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OTTAWA, ILLINOIS

—1923—

The radium, the girls in Ottawa thought, was one of the best things about their new job. Most women who worked in the town at that time were shop girls, secretaries, or factory workers—this was something a little different. No wonder it was the most popular gig in town.

Girls from all walks of life tried their hand at it, drawn by radium’s allure. Some dial-painters “were what I call ‘slumming,’”1 said one of their colleagues with more than a hint of disapproval. “[One worker] was the darling daughter of a prominent physician—one of the better people. She and her friend were just there for a very few days.”2 The well-off women simply wanted to see what it was like to be one of the ghost girls: a kind of voyeuristic life tourism. Perhaps as a result of their interest, “Mrs. Reed had [her training] room all dolled up like a kindergarten”3: it boasted curtains at the windows and flowers in a porcelain vase.

Radium Dial had initially advertised for fifty girls, but would eventually employ as many as two hundred. More workers were needed to keep up with demand: in 1923, Westclox, Radium Dial’s main client, had a 60 percent share of the U.S. alarm-clock market, worth $5.97 million ($83 million). So many girls wanted to become dial-painters that the company could afford to be choosy. “The practice,” a former employee recalled, “was to hire about ten girls at a time and try them out. Out of the ten, they would usually keep about five.”4

One who made the grade was Margaret Looney, whose family called her Peg. She was good friends with Catherine Wolfe: they had gone to the same parish school, and Peg also attended St. Columba across the way, as did the vast majority of Radium Dial workers.

Everyone knew the Looney family. At the time Peg started at Radium Dial in 1923, there were eight kids in the clan; that number would eventually grow to ten. The whole family lived in a cramped house right on the railroad tracks, where the roar of the trains was so frequent that they didn’t even think about it anymore. “It was a very tiny house: one-story, wood frame [and] four rooms, basically,” said Peg’s niece Darlene. “It had two bedrooms [and] the big bedroom, where the kids slept, had blankets hanging from the ceiling, separating the girls’ side from the boys’; there’d be three to four kids in a bed. They were dirt poor, just as poor as you could be.”5

But they were close-knit; you had to be, at such close quarters. And they had fun. Peg, a slender, freckled redhead who was tiny in stature, was known for her giggling fits, and as the eldest girl—she was seventeen—her siblings looked up to her and followed her lead. In the summer, the Looney children would run around barefoot because they couldn’t afford shoes, but it didn’t stop their games with their neighborhood friends.

Given her family background, Peg was thrilled to land a job as a well-paid dial-painter. She earned $17.50 ($242) a week—“good money for a poor Irish girl from a large family”6—and gave her mom most of it. The job meant she had to park her ambition to become a schoolteacher, but she was still young; there was plenty of time to teach later on in life. She was a very intelligent girl, so scholarly that in high school her favorite hobby had been “trying to hide behind the dictionary,”7 which she used to read in a “delightful sunny nook.”8 She had the smarts to make it as a schoolteacher, but she would dial-paint for a time to help out at home.

Anyway, she had a good time at work, painting with her friends. Peg started out, as did all the new girls, by painting the Big Ben alarm clocks that Westclox produced. He was “a rugged handsome fellow”9 of a clock, with a dial that measured about 10 centimeters across, giving him nice big numbers for the less experienced girls to paint. As they gained in skill, they were moved on to the Baby Bens, smaller clocks about half the size, and eventually to the pocket watches: the Pocket Ben and the Scotty, which were just over three centimeters wide.

Peg held the dials in her hand as she carefully traced the numbers with the greenish-white paint, lipping and dipping her camel-hair brush as she had been taught. The paper dial was mounted on a slim metal disc, cool to the touch. It had little ridges on it at the back, by which it would later be attached to the rest of the clock.

Sitting alongside Peg in the studio was another new joiner: Marie Becker. She’d been working for the bakery downtown, but as one of her relatives observed, Radium Dial “was the place that paid more money than anyplace else.”10 Marie’s wages would double if she took up dial-painting: consequently, she was sold. “Marie needed the income,” her relative went on, “so that’s why she started to work there.”11

Like Peg, Marie came from an underprivileged background. After her father had died of dropsy, her mother remarried, and when Marie was only thirteen her stepfather set her to work. She’d done all sorts of jobs since then: the bakery, factory work, and being a salesgirl at the dime store. Her stepfather’s instruction was something Marie had taken in her stride—as she did all things in life. “Her attitude was wonderful,” a close relative said. “I don’t ever remember her being in a bad mood. You know how other people get grudges or they get a chip on their shoulder—never. She was a ball of wax. She laughed a lot. She laughed loud. Her laugh would make you laugh.”12

She was an instant hit in the dial-painting studio. Marie was a real character, full of opinions and wisecracks. She was a “skinny minny”13 with dimples who, despite her German heritage, had almost a Spanish look to her, with striking dark eyes and long brown hair, which she wore in a bun, sometimes with a spit curl on her forehead. She became good pals with Charlotte Nevins and declared Peg Looney to be her closest friend.

