فصل 06

6

OTTAWA, ILLINOIS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

—September 1922—

Two days after Mollie’s funeral, and eight hundred miles away from Orange, a small advertisement appeared in the local paper of a little town called Ottawa, in Illinois. “Girls Wanted,”1 it declared. And then continued: “Several girls, 18 years or over, for fine brushwork. This is a studio proposition, the work is clean and healthful, surroundings pleasant. Apply to Miss Murray, old high school building, 1022 Columbus Street.”2

It sounded wonderful.

Ottawa was a tiny town—population 10,816—located eighty-five miles southwest of Chicago. It billed itself as a “genuine American community”3 in its town directory, and those words were on the money. It was the kind of place where its banks proclaimed themselves to be “where friendliness reigns”4 and local businesses advertised their location as being “one block north of Post Office.”5 Ottawa was in the heart of rural Illinois, surrounded by farmland and the impossibly wide skies of the Midwest. It was a place where folks were happy simply to get on with life: raise their families, do good work, live decent lives. The community was close-knit and emphatically religious; Ottawa was “a small [town] of many churches”6 with the majority of residents Catholic. “The citizens of Ottawa,” chirped the town directory, “are liberal-minded, prosperous, and progressive.”7 The perfect populace, then, for this new dial-painting opportunity.

It wasn’t the United States Radium Corporation hiring, although they knew their competitor well. The employer was the Radium Dial Company; its president was Joseph A. Kelly. He was based at the head office in Chicago, however, so it was to Miss Murray, the studio’s superintendent, the Ottawa girls applied.

Lottie Murray was an immensely loyal employee, a slim, single woman forty-four years old who had been with the company five years, as it moved its studio around various locations before settling now in Ottawa. One of her very first successful applicants was nineteen-year-old Catherine Wolfe. She was Ottawa born and bred, a devoted parishioner of St. Columba Church, which was located diagonally opposite the studio. Despite her young age, Catherine had already had some hard knocks in life. When she was only six, her mother Bridget had passed away; just four years later, in 1913, her father Maurice died from “lung trouble.”8 As a result, ten-year-old Catherine had been sent to live with her elderly aunt and uncle, Mary and Winchester Moody Biggart, sharing their home at 520 East Superior Street.

Catherine was a shy, quiet person who was very unassuming. She had thick, jet-black hair and very pale skin; she was a rather neat woman with tidy limbs who didn’t go in for showy gestures. The job at the studio would be her first, painting the dials of timepieces and aeronautical instruments. “It was fascinating work, and the pay was good,” she enthused, “but every line had to be just so.”9

And there was only one known way to get the necessary point on the “Japanese brushes the size of a pencil”10 that the Ottawa girls used. “Miss Lottie Murray taught us how to point camel-hair brushes with our tongues,” Catherine remembered.11 “We would first dip the brush into water, then into the powder, and then point the ends of the bristles between our teeth.”12

It was the “lip, dip, paint routine”13 all over again—but with an entirely new cast.

Joining Catherine at the studio was sixteen-year-old Charlotte Nevins. The ad had said “18 years or over,”14 but she wasn’t going to let a little thing like that stop her: all her friends were there, and she wanted to join them. Charlotte was the youngest of six siblings, and perhaps she just wanted to grow up fast. She was a cheerful, caring girl who, like Catherine, was a devout Catholic. Though she was generally quiet, she could be pretty outspoken when she needed to be.

Charlotte wasn’t the only one to tweak the truth about her age; another employee who did the same—though the company must have known—was Mary Vicini, a sweet Italian girl who had come to America as a baby. She was only thirteen in 1922 but nonetheless made it into the coveted workforce. In truth, the nimble fingers of prepubescent girls suited the delicate work of dial-painting; records show that some were as young as eleven. Assisting Miss Murray with the applicants were Mr. and Mrs. Reed. Rufus Reed was the assistant superintendent, a thirty-nine-year-old New Yorker who was a company man to his bones. Tall and bald-headed, he was medium-built and wore dark-framed glasses. He was in fact deaf, but it didn’t hinder him in his work; perhaps his disability made him all the more grateful to the firm that had treated him well. Like Miss Murray, Reed and his wife, Mercedes, who worked there as an instructress, had been with the company for years.

Mercy Reed was famed for her instructing: “she ate the luminous material with a spatula to show the girls that it was ‘harmless,’”15 licking it right in front of them. Charlotte Nevins remembered: “When I was working in the plant painting dials they always told me the radium would never hurt me. They even encouraged us to paint rings on our fingers and paint our dress buttons and buckles.”16

And the girls did exactly as instructed. They were “a happy, jolly lot”17 and they frequently practiced their painting, especially in the fields of fashion and art. Lots of them took paint home; one woman even painted her walls with it for interior decoration with a difference. Radium Dial seems not to have been as concerned as USRC had been about wasting material: former employees report that the radium was handled carelessly and, in contrast to the brushing-down in Orange, “washing was a voluntary procedure and not many of the workers made use of the washing facilities.”18

Why would they—when they could go home glowing like angels? “The girls were the envy of others in the little Illinois town when they stepped out with their boyfriends at night, their dresses and hats and sometimes even their hands and faces aglow with the phosphorescence of the luminous paint,”19 a newspaper reported. A young local girl recalled, “I used to wish I could work there—it was the elite job for the poor working girls.”20 When the dial-painters visited the drugstore for homemade candies or carbonated ice cream, they left a trail of glowing dust behind them. Catherine remembered, “When I went home and washed my hands in a dark bathroom, they would appear luminous and ghostly. My clothes, hanging in a dark closet, gave off a phosphorescent glare. When I walked along the street, I was aglow from the radium powder.”21 The women were “humorously termed the ghost girls.”22

They worked six days a week, using a similar greenish-white paint to that used in Orange, with identical ingredients, and the girls “were expected to work, work, work.”23 They did get a lunch break, but Mrs. Reed ate her food at her painting desk, and although a number of the girls popped home or went to nearby coffee shops, the majority chose to stay in the studio, following their instructress’s example. Catherine recalled, “We used to eat our lunches right beside the work benches near the luminous paint and brushes which we used; we hurried as fast as we could.”24 After all: “We made more money that way.”25

The girls declared, “We were extremely happy in our work,”26 and Radium Dial was equally content. It followed the attitude of its main client, Westclox. Their Manual for Employees read: “We expect you to work hard, and the pay is accordingly large… If you do not expect to work hard and carefully, you are in the wrong place.”27

But for Catherine and Charlotte and Mary, this place felt very, very right indeed.