فصل 41

PART THREE

JUSTICE 41

OTTAWA, ILLINOIS

—1933—

The executives of the Radium Dial Company had confirmed knowledge of radium poisoning since at least 1925, less than three years after their studio first opened in Ottawa. That was the year Marguerite Carlough first filed suit in New Jersey and Martland devised his tests. The executives had read Kjaer’s studies, attended the radium conference and seen the Eben Byers story: they knew radium was dangerous.

When their employees had found out about the New Jersey cases in 1928, the company had lied. There was a full-page advertisement in the paper: the girls are safe, their medical exams prove it; the paint is safe, for it is “pure radium only.”1 When Peg Looney died, the company lied. There was “no visible indication of radium poisoning”2; but only because her jawbone was no longer visible to anyone, having been cut from her after death.

With these assurances plastered across the papers, the company had been supported by the town. After all, the executives had promised they would close the studio if there was any danger. No wonder the town was behind them, when they took such good care of their employees and were willing to put people before profits. It must be really, really safe to work there, everyone thought.

For eight years on from Marguerite’s lawsuit, Radium Dial was still trading daily in the little town of Ottawa.

Oh no, the local doctor said, it was definitely not radium poisoning that Catherine Wolfe Donohue had. She limped out of the consulting room, still no wiser as to the cause of her illness, and made her slow way home to East Superior Street. She was not alone; she pushed a stroller in which lay her baby son, Tommy, born in April 1933, just over a year after she’d married Tom Donohue. “God has sure blessed me,” Catherine wrote, “with a grand husband and [a] lovely child.”3

She and Tom had been married on January 23, 1932 in St. Columba. It was a modest wedding with only twenty-two guests; Catherine’s uncle and aunt had both passed away by then, and Tom’s family did not approve of the union. As their niece Mary remembered it, “None of Tom’s family wanted him to marry her because they saw her as not being in good health.”4 But Tom Donohue adored Catherine Wolfe, and it was a love match; he married her no matter what his relatives said.

The Donohues seem to have come around to the idea by the time the vows were exchanged: Tom’s brother Matthew was the best man, while his twin sister Marie also attended. The local paper deemed it “one of the prettiest weddings of the mid-winter season.”5 As Catherine had limped down the aisle to marry Tom, dressed in a green crêpe gown and with a bouquet of tea roses clutched in her hands, she’d thought, despite her hobbling steps, that she had never felt so well—a feeling topped when they’d then been blessed with Tommy. If it wasn’t for her declining health, she would be on top of the world.

Today’s appointment had been the third doctor she’d consulted, but he was as uninformative as the rest. “They were just guessing,” commented one dial-painter’s relative about the town’s physicians. “They had no idea [what the trouble was]—especially any doctors in Ottawa.”6

It was certainly true that the local physicians, perhaps as a result of the isolation of the tiny town, were not the most knowledgeable. Some of their cluelessness was apparently due to ignorance, despite the fact that by this time Dr. Martland had published many articles on radium poisoning. As an example, one Ottawa doctor—a former physician of Peg Looney, as it happened—had recently stated: “It has never been brought to my attention that the use of luminous paint could in any way be responsible for the production of sarcoma.”7

Whether it had been brought to their attention or not, Ottawa doctors were now seeing peculiar conditions in former Radium Dial girls. Sadie Pray had had a big black lump on her forehead; she’d died back in December 1931—of pneumonia, her death certificate said; Ruth Thompson had supposedly passed from tuberculosis. The doctors thought it a coincidence that the girls had all worked at Radium Dial, but nothing more than that; they had all died from different things, and their symptoms varied so much that surely there was no possible connection.

Catherine pushed the stroller home dejectedly and let herself in the front door: 520 East Superior Street, which had been left to her by her uncle when he’d died in 1931, was a two-story detached white clapboard house, with a pointed roof and a covered porch. It was on a quiet residential street. “It wasn’t a big home,”8 remembered Catherine’s nephew James. It had a galley kitchen and a modest dining room, where Tom would read books of an evening; this room was furnished by a blue couch and a round oak table. It was a perfect family house. “We were so happy just staying home with Tommy,”9 remembered Tom with a fond smile.

As Catherine set Tommy down on a rug and watched him play, her mind went over her appointment. Mindful of the dial-painters’ deaths out east, she had asked the doctor today if radium poisoning could be what she had; but he’d said clearly that he didn’t think so. He—like all the others—had “repeatedly advised her he was not informed as to radium poisoning thus to diagnose her case.”10 Perhaps the doctors were influenced by what they’d read in the paper: no Ottawa girls could possibly have radium poisoning, for the paint Radium Dial used was not hazardous.

Every time she went to church, Catherine was aware of the Radium Dial studio just across the road. It was a much quieter place these days; the economic downturn had the little town of Ottawa firmly in its grip—tenaciously so, in fact, as Illinois was such a big farming state. Many dial-painters had been laid off. Those who remained no longer lip-pointed, perhaps because of the Eben Byers case. Some were using their fingers instead; this doubled the amount of paint each woman handled. But given the financial hardships, the workers would paint any way they could: those lucky enough to have a job were fiercely loyal to the firm. There was a feeling that the whole town needed to support such an employer; there were very few of them about in these straitened times.

Though most of the original girls had been laid off or quit, their friendships had not faded. Catherine’s close neighbors included Marie Rossiter and Charlotte Purcell; they often spent time together and, when they met, they talked. They talked of Catherine’s tender jaw, of Charlotte’s achy elbow, of Marie’s sore legs. Marie and Charlotte had also gone to various doctors. And as the women discussed what the different physicians had said, they realized they’d all had the same response. And it wasn’t just them: Mary Robinson’s mother said the doctors “scoffed”11 when she mentioned radium poisoning as a possible cause of her daughter’s disease.

As had happened in Orange, mysterious illnesses were plaguing the girls of Ottawa—but here there was no Dr. Martland making pioneering medical discoveries, not even a Dr. Barry who was familiar with phossy jaw. The conditions the girls were experiencing were completely novel in this town.

Although…there had been that visit from the national investigator Swen Kjaer. He had visited the local dentists and doctors—and he had visited not once, but twice. He had told them what he was looking for, described the telltale signs of radium poisoning. Yet the doctors do not seem to have connected the dots, nor notified the Bureau of Labor Statistics of these curious cases, as they had once promised to do.

An oversight? Or was it as some of the women were now starting to fear: that “none of the local physicians will admit it”?12 One dial-painter’s relative thought so: “They didn’t want anything to happen to the company,”13 he said.

“They were all bought off,”14 claimed another.

“It was confusing,” remembered Catherine’s niece Mary. “I only remember that no one seemed to know what was wrong. But we knew something was wrong; really wrong.”15