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It arrived by letter at 520 East Superior Street. A slim, unremarkable envelope addressed to Mr. Thomas Donohue. It looked innocent enough, but the news it held was anything but. Having run his tests, including x-rays on her jaw, Dr. Loffler could now confirm it. Catherine Donohue was suffering from radium poisoning.

“Tom was devastated,” remembered his niece Mary. “Just absolutely devastated. I don’t know how the man functioned.”1

“After that,” Tom himself said, “I took care of [Tommy] when [Catherine] could not do so.”2

Catherine herself never spoke publicly about how she felt. She probably prayed, as did many of her fellow sufferers. “I firmly believe,” wrote one of her friends, “that prayers is all that brought me through.”3

Yet just days after Catherine and Tom had received that letter from Chicago, Catherine’s disease took even the solace of prayer away from her. On Wednesday, April 25, 1934, she hobbled the short distance to St. Columba—but found herself unable to kneel in church. Her hips had become so locked that she could no longer bend her legs to pray; for Catherine, so devout, it was profoundly distressing. At about the same time, Charlotte Purcell came home from the hospital for “the first time with her arm off.”4 The doctors had confirmed radium was to blame for all of this—and Tom Donohue felt somebody should tell Radium Dial.

Ottawa was a small place. Mr. and Mrs. Reed, the firm’s superintendent and instructress, didn’t attend St. Columba, but they were forever walking past it as they went to work.

“I saw him on the street,” remembered Tom of running into Reed. “I told him the women were in a bad way, and that the doctors were finding it was from the material in the paints they were using.”5

But Mr. Reed refused to admit any responsibility. He refused even after he saw Charlotte and her husband walking past the studio, where they met him coming down the steps. Al was “very angry”6 at what had happened, but Mr. Reed brushed off everything they said.

Dr. Loffler tried to communicate with the firm too. Going above Mr. Reed’s head, he telephoned Vice President Fordyce. “I told him from the cases I had seen, I thought it would be wise to investigate all the [other] cases.”7

Loffler’s phone call was not unexpected to Rufus Fordyce. After all, the firm had in its possession the results of the radioactivity tests of all the women at Radium Dial, taken back in 1928. The results that showed that, of the sixty-seven girls tested that day, thirty-four were suspiciously or positively radioactive. Thirty-four women: more than half the workforce.

The company had said in its press statement at the time: “Nothing even approaching symptoms [of radium poisoning] has ever been found.”8 That declaration was not some miscalculation, caused by a misunderstanding of the data. The data was clear: most of the employees were radioactive—a telltale sign of radium poisoning. But though the women’s breath betrayed the truth, the company had deliberately and unashamedly lied.

The company still had the women’s names on its secret list of results, each numbered according to how radioactive she was. Ranked at number one for positivity: Margaret Looney, Mary Tonielli…Marie Rossiter. “Very suspicious”9 were the results of Catherine Wolfe and Helen Munch.

For almost six years, Radium Dial had known the women were radioactive. Yet “the knowledge of the discoveries had been carefully concealed by the firm, who feared disruption of their business if the facts became known…the victims had not been informed of their condition, nor the cause, through fear of panic among the workers.”10

It all meant that when Loffler’s call came in, Fordyce was ready. He refused to do anything.

Catherine, Charlotte, and all the other girls, however, were determined to make the company pay. In many ways, they had no choice: Catherine had already expended large sums in a vain effort to be cured of the disease, and she and Tom were stone-broke.

It was Loffler who helped the women take the next step, connecting them with an acquaintance of his: the stenographer of a Chicago lawyer, Jay Cook. Cook was formerly with the Illinois Industrial Commission, which oversaw all industrial-compensation cases, and he agreed to represent them “virtually on charity.”11

Though the women never met him, he nevertheless gave advice from the big city. Like so many New Jersey lawyers before him, he saw at once that the women’s case was complex and that an early settlement might be to their advantage. The girls told him there were rumors that their former colleague Mary Robinson might have been given some compensation, after she’d had her arm amputated at the start of the year. “The Dial people gave her some money,” Mary’s mother confirmed. “They sent it to her husband, Francis. Not very much, probably not over $100 [$1,768] altogether.”12

It may not have been much, but it was an open door through which the other women hoped to find some financial aid. There was another reason to approach the company: the statute of limitations. Under Illinois law, at the earliest instance of diagnosis, the women had to give Radium Dial notice of their condition; such notification should then lead the company to act lawfully in providing medical care and compensation, since the women had been injured at work.

It was Charlotte and Catherine, as they had done from the start, who led the way. They only hoped that the company would now be fair. With the help of Jay Cook, and working with their husbands, the women came up with a plan. Catherine wrote a letter on behalf of them all on May 1, 1934, and then Al Purcell telephoned the studio so that Catherine could read it down the line to the manager. Immediately afterwards, Tom took the hard copy and ran it down the street to the mailbox. The company had been given their notification. Now, the women only had to wait.

They waited…and waited…and waited. By May 8, there had been no reply: not one word.

