پایان بندی

EPILOGUE

The radium girls did not die in vain. Although the women could not save themselves from the poison that riddled their bones, in countless ways their sacrifice saved many thousands of others.

Fifty days before the final triumph in Catherine Donohue’s case, war was declared in Europe. It meant that there was, once again, an enormous demand for luminous dials to light the dashboards of military machines and the wristwatches of soldiers taking up arms. Yet thanks to Catherine and Grace and their colleagues’ bravery in speaking out about what had happened to them, dial-painting was now the most feared occupation among young women. No longer could the government sit idly by: the radium girls’ demise demanded a response.

Safety standards were introduced that protected a whole new generation of dial-painters, based entirely on knowledge gained from the bodies of those women who had come before. The standards were set not a moment too soon, for seven months later America formally entered the war. The U.S. radium dial-painting industry exploded, with USRC alone increasing its personnel by 1,600 percent. Radium dials were even bigger business than the first time round: the United States used more than 190 grams of radium for luminous dials during the Second World War; in contrast, fewer than 30 grams were used worldwide in the earlier conflict.

In addition, a chemist called Glenn Seaborg, who was employed on the most secret mission of them all—the Manhattan Project—wrote in his diary: “As I was making the rounds of the laboratory rooms this morning, I was suddenly struck by a disturbing vision [of] the workers in the radium dial-painting industry.”1 Atomic-bomb making involved widespread use of radioactive plutonium, and he realized at once that similar hazards faced those working on the project. Seaborg insisted that research be undertaken into plutonium; it was found to be biomedically very similar to radium, meaning it would settle into the bones of anyone exposed to it. The Manhattan Project issued nonnegotiable safety guidelines to its workers, based directly on the radium safety standards. Seaborg was determined that the women’s ghosts would not be joined by those of his colleagues who were working to win the war.

After the Allies had triumphed—helped by the deployment of those very atomic bombs that the Manhattan Project built—the debt the country owed to the radium girls was acknowledged in full. An official of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) wrote: “If it hadn’t been for those dial-painters, the [Manhattan] project’s management could have reasonably rejected the extreme precautions that were urged on it and thousands of workers might well have been, and might still be, in great danger.”2 The women had been, officials said, “invaluable.”3

Even after the war was over, the dial-painters’ legacy continued to save lives, as the world entered the age of atomic energy. “We were going to live in an era of plutonium,” enthused one man who grew up in 1950s America. “We’d have plutonium cars, planes… It was infinite.”4 The large-scale production of radioactive materials seemed inevitable. “In the foreseeable future,” wrote the Consumers League, “millions of workers may be affected by ionizing radiations.”5

The League was right. Almost immediately, however, it became clear that it was not just employees in the new atomic industries who were at risk: the whole planet was. Less than five years after the Second World War ended, the nuclear arms race began: over the next decade, hundreds of above-ground atomic tests were conducted across the globe.

Each blast, sending mushroom-cloud bomb debris into the sky, eventually resulted in radioactive fallout drifting back to earth: it landed not only on the test site, but rained down upon fields of green grass, wheat, and cereal—through which the radioactive isotopes in the fallout entered the human food chain. Just as radium had done in the dial-painters, these isotopes, especially a particularly dangerous, newly created one called strontium-90, began to deposit in human bones. “Every one of us,” wrote the Consumers League in alarm, “is a potential victim.”6

The AEC dismissed the concerns: the risks, it said, were very small when compared to “the terrible future we might face if we fell behind in our nuclear defense effort.”7 Yet its words were not sufficient to calm the troubled public; after all, “the radium dial-painters’ agony [had] alerted the world to the hazards of internal radiation.”8 “[They] serve as a warning,” railed the Consumers League, “of the results of carelessness and ignorance…a cloud on the horizon, no larger than a man’s hand.”9

In 1956, growing public unease led the AEC to establish a committee to examine the long-term health risks of atomic tests, specifically the effects of strontium-90. But how, the researchers thought, could they possibly begin this study for the future health of humanity when they were dealing with such an unknown substance? All they really knew was that strontium-90 was chemically similar to radium…

“There is only a limited pool of people that have had exposure to internal radiation,” a radioactivity specialist said. “If anything happens in our up-and-coming nuclear age, these [people] are about the only starting point that anyone has.”10

The dial-painters were needed to help once more.

