فصل 46

46

You fight and you fall and you get up and fight some more. But there will always come a day when you cannot fight another minute more.

On February 25, 1936, Inez Vallat died; she was twenty-nine. After eight years of agony, she finally succumbed to a “hemorrhage from sarcoma of the neck,”1 bleeding out as medics desperately tried to staunch the flow of blood. “Mr. Vallat,” dial-painter Frances O’Connell recalled, “would not talk at all about his wife because she had died a very horrible death and he did not want to think about it or talk about it.”2

The Ottawa doctors completed her death certificate. Was death in any way related to occupation of deceased?

No.

Inez’s death, coming on top of the lawsuit defeat, left the Ottawa women reeling. Many of the original clique were too ill to attend her funeral, as much as they wanted to say good-bye. Catherine Donohue, these days, was “rapidly becoming too weak to move about her home very much”3 and seldom even left the house.

There was some coverage of Inez’s death in the Chicago papers. The press called the girls, rather dismally, “The Suicide Club.” A senator commented that he would try to interest the Industrial Commission in their case, but added: “Unfortunately, any proposed legislation cannot be made retroactive. It is pitiful indeed.”4 The girls couldn’t even get excited when the governor signed the new Illinois Occupational Diseases Act, which now included a provision for industrial poisoning. The new bill was the direct result of the women’s case and would protect thousands of workers—but it would not become law until October 1936.

Given how quickly the women were dying, they hadn’t much hope they would be alive to see the day.

The same month the new law was signed, the girls had an approach from a journalist that lifted their spirits somewhat. Mary Doty, a leading reporter with the Chicago Daily Times, now gave them a voice. She turned the public spotlight back on their suffering in articles that ran for three days in March 1936. “We’ll always be grateful to the Times,” Pearl Payne would later say, “for helping us when everything was so black.”5

The Times was “Chicago’s Picture Newspaper,”6 a populist publication. Doty knew just how to write for her readership: “They shoot to kill when it comes to cattle thieves in Illinois, and fish and fowl are safeguarded by stringent game laws—but womenfolk come cheap.”7 She decried the fact that dial-painters had been “dying off for thirteen years in Ottawa without any official comment or investigation.”8 And she painted a picture of the women’s conditions that would haunt her readers: “Some [girls] creep along, unable to move beyond a snail’s pace; another with an empty coat sleeve or a mutilated nose, withered hands, a shrunken jaw.”9

The girls posed for photographs, many with their children. Mary Jane Donohue looked absolutely tiny—Doty called her a “wizened little baby.”10 At a year old, Mary Jane weighed only ten pounds and had “match-thin arms and legs.”11 “Her parents,” wrote Doty, “hope against hope her mother’s illness will not leave its permanent mark on her.”12

Catherine herself said to the press, “I am in constant pain. I cannot walk a block, but somehow I must carry on.”13 When the journalist asked about her friend Inez, “it brought tears.”14

Marie Rossiter spoke of her son, Bill. “I’m frightened to death, but I want to live as long as I can for the sake of my little boy,”15 she told the press. Though Marie now had five bad teeth, “the [Chicago] dentists say they won’t touch them because of the radium poisoning eating into the bones of my jaw.”16

Charlotte Purcell was pictured with her daughter Patricia. She was gradually coping with having only one arm; “Having three babies, she adapted,”17 said a relative. In time, she would relearn how to make beds, peel potatoes, and even hang out washing, the clothespins stuffed into her mouth. As she told reporters, she was haunted by the thought that the sacrifice of her arm had not been enough; the radium ran right through her, and she didn’t know where it might strike next.

The final piece in Doty’s series focused optimistically on Catherine Donohue: “She waits hopefully for another call to the city for an operation.”18

Privately, Tom had to whisper to Doty: “[It] will never come.”19

The women found the publicity got them motivated again. Charlotte’s son Donald remembered: “Mom used to get dressed up and take her friends and they’d go up to Chicago to see these lawyers.”20 A few months later, Charlotte, Catherine, and Marie engaged a new attorney, Jerome Rosenthal, for their case before the IIC. They also decided to approach the government for help: their target was Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor—the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet. It was Tom who contacted her, having “telephone conversations and personal correspondence”21 with the Secretary. Whatever this quiet man said clearly made an impact, for no less than three federal departments began investigating.

The case was snowballing, and Tom now dug deep for the most important act of all. His wife had told him about the company tests, and he judged—since it was clear Radium Dial had lied about the results—that getting hold of the original data would provide powerful evidence in court. On May 20, 1936, he decided to ask Mr. Reed outright for the results. He felt they should have been given to the women anyway, or at least to him as Catherine’s husband. He was only asking for what was rightfully theirs. “This day,” Tom said, “I wanted to find out the name of them doctors, who was supposed to examine them women that was working there, that didn’t give them a report.”22

Reed might have seen him coming. At any rate, the two met each other not in the studio, but on the streets of Ottawa.

Tom started out calmly enough. “Why wasn’t the report given to me?” he asked.

Reed, taken aback by Tom’s direct question, did as he had always done and tried to ignore the situation. He brushed by him.

“I only have another question to ask you!” shouted Tom at the superintendent’s retreating back—then he ran to catch up with him. “I only want to help the women!”

Mr. Reed had had enough. Perhaps there was a guilt eating away at him that led to what happened next. “He started to swing at me,” Tom remembered with some astonishment.

Tom, though small, had an “Irish temper.”23 “I don’t think anybody in our family,” one of his relatives later said, “would go out of their way to cause a confrontation, but they wouldn’t let one go if it came to them. I’m sure he’d have been angry. I’m surprised he stayed as level-headed as he did.”24 With Reed—the man who had overseen his wife’s slow murder and then fired her when the poison’s effects started to show—now hitting him, Tom dropped all pretense of civilized conversation. “I swang at him,”25 he remembered with some satisfaction. He said Reed “got excited.”26

The two men brawled in the street, hitting out at one another in a “fisticuff encounter.”27 Tom found himself landing blows for Catherine, for Inez, for Charlotte’s lost arm, for Ella, for Mary, for Peg. Reed floundered under the attack and the police were called. Even though Mr. Reed had started it, the respected superintendent of Radium Dial had Tom Donohue arrested. He brought charges of assault and battery and disorderly conduct.

Tom was now in the hands of State Attorney Elmer Mohn, facing two criminal charges.