At first, however, Marie wasn’t sure about staying there. On her first day at work, she was taught to put the brush in her mouth, and she hated it; when she went home at lunchtime that day, she told her mother bluntly that she wouldn’t return because “she just didn’t like that idea of putting the brush in her mouth.”14

But it was a short-lived reluctance, for despite her dislike of the work, she was drawn back to the studio the following day. “She stayed because of the money,”15 a relative remarked somberly. Those high wages were so hard to say no to.

Not that Marie saw them. “The money went to her stepfather,” her relative continued. “He was very strict; a very stern man. She had to give him the money.”16 Marie hated it, and it was especially hard for her because most of the other girls at the studio could keep their money—and they spent it on the latest fashions at T. Lucey & Bros, where girls could buy “corsets, gloves, laces, ribbons, fancy goods, and notions.”17

Marie dreamed of spending her wage on high heels, which she loved. One day, she’d had enough: she’d earned the money, not her stepfather, and she thought to herself that when she got paid that week, she would go straight to the shoe store and splurge her hard-earned cash on a pair of fabulous shoes: her very first pair of high heels. And she did just that—she even told the clerk not to bother wrapping them because she was going to walk right out of the shop with the heels on. “That was Marie!” exclaimed a relative fondly. “She knew if she wore those shoes home, there was nothing her stepfather could do.”18

And there wasn’t. Marie had an argument with him about not handing over her check—and then eventually moved out, when she was seventeen. Thanks to her wages and her spirit, she was well able to.

Marie’s new feistiness was a sign of the times. It was the Roaring Twenties, after all, and even in a tiny town like Ottawa the breeze of female independence and fun times was stirring the sidewalks, blowing the winds of change. The dial-painters were full of youth and beauty, just itching to get out there and see the world.

And what a time to be doing it. “Prohibition was huge [in Ottawa],” remarked a resident. “There was a lot of drinking and gambling joints.”19 And not just that: big bands and good times. The dial-painters were among those dancing to the Twentieth Century Jazz Boys and, later, Benny Goodman. The year 1923 was when the Charleston dance craze took America by storm, and the Radium Dial girls swiveled their knees with the best of them. The luminous glow of the radium on their hair and undulating dresses made those parties even more special. “Many of the girls,” Catherine Wolfe recalled, “used to wear their good dresses to the plant so that they would become luminous when they went out to parties later.”20

It gave the girls even more reason to invest in high-end fashion: they bought the latest cloche hats, high heels with bows upon them, handbags, and strings of pearls. And it wasn’t just after work that the good times roared, either; in work, too, the girls had a blast. As in Orange, the bosses—Mr. and Mrs. Reed, and Miss Murray—worked downstairs, giving the girls on the second floor a free rein to have fun. In their lunch hour, the girls would go into the darkroom with the leftover radium paint: they’d had a swell idea for a new game.

“We used to paint our eyebrows, our lips, and our eyelashes [with the remaining radium paint], and then look at ourselves in the darkroom,”21 recalled Marie. The girls would always get fresh jars of material for the afternoon’s work, so they had carte blanche to use up the surplus paint from the morning. Marie used to dab the glowing mixture freely around her nostrils and along her eyebrows, and then give herself an elaborate mustache and a comedy chin. The girls would all make faces at each other; they thought it was hilarious. Charlotte Nevins remembered that they would “turn the lights off and then [we] could look in the mirror and laugh a lot. [We] glowed in the dark!”22

Yet for all the laughter, it was a strangely spooky vision. In the darkroom, no daylight shone. There was no light at all—except for the glowing element the girls had painted on their bare skin. They themselves were completely invisible. All you could see was the radium. But, as Marie herself said, it was all “just for fun.”23

More and more girls joined them at Radium Dial. Frances Glacinski, Ella Cruse, Mary Duffy, Ruth Thompson, Sadie Pray, Della Harveston, and Inez Corcoran were among them; Inez sat right next to Catherine Wolfe in the studio. “We were a bunch of happy, vivacious girls,” remembered Charlotte Nevins fondly. “The brightest of the girlhood of Ottawa. [We had] our own little clique.”24 That clique worked together, danced together and had outings along the river and at Starved Rock, a local beauty spot.

They were such good, good times. And, as Catherine’s nephew later said of those halcyon days, “They thought it was never gonna end.”25