They seemed Cassandra-like in their powers: able to predict for scientists the likely long-term health effects of this new radioactive danger. “Something that happened far in the past,” an AEC official said, “is going to give us a look far into the future.”11 He termed the women of “incalculable value”12: their suffering would provide “vital insight, with implications for hundreds of millions of people all over the world.”13 In a spookily prophetic letter, Pearl Payne had once written, “My history is unusual and may be of interest to medical men of the future.”14 She could never have anticipated just how right she was.

Medical studies began immediately, including in New Jersey and Illinois; later, the research would be amalgamated into the Center for Human Radiobiology (CHR), which was located in a multimillion-dollar clinic called the Argonne National Laboratory, based 75 miles from Ottawa. Here, special lead-lined vaults were constructed, buried under three feet of concrete and ten feet of earth, in which the dial-painters’ body burdens (the amount of radium inside them) were measured. The research was designed to help future generations and called “essential to the security of the nation.”15 “If we can determine the long-term effects of radium,” one of the scientists said, “we’re quite sure we can predict the long-term, low-level effects of fallout.”16 Scientists were seeking to “give the world an exact guide on safe radioactivity by studying all dial-painters who can be found.”17

There were dial-painters still living—albeit with a time bomb ticking in their bones. Dr. Martland had already explained why they had survived thus far. Radium was known to settle in the girls’ bones and known to cause late-onset sarcomas, but when such deadly tumors might begin to grow was the factor that remained mysterious, like a dark trick. Radium had not given away all its secrets just yet.

The hunt to find those living dial-painters now began in earnest: WANTED: RADIUM WORKERS OF THE ROARING TWENTIES18 read the headlines. Employment records were procured and snapshots of those long-ago USRC picnics unearthed; the company photograph taken on the steps of Radium Dial became a vital source of clues. The scientists pronounced, “Each of these persons is worth [her] weight in gold to science”19; the girls were termed “a reservoir of scientific information.”20 In an eerie echo of the women’s treatment when they sued their former firms, private investigators were hired to track them down.

Those they found, they often found willing. “She said she would be very happy to do it (anything for science),”21 a memo recorded. Those dial-painters who were still working for USRC participated anonymously, for fear of jeopardizing their jobs.

There were some who didn’t want to stir things up. “Miss Anna Callaghan does not know she has radium poisoning and her family does not want her to know,”22 read one note. Another woman was reluctant to be measured for radium as the scientists “couldn’t do anything about it anyway.”23

Even family members of the girls took part. Grace Fryer’s little brother Art was one. They tested him “because he spent so much time with her and basically she was radioactive,” said his son. “I guess the government was trying to figure out if he was going to suffer any ill effects.”24

Though Art was fine, it was a concern that was not exaggerated. Swen Kjaer’s notes minuted the death of a dial-painter’s sister: she had “reportedly died from radiation exposure, but had never worked at the [USRC] plant. The source of contamination appears to have been her sister, the dial-painter, with whom she shared a bed.”25

Many of the original girls, of course, were no longer alive to help with the study. Edna Hussman had died on March 30, 1939; she was said to have “maintained her good spirits and courage until the last.”26 She died of a sarcoma of the femur, leaving her husband, Louis, a widower at the age of forty.

Albina Larice, too, had passed away. She died aged fifty-one on November 18, 1946, also of a leg sarcoma. Pictures of her toward the end show her smiling, with no tension in her face. She passed away fourteen days before she and James would have celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Yet even the deceased dial-painters had something to offer the scientists. Dr. Martland had collected tissue and bone samples from the radium girls when he was making his groundbreaking discoveries in the 1920s—and these ended up in the studies’ archives. Those contributing to the world’s knowledge of radiation included Sarah Maillefer, Ella Eckert, Irene La Porte and many more… The researchers even went to the Cook County Hospital and brought back Charlotte Purcell’s amputated arm; they found it still in its formaldehyde crypt, saved through the decades due to its never-before-seen symptoms.