On the advice of Cook, the women now took matters into their own hands—and headed back to Radium Dial to confront their old manager Mr. Reed.

It was a journey Catherine had undertaken so many times before. Turn right out of the house, walk straight to Columbus Street, turn left and walk one block to Radium Dial. But it had never been a journey like this before. She felt nervous, but knew she had to stand up for herself—and for all the other girls; they had agreed that she and Charlotte would be “spokesmen for the other women.”13

Charlotte walked slowly by her side, keeping pace with Catherine’s limp. It felt so strange walking, Charlotte thought; she had never realized before how much you used your arms when you walked. Now, there was nothing but air by her side.

Charlotte was a woman who didn’t dwell on herself. “She never felt sorry for herself, ever,”14 said a relative. Though she had said after her amputation, “I can’t do housework,”15 already she was finding ways to cope: she had managed to open and close her baby’s diaper pins with her mouth; washing up the frying pan, she had discovered, could be achieved if she set the handle under her chin. It was Al, of course, who picked up the rest of the slack.

But Al wasn’t here now. It was just the two of them: Catherine and Charlotte. The women walked along, so different from how they’d been when they’d first entered the studio. Catherine hobbled up the six front steps and tried to straighten up as much as she could. They made their way inside and found Mr. Reed.

“I have received a letter from my doctor, who has been treating me for weeks,”16 Catherine said formally to him. She had a “cultured voice”17 and her words were sure. “He has come to the definite conclusion that my blood shows radioactive substance.”18 She gestured at Charlotte to include her: “We have radium poisoning.”19

There it was: fact. Hard to say out loud, but fact. She paused to see if there was a reaction, but there was nothing from the man who had been her manager for nine years.

“Having consulted legal advice,” Catherine went on, in spite of Mr. Reed’s silence, “[my lawyers] have advised me to ask the company for compensation and medical care. We have legal advice that we are entitled to compensation.”20

Mr. Reed looked over his former employees. Catherine had barely been able to get into the studio; Charlotte no longer had an arm.

“I don’t think,” he said slowly, “there is anything wrong with you.”21

The women were gobsmacked.

“There is nothing to it at all,”22 he said again.

“He refused,” Catherine remembered angrily, “to consider our request for compensation.”23

She notified him about the condition of the other women, too, but he didn’t back down. He didn’t back down even when, two days later, Mary Robinson died.

Her death was important. “Mary’s was the first case definitely called radium poisoning,” her mother Susie recalled. “[Her doctors] sent a sliver of bone to a New York laboratory. They sent back word it was radium poisoning. The Ottawa doctors couldn’t deny it then.”24

But Susie had reckoned without the stubbornness of the Ottawa physicians. Just because these hoity-toity New York and Chicago folk were saying Ottawa girls had radium poisoning, it didn’t make it true—not in their eyes. The Ottawa doctors remained skeptical and “steadfastly refused to admit that radium poisoning was the cause of the women’s illnesses and deaths.”25 When Mary’s death certificate was signed, the attending doctor answered “no”26 to the question: “Was disease in any way related to occupation of deceased?”27

But although the local doctors were not convinced, the women absolutely were. In light of the company’s refusal to aid them, in the summer of 1934 a large group of dial-painters—including Catherine, Charlotte, Marie, and Inez Vallat—filed suit for $50,000 ($884,391) apiece. Jay Cook thought they stood a good chance of winning: Illinois law was progressive, and a pioneering act passed in 1911 had long commanded companies to protect their employees.

But not everyone was pleased with the possibility of bringing the firm to its knees. The town “bitterly resented these women’s charges as giving a ‘black eye’ to the community.”28 Ottawa was a close-knit and folksy town, but the girls soon realized that when it turned against you, it turned hard. “They weren’t treated too nice,”29 commented a relative of Marie with understatement.

After all, Radium Dial had long been a valued employer. With the country in the middle of its worst-ever economic depression—what some were now calling the Great Depression—communities were even more protective of the firms that could give them work and wages. The women found they were disbelieved, ignored and even shunned when they spoke out about their ailments and the cause.

Day after day, former colleagues and friends lined up to dismiss them. “Margaret Looney was one of the girls that appeared to [me] to look as if she had one foot in the grave when she was hired!” exclaimed one Radium Dial worker bluntly. “The [girls] that people thought died from radium and looked so terrible looked terrible when they were hired.”30

“Some of them shun us as if we had the plague,”31 remarked Catherine’s friend Olive Witt. Catherine lived just a few paces from Division Street in Ottawa, and it was painfully apt, given the way the women had split the town—and the disapproval went right to the top, with “business interests, politicians, and the clergy”32 all against the women bringing suit.

In her little house on East Superior, however, Catherine ignored everything that was going on in the outside world. Her world, now, reduced down: down to the four walls of the clapboard house, down to the room she was standing in, down to the dress hanging on her body…down to her body itself. She stood quite still, as though listening. Then she felt it again.

She recognized that feeling. She knew what that was.

Catherine Wolfe Donohue was pregnant.