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In America, religion is king—and in 1938 there was an heir apparent: Father Keane of Chicago. He ran the Sorrowful Mother Novena, a weekly church service attended by more than two hundred thousand people countrywide, to which worshippers submitted personal requests for aid. Keane prayed publicly for them—in church, on the radio, and in a weekly booklet, which was published nationwide so that Catholics across the States could pray for those in need. The novena was a cultural phenomenon.

Catherine didn’t have the energy to read anymore, depending instead on Tom, so she probably didn’t read those published prayers—but Pearl Payne’s sister-in-law did. “I would suggest all of your girls write to Father Keane,” she encouraged, “I am sure all of you will benefit greatly and MIRACLES do happen even in this day and age, Pearl, so don’t give up hope.”1

Catherine had nothing to lose. During every moment she spent with Mary Jane and Tommy, she felt like her heart was breaking. She needed more time…she needed so much more time with them. And so, at the direction of her dear friend Pearl, on June 22, 1938, Catherine summoned all her courage and her faith, and she wrote from the bottom of her heart.

Dear Father Keane,

The doctors tell me I will die, but I mustn’t. I have too much to live for—a husband who loves me and two children I adore. But, the doctors say, radium poisoning is eating away my bones and shrinking my flesh to the point where medical science has given me up as “one of the living dead.”

They say there is nothing that can save me—nothing but a miracle. And that’s what I want—a miracle…But if that is not God’s will, perhaps your prayers will obtain for me the blessing of a happy death.

Please,

Mrs. Catherine Wolfe

Donohue2

That “Please” said it all. Catherine was begging for help. She had no shame or pride now—she just wanted to survive. Just one month longer. Just one more week. One more day.

Such was her fame as the leader of her Living Dead Society, her letter made front-page news. The reaction to her note was extraordinary, even by the standards of the popular novena. There was “a sweeping response…the length and breadth of the land.”3 Prayers were said daily for Catherine throughout the nation; hundreds of thousands of people queued in the rain to pray for her. Catherine herself received almost two thousand letters. “I would like to answer them all,” she said, quite overwhelmed, “but of course I can’t.”4

And even though one has to take the news reports with a pinch of salt, it worked. By the following Sunday, Catherine was sitting up and eating her first meal with her family in months.

“Doctors told me today,” Leonard Grossman announced on July 3, “they don’t know what is keeping her alive. It is fortunate indeed that Catherine finds comfort in prayer. It is fortunate that she is a Christian and may forgive—she can never forget.”5

Catherine counted each day as it passed; July 10 was not so very far away. She was living for her children, for Tom—but also for justice. She simply prayed it would be done.

And on July 6, 1938—four days early—her prayers were answered. On this date, the appeal of the Radium Dial Company was thrown out of court by the IIC. They upheld Catherine’s award; and not only that, they added an additional $730 ($12,271) to it, to cover the medical expenses she had incurred since April. It was a unanimous decision from all five members of the adjudicating panel. “It was,” Catherine wrote with exultant pleasure, “a wonderful victory.”6

“I’m so happy for Catherine,” Pearl wrote excitedly to Grossman after she heard the good news. “I sincerely hope she benefits at once, so she may enjoy some medical comforts and things she actually wishes for.”7

Yet the one thing Catherine truly wished for—the return of her health—seemed, despite all her prayers, to be out of her reach. In the middle of July, she had a “bad spell”8 and had to have the doctor, but Catherine Donohue was not done fighting yet. When Olive stopped in to see her a day later, she found Tom asleep from his night shift but Catherine sitting up eating her lunch wearing the pretty nightgown Pearl had given her. “She did look nice in it,” commented Olive fondly. “Poor child, my heart goes out to her.”9

Catherine was doing so well that on July 17 the women decided to have a reunion to celebrate their success; they had a “lovely time”10 talking about their incredible victory. The other girls were full of plans for their own cases. Thanks to Catherine’s triumph in court, they too could now bring claims before the IIC; Grossman said he would begin litigating Charlotte’s case immediately. The others were having medical examinations in Chicago to support their claims; Pearl began consulting Dr. Dalitsch. “Personally,” she wrote to him, “I think it was an act of God that sent you to Ottawa in Catherine Donohue’s case.”11

Pearl felt an unfamiliar sensation these days; she realized with some surprise it was a pleasant anticipation for the future. “I live,” she said simply, “in the hope of living.”12

Catherine did the same. Yet it was not a smooth life. On Friday, July 22, Tom was so worried about her that he called out Father Griffin to administer last rites. Catherine, lying weakly in bed, “wistfully”13 asked her husband, “Is it that bad?”14

Though Tom was unable to answer, in fact, it wasn’t that bad. Catherine lived on and on, day after day, the verdict in court seeming to buoy her. It gave her another hour, another dawn; one more day in which she could greet Tom in the morning, kiss Mary Jane good-night, see Tommy draw just one more picture with his watercolor paints. Catherine kept on living.

And then, on July 26, Radium Dial went above the IIC to file another appeal in the circuit court. They alleged the commission did not take into proper consideration the firm’s “judicial propositions.”15

It was a shock: a stab to the happy balloon of hope that Catherine had been carrying. It was a blow from which she found she simply could not recover. “She had held on,” Grossman said, “to a slim thread of life as long as she could, but yesterday’s move to deprive her of what was legally hers was too much. She had to let go.”16

Catherine Wolfe Donohue died at 2:52 a.m. on Wednesday, July 27, 1938, the day after Radium Dial filed its latest appeal. She passed away at home on East Superior Street; Tom and the children were by her side. She remained conscious until a short time before her death, and then just slipped away. “Those who were with her to the end agreed she died a peaceful death.”17

She weighed less than sixty pounds.

As was tradition, her family kept her at home with them. They washed and dressed her in a pretty pink gown, looped her precious rosary beads through her still fingers. Her plain gray coffin was an open one, lined with ivory silk and covered with a veil, and as she lay there she did, indeed, look truly peaceful and at rest. Her casket was surrounded by garlands and tall candles, lending light against the darkness as she spent her final few nights in the place she had called home.

Now, the neighbors came. Some of them had shunned her before, but now they came to help. All day long, Eleanor, the housekeeper, took in offers of aid and dishes of food. “Everyone has been very kind,”18 she said, perhaps a little tightly. Some of that kindness would have gone further when Catherine was still alive.

Catherine’s friends came, too. They brought flowers; they brought their love and grief. Pearl came dressed in the same outfit she had worn when she and Catherine had gone to Chicago on that long-ago summer day when they’d persuaded Grossman to take their case; perhaps it was a symbolic choice, chosen for happier times. Yet it did not work. As Pearl knelt by her friend’s coffin to pray for her, she was “almost hysterical”19 at her loss.

Tom was strangely stoic, though his head was bowed and his cheeks sunken. Observers said his spirit seemed “broken,”20 but he had to carry on for the children. He dressed respectfully for Catherine in a black suit and tie, but his shoes were scuffed and unpolished: perhaps the sort of detail to which his wife had once attended. He and Eleanor got the children ready for their day, tying a ribbon in Mary Jane’s hair and slicking down Tommy’s (it did not work; bits of it kept sticking up). Tom paid his best attention to them, letting Mary Jane fiddle with the unfamiliar suit jacket on her father’s shoulders; giving Tommy a hug as his son shyly looped an arm around his father’s neck.

The children stood before their mother’s casket, but they did not understand. They spoke to her and wondered why she did not reply.

“Why doesn’t Mommie talk?”21 asked Mary Jane innocently.

Tom could not, he just could not answer. He tried, but his words were choked back by tears. He led the children silently away.

That first evening without Catherine, nuns from the St. Columba parish school she had attended came to say the rosary by her side. They chanted the prayers, a song of loss and lamentation as they sent her soul on its way. They were still there as the children went through their first nightly routine without their mother and knelt to say their own prayers.

Mary Jane, aged just three, said hers in “a tiny piping voice”22 that carried through the quiet house. As her mother lay downstairs—perhaps, to her young mind, merely sleeping—Mary Jane prayed as she had always learned to do.

“God bless Mommie and Daddy.”23

The night before Catherine’s funeral, as necessitated by Illinois law in cases of poisoning, an inquest was held into her death. Tom and Catherine’s friends attended; Grossman was there too. He branded her death “a cool, calculating, money-making murder.”24

As dramatic as Grossman’s declaration was, it was Tom’s testimony which was most powerful, due to his raw emotion; the inquest was held the day after Catherine died. He was described as “a weary little man with gray hair, shaken with grief”25—but no matter how shaken he was, he had to testify at the inquest. “He spoke with great difficulty and choked up when he described his wife’s death,” said a witness. “His breathing became greatly labored and further questioning was cut short. He left the stand in tears.”26

The jury of six men stayed silent throughout, as not only Tom but also Dr. Dunn and Dr. Loffler gave evidence. The jury was instructed by the coroner that they had “only to find the cause of death and that it was not their province to fix the responsibility for Mrs. Donohue’s demise.”27

But they did anyway. “We, the jury, find that [Catherine Donohue] died of radium poisoning absorbed while she was employed in an industrial plant in Ottawa.”28 At Grossman’s suggestion, the name of the Radium Dial Company was added to the formal verdict.

“It’s the only industrial plant Mrs. Donohue ever worked in,”29 he said sharply.

With the jury’s verdict in, Catherine’s death certificate was formally signed.

Was death in any way related to occupation of deceased?

Yes.

Catherine Wolfe Donohue was buried on Friday, July 29, 1938. Her children were not old enough to attend the funeral, but hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects to this most exceptional woman: a quiet, unassuming person who had only wanted to work hard and love her family, but who made a difference to millions in the way she responded to her own personal tragedy. She was carried from her home by an assorted mix of Wolfe and Donohue relatives; this final journey, at last, causing her no more pain.

Her friends lined the street outside her home to accompany her to church; only Charlotte Purcell was missing, quarantined in Chicago caring for her children, who had caught scarlet fever. The women wore their best clothes—not black attire but floral dresses and colored gowns. They dipped their heads as Catherine’s coffin was carried past, and then they followed her: past Division Street and on to Columbus, where the slow cortège turned left. They followed her all the way to St. Columba, which had always been her spiritual home: the place where she had been baptized, where she had married Tom, and where, now, she took her final bow.

She had not been back since she fell ill. But on this funeral day Catherine Donohue, once again, made her slow way down the aisle of the church and rested once more in the grace of God beneath that towering, arched ceiling that had been so familiar to her in life, bathed in the colored light from the stained-glass windows that her husband’s family had helped to buy.

Father Griffin led the Mass. He “spoke of the relief that death made for Mrs. Donohue after her long and patient sufferings.”30 It seemed, to Tom, too short a service—for when it was over, all that was left was the burial. The burial; and then the rest of his life to live without her. He was “near collapse”31 as he bade farewell to his wife.

The other mourners joined him in his helpless grief. “In a silent but impressive few moments,” a witness wrote, “Catherine’s best friends—the girls who worked in the plant with her and contracted the same poisoning—said good-bye. The scene brought to mind the words of the ancient gladiators of glorious Rome: ‘Moritamor te salutamus [sic]—we who are about to die salute thee.’”32 Their heads and their hearts were filled with Catherine, filled with her even as they left the church and blocked out the sight of the old high school across the road, where she had been poisoned. Their hearts stayed full of her, as Pearl wrote to Grossman later that same day:

When I returned home from Catherine Donohue’s funeral with my heart full of her and thoughts of your great work at the inquest and the circuit court, I felt I must drop this little note and let you know my heart is filled with gratitude when I think of the courageous battle you are waging on behalf of us girls.33

She closed “with prayers and best wishes for further successes.”34 For even on the day of Catherine’s funeral, Grossman was in court, defending her claim. The company had been denied the right of appeal, but they were appealing even that. They appealed over and over and over. In fact, Radium Dial fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Other lawyers might have dropped the case, citing lack of funds—for Grossman was still covering the expenses—but Leonard Grossman had vowed to stand by the women, and he did not let them down. “He just collapsed after over-working on this case,”35 his wife, Trudel, said. Perhaps Radium Dial were hoping either he or the girls would give up the fight, maybe run out of money, but they were battling in Catherine’s memory now, and that was a powerful motivator.

Grossman had to get a special license to be admitted to the Supreme Court. “[That] license was under glass in our house forever,” said his son. “He talked about [the case]. He was proud of it and the scrapbooks were always in the middle of the bookshelf. I heard some of the stories over and over again; I grew up with this case.

“When the case went to the Supreme Court,” he went on, “my parents both went to Washington for it. I looked it up. ‘Cert denied.’ The court decided not to hear it. It meant they were upholding the lower court.”36

Catherine Wolfe Donohue had won her case. She won it eight times in total. But the final victory came on October 23, 1939.

The papers described her battle for justice as “one of the most spectacular fights against industrial occupational hazards.”37 Now, that battle was at an end—finally at an end. It was a pure, clean victory, with no clouds or contingencies to sully it.

No settlement. No board of doctors to poke and prod and say that there was no such thing as radium poisoning; no firm reneging on an out-of-court agreement that had been made in good faith. Now there were no more legal machinations; no lawyers’ twisting words; no law itself whose unclear wording tied mercy up in knots. It was outright justice, plain and true. The women had been vindicated. The dial-painters had won.

And it was Catherine Wolfe Donohue, in the end, who had led them to victory.

“If there are saints on earth,” one commentator said, “and you believe in that, I think Catherine Wolfe Donohue was one of them. I really do.”38

She was buried in St. Columba Cemetery. She has a simple, flat gravestone, as unobtrusive, and as neat and tidy, as she herself had been in life.