In 1963, perhaps at least partly in response to the research on the dial-painters, President Kennedy signed the international Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited atomic tests above ground, underwater, and in outer space. Strontium-90, it had been determined, was too dangerous for humanity after all. The ban undoubtedly saved lives and, very possibly, the entire human race.

Atomic energy remained part of the world; it is a part of our lives even today, when 56 countries operate 240 nuclear reactors, and more still are used to power nuclear ships and submarines. Yet thanks to the radium girls, whose experiences led directly to the regulation of radioactive industries, atomic power is able to be operated, on the whole, in safety.

The study of the dial-painters did not end when the threat of nuclear war subsided. A leading figure in the research, Robley Evans, “forcefully argued that it was prudent, and indeed a moral obligation to future generations, to learn as much as possible about the effects of radiation.”27 The AEC agreed and so, through the Center for Human Radiobiology, the dial-painters were studied “for their full life spans.”28

Decade after decade, the radium girls came to CHR to be tested. They agreed to have bone-marrow biopsies, blood tests, x-rays, physical exams; the women were asked to fast before coming and to wear clothes that they could “easily slip in and out of.”29 They were given probing questionnaires about their mental and physical health, they had breath tests and, of course, they had their body burdens measured in the claustrophobic iron rooms beneath the earth. Even after death, some were autopsied, their bodies giving up secrets that the scientists couldn’t learn in life. Thousands of women helped with the study, through their forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond; their contribution to medical science is incalculable. We all benefit from their sacrifice and courage, every day of our lives.

And among those women who submitted to examination for the good of humanity were some familiar faces. Pearl Payne was one of them. “I believe I was fortunate,” she once said of her survival, “in the fact that [my] radium did not become localized in some of the bones of the body which cannot be removed, as is the case with many of the girls that are dead.”30

Instead of death, Pearl embraced life. She made curtains and dresses on her sewing machine and “the best homemade pies,”31 using freshly fallen fruit from the trees in her backyard. Her survival meant she was around when her little sister needed help. “At the time my dad walked out on my mom,” Pearl’s nephew Randy said, “there was nobody left. Nobody to help us. And so Pearl and Hobart were the best people in our lives. They would take care of us.”32

Another dial-painter who came to the Argonne Laboratory was Marie Rossiter. She had survived to see her son, Bill, marry the girl next door, Dolores, and to see her granddaughter Patty grow up to become a dancer. Although for much of her life Marie had “huge and spotty”33 legs from the radium, which forced her to walk with a limp, she would dance with Patty regardless. “She’d always dance with me,” remembered her granddaughter fondly. “It wasn’t that great, but we danced together. She had a wonderful love for life. I used to look upon her like she could do anything.”34 Marie simply refused to let the radium rule her life. “She was in pain,” recalled Dolores. “Pain to walk. Pain to just stand here, sometimes, it was that bad.”35 Yet although Marie had her bad times—“I prayed to die and couldn’t die,” she once said. “Why would I want to live, I had so much pain?”36—she added stoically, “I witnessed the bad times, but you get through them.”37

There was a friend of hers who had gotten through the bad times too: Charlotte Purcell. She’d been told in the 1930s that she was the Ottawa dial-painter most likely to die after Catherine Donohue, but thirty years later, she was still living. Marie Rossiter put that down to God’s intervention, suggesting that He had helped Charlotte—spared her life—because Charlotte had, in turn, helped Catherine.

Charlotte had had a sarcoma, back in 1934, but her courage in electing to have an amputation undoubtedly saved her life. She lost all her teeth and had one leg shorter than the other but, like Marie, she refused to let it bring her down. “I now feel fine, although I’m bothered a bit by arthritis,”38 she said to a reporter in the 1950s. “I’ve gone through all that years ago; I don’t like to think about it.”39 Although it was a time in her life she wanted to forget, when the scientists invited her to Argonne, she answered their call. The doctors had told her that doing so would help others, and Charlotte Purcell was never a woman to turn down an appeal for aid.

The research at Argonne uncovered what happened to the Ottawa women’s lawsuits after Catherine Donohue won her test case. Many fought on with Grossman’s help after that victory in court—though the small pot of money available meant the payouts were not high; those who did claim were paid only a few hundred dollars each. Charlotte received $300 ($5,000), a negligible sum that made Al Purcell “very angry”40; it paid for the amputation of her arm, and that was about it. Others received nothing; Marie was taken to lunch when she went to Argonne and said, “This is the most we’ll probably ever get.”41 Some dropped their cases: the Glacinski sisters and Helen Munch were among them. Perhaps they’d joined forces for Catherine, and upon her death the fight went out of them. There was very little money, anyway; maybe, in the end, it did not seem worth it. It was the judgment they had fought for, and that they had achieved.

As for the companies, eventually the law caught up with them—though by then the damage had been done. In 1979, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the former USRC site in Orange had unacceptable, environmentally hazardous levels of radioactivity: twenty times higher than was safe. There was widespread contamination—and not just of the site, but in those locations where the company had dumped its radioactive waste as landfill. Almost 750 homes had been built on top of that waste; they too needed decontamination. More than 200 acres of land were affected in Orange, some to a depth of more than fifteen feet.

The EPA ordered the corporate successor of USRC to perform the cleanup work, but it declined, except for agreeing to erect a new security fence (even this they did not see through; the EPA was forced to complete it). The courts were not forgiving; in 1991, the New Jersey Supreme Court found USRC “forever”42 liable for the contamination and declared the firm had had “constructive knowledge”43 about the dangers at the time it operated there. Residents sued the firm; after seven years, the cases were eventually settled out of court, costing the company some $14.2 million (almost $24 million) in damages. It reportedly cost the government $144 million ($209 million) to clean up radium-contaminated sites across New Jersey and New York.

As for Radium Dial, despite the wartime boom, it went bust in 1943. The building it left behind in the center of Ottawa, however, had a legacy that lasted far beyond that. A meat-locker company later operated in its basement: its employees died of cancer, while a family who purchased meat there found that “every brother got colon cancer within six months of each other.”44 The building itself was knocked down in 1968. “They just hauled it down,” remembered Peg Looney’s niece Darlene, “and used it as fill, everywhere.”45 The waste from the building was dumped around town, including alongside a school field. Later studies showed an above-average cancer rate near the factory as well as across town; people found that their pet dogs didn’t live to maturity and that the local wildlife developed distressing tumors. “I noted,” said another niece of Peg, “that nearly one person in each household of that neighborhood [where I grew up] had cancer.”46 Another resident remarked: “There aren’t many families not affected.”47

Yet the town officials, in a reprise of their attitude toward Catherine and her friends, did not address the evident problem. When filmmaker Carole Langer made a documentary, Radium City, which highlighted the town’s radioactivity, the mayor declared, “That lady is trying to destroy us.”48 He ordered “everybody not to go to [see] it.”49

“Well,” said Marie’s daughter-in-law Dolores, “that was the wrong thing to say. Because it filled up the whole [showing] and they had to have another one.”50 The film was shown to a standing-room-only crowd of nearly five hundred residents.

“People were divided,” recalled Darlene. “There were people that didn’t want to hear about it; they didn’t want to believe it. And then there were people who were like, ‘OK, let’s get this cleaned up.’”51

In the end, they did get it cleaned up. The EPA stepped in, and funds were found to begin tackling the dangerous legacy of radioactivity that Radium Dial left Ottawa. As in Orange, the damage plunged many feet deep into the earth. It was an operation that would take decades; in 2015, the cleanup was still going on.

The Center for Human Radiobiology (CHR) studied the dial-painters for decades. Its scientists came to learn that radium was a wily, tenacious element. With a half-life of 1,600 years, it had plenty of time to make itself known in those it had infiltrated, inflicting its own, special damage across the decades. As the researchers followed the women through the years, they witnessed what the long-term effects of internal radiation really were.

The dial-painters who had survived did not escape unscathed—far from it. Some women were stricken early but then endured a half-life for decades; one Waterbury girl was bedridden for fifty years. The older the women were when they dial-painted, and the fewer years they worked, the less likely they were to die in the early stages—so they lived on, but the radium lived with them, a marriage from which there was no divorce.

Many suffered significant bone changes and fractures; most lost all their teeth. There were unusually large numbers who developed bone cancer, leukemia, and anemia; some were given blood transfusions for years. The radium honeycombed the women’s bones so that, for example, Charlotte Purcell later developed osteoporosis throughout her spine and suffered a partial collapse of her vertebrae. Like Grace Fryer before her, she ultimately wore a back brace.

Marie Rossiter had at least six leg operations—her swollen legs began turning black—and in the end she had her leg amputated. “She said,” remembered Dolores, “‘Take it off! Right now! I don’t want to go home and think about it.’”52

Marie’s remaining leg had a metal bar through it from her knee to her ankle; she became crippled—but it still didn’t slow her down. She was the life and soul of the care home she later lived in, whizzing about in her wheelchair.

Having studied these long-term effects of radiation, the CHR scientists—who had, at first, been looking for a magic threshold of radiation exposure, under which no harm was done—ultimately came to agree with Martland, who had warned decades before that “the normal radioactivity of the human body should not be increased.”53

It is impossible to say how many dial-painters were killed by their work: so many were misdiagnosed or never traced that the records simply do not exist. Sometimes the cancer that former workers suffered later in life was never attributed to the job they did in their teens, though it came as a direct result. And the deaths, too, were only one part of it; how many women were crippled or suffered the unique pain of childlessness as a result of their poisoning is also unknown.

The files at Argonne are filled with hundreds and hundreds of dial-painters’ names—or rather numbers. Each woman was given a reference number, by which she was always known. The Argonne List of the Doomed makes for chilling reading, charting as it does each woman’s suffering with cool detachment. “Bilateral amputations of both legs; amputation of right knee; died of cancer of ear; brain; hip; cause of death: sarcoma; sarcoma; sarcoma”54 over and over through the files. Some women survived for forty years or more—but the radium always came calling in the end. The newspapers followed some of the deaths: RADIUM, DORMANT KILLER, AT WORK AGAIN!55 screamed the headlines through the years.

Mercedes Reed is said to have died in 1971; she was eighty-six. “I’m absolutely unequivocally convinced,” said one researcher, “that the radium level would be huge in her bones. She supposedly died from colon cancer, but maybe it was misdiagnosed.”56 The Reeds did not continue their association with Radium Dial, even before it went bust. “Ultimately, Mr. Reed was fired from the plant and it is understood that he [was] bitter about this,”57 researchers discovered. After his dismissal from the company to whom he had been, some might say, unforgivably loyal, he became a maintenance man for the YMCA.

Reed’s former president, Joseph Kelly, died about 1969; after a series of strokes “reduce[d] [his] mental capacity…he just got frailer and frailer.”58 In his final years, he would often say, “Have you seen so-and-so lately?”59 of someone who had worked with him in the 1920s. Given his distance from the dial-painters he had sentenced to death, when he signed his name to the ad that told them they were safe, it seems unlikely his damaged mind was being haunted by the ghost girls.

As for those girls he used to employ in Ottawa, against all the odds a few of them had long, good lives. Pearl Payne lived to be ninety-eight years old; she and Hobart embraced the extra time they had unexpectedly been given. “They traveled all over the world,” revealed their nephew Randy. “They went to Jerusalem, England…they were in every state in the union.”60

Before she died, Pearl called Randy over to her house one day. “She asked me to go up in the attic and pick up some boxes and bring ’em down,”61 he recalled. He picked his way through the items Pearl kept in her loft: a baby stroller, a crib—strange things for an old lady to have in her attic, but perhaps Pearl had found herself unable to let go of these final traces of the many children she had wanted, but could never have. Randy found the boxes she meant: they were full of newspaper cuttings about Catherine Donohue and letters and documents to do with her case.

“This is what happened to us,” Pearl told Randy urgently. And she said emphatically, “These need to be safeguarded. This stuff is important. Be sure that Pearl [her daughter with the same name] gets these if anything happens to me.”62

Hobart and Pearl “were two very fine people,” said Randy. “I don’t [normally] visit graves, but I go to theirs. And I wanna tell you, I say thank you every time I’m there. That’s the kind of people they were.”63

Charlotte Purcell lived to be eighty-two. She was adored by her grandchildren. “She was probably one of my most favorite people in the whole world,” raved her granddaughter Jan. “She was one of the most courageous, loved and influential people in my life. What my grandmother taught me was: it doesn’t matter what life throws at you, you can adapt.

“When I asked her to teach me how to jump rope, she said, ‘Well, I don’t think I can teach you because I only have one arm.’ I suppose that was upsetting to me so she said, ‘Well, wait.’ She tied a rope to a chain-link fence and then she jumped rope with one arm and showed me how to jump rope.”64

Jan’s brother Don added, “It was nothing out of the ordinary to me [that she didn’t have an arm] because she made it that way.”65

The kids would chorus, “Tell us the story of how you got your arm cut off!”66

“She would repeat the story,” remembered Jan. “She would repeat it over and over, any time we asked.”67

“When I was a young girl,” Charlotte Purcell would say, “I got paid a lot of money to paint numbers on watches and clocks. We didn’t know that the paint was a poison. After I had left there, my friend Catherine Donohue got very sick. And a lot of the girls started getting very sick. The poison settled in my arm, but with my friend Catherine it went throughout the body and she died. She died and left her husband and children without a mom.”68

She was always “pretty sad”69 when she got to that part of the story.

Though Charlotte had been unable to attend Catherine’s funeral, her son remembered something from his mother’s life that maybe, to a poetic mind, suggested that the friends got to say their own good-bye. “When the weather was nice,” Donald recalled, “my mother used to go out to the porch and sit on the glider they had there, and swing back and forth. While she was there, a little yellow-and-black canary used to come and sit on her left shoulder [where her arm was missing] and might stay with her about thirty minutes and then leave. That happened several times. Normally, birds don’t have anything to do with people.”70

The women didn’t talk to their families about the incredible legacy they had given the world. And the radium girls did not simply set safety standards and contribute incalculably to science—they left their mark in legislation too. In the wake of Catherine Donohue’s case in 1939, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins announced that the fight was “far from won”71 when it came to workers’ compensation. Subsequently, building on what the women had achieved in life, further legal changes were made to protect all employees. The dial-painters’ case ultimately led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now works nationally in the United States to ensure safe working conditions. Businesses are required to inform employees if they work with dangerous chemicals; workers certainly won’t be told that those corrosive elements will make their cheeks rosy. There are now processes for safe handling, for training, for protection. Workers also now have a legal right to see the results of any medical tests.

To the dial-painters’ frustration, however, the results of the exams at Argonne were not shared with them. This secrecy may well have been to do with the highly technical nature of the measurements the researchers were making; perhaps they thought the results would mean nothing to the women, but the women still wanted to know. “They would never tell [Marie] anything, which made her mad,”72 recalled Dolores. By 1985, after going there for decades, Charlotte Purcell had had enough of it. When the researchers called her that year, she said she had not been feeling well, “but why should I discuss it—you people don’t help me—I don’t get anything out of it—I don’t even have any money to go to the doctor.”73 She refused to go again.

Marie did the same. And it wasn’t just the scientists’ silence that bothered her; it was her town’s continued reaction to what the women had endured. She always thought the whole saga “will be swept under the carpet…it will never come to light. You’ll never hear about it.”74 It made her shock all the greater when Carole Langer came to Ottawa to make her movie. Marie then remarked, “God has left me here. I always knew someone would walk through that door, and I would finally have a chance to tell my story.”75 Langer dedicated the film to Marie, commending her for the way she had never lost her sense of humor or her faith, even as she’d battled against the toughest odds throughout her life.

When Marie died in 1993, like many dial-painters she donated her body to science. “She thought maybe she could help other people,” said her granddaughter Patty. “Maybe they could find exactly what happened and they could find a cure. Maybe she could help other women.”76 Marie’s body would not be the last Ottawa dial-painter’s corpse to be studied; nor was it the first. That honor goes to Margaret Looney.

Peg’s family had wanted her exhumed for testing as soon as they’d heard about the postwar studies on the dial-painters. At that time, however, research was limited to the living. By the time CHR was established, the remit had broadened. Finally, someone was prepared to investigate what had really killed Peg.

Every one of her nine brothers and sisters signed the necessary forms. “It was going to help somebody else get better,” said her sister Jean; “of course we let them do it.”77

In 1978, researchers exhumed Peg’s body from St. Columba Cemetery, where she had been resting alongside her parents. They discovered she had 19,500 microcuries of radium in her bones—one of the highest quantities found. It was more than 1,000 times the amount scientists then considered safe.

They didn’t just discover the radium; they discovered that the company doctor had cut her jawbone from her while she lay dead. That was probably how the Looney family found out about it.

“I’m angry,” said one of Peg’s sisters. “They knew she was full of radium. And then they lied.”78

“Every family has sadness and grief,” Jean said steadily. “But Margaret’s death was unnecessary.”79

That was the tragedy. Radium had been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary.

The researchers exhumed more than a hundred dial-painters, many tests proving once and for all that radium poisoning, and not syphilis or diphtheria, was the woman’s true cause of death. And there was one deceased dial-painter in particular in whom the scientists were very interested: Catherine Donohue. In 1984, CHR wrote to her daughter to request her exhumation.

They wrote to Mary Jane because, by that time, Catherine’s devoted husband Tom had died. He passed away on May 8, 1957, aged sixty-two. He had lived the remainder of his life at 520 East Superior Street, never leaving the home he had once shared with Catherine—the home where, when the news of her triumph in court had come through, he and the family had celebrated with potluck food. “We all went down and we celebrated with him,” remembered his niece Mary. “Because it was such a moral victory. Something that nobody had ever done before.”80

Though the money helped a lot, it couldn’t bring Catherine back. “I think it broke him when she died,” said a relative. “His heart was broken.”81

The family rallied round; for a time, Tom’s sister Margaret moved in to help with the children. Tom doted on the kids. “They were all he had left,”82 Mary said simply.

“As time went on,” she added, “he healed. He became [a] smiling man; it was really great to see that.”83 He rarely talked of Catherine but, said Mary, “[i]t was a painful memory because of the painful death that she had.”84

Tom Donohue never remarried. No one could replace Catherine Wolfe Donohue.

As for Mary Jane’s brother Tommy, he had gone to fight in the Korean War—and made it home. He married a young woman from Streator and worked in a glass factory, just like his father. But he died shortly after his thirtieth birthday in 1963, of Hodgkin’s disease, a type of cancer. Mary Jane had been on her own for a long time now.

She had not had an easy life. The little girl who weighed only ten pounds on her first birthday had stayed small. “She was almost childlike,” remembered her cousin Mary. “She was tiny.”85

Yet Mary Jane, showing some of her mother’s spirit, rose above the challenges she faced. “It was really remarkable,” said Mary, “that she was able to hold down [her] job because she was so small. She was very sweet as an adult; everyone liked her. We tried to invite her to all the functions of the family because of course she had no one.”86

When Mary Jane received the request from CHR, she considered it carefully and then wrote back. “I have really developed a lot of medical problems,” she told the doctors. “I realize now that most of them are probably a result of my mother’s illness. If it is convenient and you wish me to do so, I would like to come up to Argonne Lab. I feel it is important for myself and for research.”87 It seems Mary Jane was tested, adding her own contribution to science. On August 16, 1984, she gave permission to the researchers to exhume her mother. “If this could help one person,” she said, “it is worth it.”88

And so, on October 2, 1984, Catherine Donohue left St. