فصل 09

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ORANGE, NEW JERSEY

—June 1923—

It was the Roaring Twenties in Orange too—but Grace Fryer wasn’t in the mood for dancing. It was odd: she had this slight pain in her back and feet; nothing major, but enough to make it uncomfortable for her to walk. Dancing definitely wasn’t on the agenda, even though the girls at the bank were still throwing their parties.

She tried to put it to the back of her mind. She’d had a few aches and pains the year before, too, but they came and went; hopefully, when these latest aches cleared up, they would simply go for good. She was just run-down, she reasoned: “I thought that this was merely a touch of rheumatism and did nothing about it.”1 Grace had far more important things to think about than an achy foot; she’d been promoted at work and was now the head of her department.

It wasn’t just an achy foot troubling her, however. Back in January, Grace had gone to the dentist for a routine checkup; he’d removed two teeth and, although an infection had lingered for two weeks, her trouble had then cleared up. But now, six months on, a hole had appeared at the site of the extraction and was leaking pus profusely. It was painful, and smelly, and tasted disgusting. Grace had health insurance and was prepared to pay to get it sorted out; the doctors, she was sure, would be able to fix her trouble.

But had she known what was happening just a few miles away in Newark, she might have had reason to doubt her faith in physicians. Grace’s former colleague Irene Rudolph was still paying doctor after doctor to treat her—but without relief. She had by now undergone both operations and blood transfusions, but to no avail. The decay in Irene’s jaw was eating her alive, bit by bit.

She could feel herself weakening. Her pulse would pound in her ears as her heart beat faster to try to get more oxygen around her severely anemic body—but although her heart was drumming faster and faster, it felt to her like her life was inexorably slowing down.

In Orange, for Helen Quinlan, the drumbeat suddenly stopped.

She died on June 3, 1923, at her home on North Jefferson Street; her mother Nellie was with her. Helen was twenty-two years old at the time of her death. The cause of it, according to her death certificate, was Vincent’s angina. This is a bacterial disease, an agonizing and progressive infection that begins in the gums and steadily spreads until the tissue in the mouth and throat—swollen and ulcerated—finally sloughs off, dead. Her doctor later said he didn’t know if the disease was confirmed by laboratory tests, but it was written on her death certificate, nonetheless.

The “angina” in its name is derived from the Latin angere, meaning “to choke or throttle.” That’s what it felt like when the decay in her mouth finally reached her throat. That’s how Helen died, this girl who had used to run with the wind in her skirts, making boyfriends gaze and marvel at her zest for life and her freedom. She had lived an impossibly short life, touching those who knew her; now, suddenly, she was gone.

Six weeks later, Irene Rudolph followed her to the grave. She died on July 15, 1923 at twelve noon, in Newark General Hospital, where she’d been admitted the day before. She was twenty-one. At the time of her death, the necrosis in her jaw was said to be “complete.”2 Her death was attributed to her work, but the cause was given as phosphorus poisoning, a diagnosis admitted by the attending physician to be “not decisive.”3

Katherine Schaub, who had watched her cousin suffer through every stage of what she called her “terrible and mysterious illness,”4 was angry and confused, as well as grief-stricken. She knew Irene had spoken to Dr. Allen about her fears that her sickness had been caused by her job, but since then the family had heard nothing. They didn’t know the names John Roach or Dr. Szamatolski; they knew nothing of the doctor’s verdict following his tests. In fact, after reviewing Szamatolski’s report and that of the two inspectors, the Department of Labor took no action.

No action whatsoever.

Katherine was an intelligent, determined young woman. If the authorities weren’t going to do anything—well then, she would. On July 18, the Schaubs buried Irene, who had lived such a short, sad life, and the next day, fueled by sorrow and the senseless waste, Katherine went to the Department of Health on Franklin Street. She had a report she wished to make, she told the official there. And she told him all about Irene, and her tragic death; and how Mollie Maggia had died of the same sort of poisoning a year ago. It was the United States Radium Corporation, she made sure to say, on Alden Street in Orange.

“Still another girl,” she reported, “is now complaining of trouble.”5 And she said clearly: “They have to point the brushes with their lips.”6 That was the cause of all this trouble, all this agony.

All this death.

Report filed, Katherine left, hoping and assuming that something, now, would be done.

A memo was filed about her visit. At the end, it said simply, “A foreman [at the plant] by the name of Viedt said [her] claims were not true.”7

And that was that.

Helen and Irene’s deaths had not gone unnoticed by their former colleagues, at least. “Many of the girls I knew and had worked with in the plant began to die off alarmingly fast,”8 observed Quinta McDonald. “They were all young women, in good health. It seemed odd.”9

That summer, however, Quinta was caught up in all things family, and had no time to give the situation much more thought than that. On July 25, she gave birth to her second child, Robert. “We were all so darned happy together,”10 she remembered of that time. She and her husband James now had the perfect family: a little boy and a little girl. The kids’ Aunt Albina, who was still waiting for the blessing of her first child, doted on them both.

During her pregnancy, like many women, Quinta had suffered swollen ankles. Although Helen’s birth had been relatively easy, she’d struggled with Robert; it was a difficult labor, and forceps had been used. After his birth, she’d assumed she’d get well but instead developed a bad back; and her ankles still bothered her. “I hobbled around,”11 she later recalled; she treated the problem with household remedies. And then: “I went to bed one night,”12 she remembered, “[and] woke up in the morning with terrible pains in my bones.”13 She called out a local doctor and he began treating her for rheumatism. His call-out fee was $3 ($40) a pop, and she and James could have done without the additional expense, given the new baby, but she just couldn’t seem to shake the pains.

By the end of the year, she would have seen the doctor eighty-two times.

As the summer of 1923 drew to a close, Katherine Schaub’s complaint from the middle of July was finally investigated by Lenore Young, an Orange health officer. She looked up the dead girls’ records—and found that Mollie Maggia had died of syphilis and Helen Quinlan of Vincent’s angina.

“I tried to get in touch with Viedt,” she added, “but he was out of town.”14 And so she did nothing. “I let the matter drop. [It] has been neglected…but not out of my mind entirely.”15

Had the dial-painters been privy to her correspondence, those words would have been cold comfort indeed to those continuing to suffer, including Hazel Vincent. Hazel was still being treated for pyorrhea and still having teeth extracted; they were like old friends dying off, one by one, until her own mouth felt like a stranger. By now, she could no longer work, as the pain was unbearable.

For her friends and family, it was intolerable to watch. For Theo in particular, who had loved her since they were teenagers, he felt like he was feeling his future disintegrate in his arms. He begged her to let him pay for the doctors and the dentists that she went to, but she was unwilling to accept money from him.

He wasn’t going to stand for that. This was the woman he loved. If she wouldn’t accept help from him as her boyfriend—would she accept it if she was his wife? And so, even though Hazel was very ill, he married her, because he believed that if she was his wife he would be more able to take care of her. They stood before the altar together, and he promised to love her, in sickness and in health…

The new bride wasn’t the only radium girl suffering that fall. In October 1923, Marguerite Carlough, who was still working in the studio, developed a severe toothache that made her face swell up. And then, in November, another young woman fell ill.

“I began to have trouble with my teeth,”16 wrote Katherine Schaub.

Katherine had seen first-hand what Irene went through. When her mouth started to ache, it must have shot a bolt of terror right through her. She was brave; she didn’t ignore it. Instead, on November 17, she went to the same dentist who had treated Irene, to see if he could help her where all his efforts had failed for her cousin. Dr. Barry removed two of her teeth; he noticed, as he examined them, that they were “flinty”17 and broke easily. He added in her file: “Patient has been employed in radium works in Orange, same place as Miss Rudolph…”18 Katherine was told to come back soon.

And she did—again and again. Following the tooth extraction, her gum failed to heal, and she returned very frequently to Dr. Barry’s office: five times within that same month, at a charge of $2 ($27) each visit; the extraction had cost $8 ($111). Katherine wasn’t stupid: “I kept thinking about Irene,” she said anxiously, “and about the trouble she had had with her jaw…there was some relationship between Irene’s case and mine.”19 She also realized: “[Irene] had necrosis…she died.”20

Katherine’s always-vivid imagination, now fueled by the knowledge of what she had seen Irene suffer, soon became a constant, flickering cine-reel, silently playing out what must lie before her, over and over. She was “seriously shocked,”21 and a severe nervousness developed which affected her mental health, a situation that did not improve when, on December 16, 1923, Catherine O’Donnell, another former coworker, passed away. The doctors said she died of pneumonia and gangrene of lung, but Katherine didn’t know for sure. And so Catherine became another ghost girl to haunt her in her head. She was buried in the same cemetery where, six months earlier, Irene had been laid to rest.

So many girls were ailing. As Christmas approached, Grace Fryer was conscious that although her jaw seemed to be getting better, the pain in her back and foot had become worse. “My foot was stiff; I couldn’t bend it,” she remembered. “[When] I walked I had to walk with my foot real flat.”22 Yet she’d soldiered on throughout the fall and didn’t ask for help. “I said nothing about [my condition] to anyone.”23

But she couldn’t pull the wool over her parents’ eyes. Daniel and Grace Fryer watched their eldest daughter as she went about her life—commuting to the bank, helping out at home, playing with her young nieces and nephews—and they saw that her gait, which had always been confident and unhindered, had changed. She was limping, despite herself. They couldn’t let this go on.

“Toward the end of 1923,” their daughter Grace conceded, “my condition became noticeable, and my parents insisted that I see a doctor.”24 Dutifully, she made an appointment at the Orthopedic Hospital in Orange for January 5, 1924.

Before that was Christmas. By Christmas Eve 1923, Marguerite Carlough felt at her wits’ end. All fall, she’d struggled on, continuing her work at the studio in spite of increasing ill health. Lip-pointing had been stopped in late 1923; Josephine Smith, the forelady, revealed: “When [the company] warning was given about pointing brushes in [our] mouths, it was explained to the girls [that] this was because the acid in the mouth spoiled the adhesive.”25

Marguerite had followed the new orders. Her mind wasn’t on the job, though; she couldn’t concentrate as she’d used to. She had extreme fatigue, was pale and weak, and her toothache, which had started in October, was driving her insane. Unable to eat, the weight had dropped off her at an alarming rate; the smart tailored clothes she favored were now hanging off her frame, no longer made to fit her newly scrawny figure.

When she left work that December 24, she didn’t know it, but it would be for the very last time. Because, that same evening, she visited her dentist. There were two teeth that were especially hurting her, and her dentist advised that both should be removed that same day. Marguerite consented to the extraction.

When her dentist pulled the teeth, a piece of decayed jawbone came out too.

She wasn’t going back to the studio after that. She went home instead, to her sister Sarah and her niece Marguerite, to her mom and dad, and she tried to tell them what had happened. Christmas Day was a sober, solemn occasion after her gruesome experience—but at least they were all together. Given the absences in other New Jersey homes that winter, that was something to be grateful for.

Unbeknownst to the Carloughs, or to any of the dial-painters, that same month the U.S. Public Health Service issued an official report on radium workers. Though it noted that no serious defects had been found among the staff examined, it revealed that there had been two cases of skin erosion and one case of anemia among the nine technicians studied. As a result, it made a formal recommendation to the nation—to New Jersey and to Illinois; to Connecticut, where the Waterbury Clock Company was painting its own dials; and to all the places where radium was used. Safety precautions, the report said, should most definitely be undertaken by those handling radium.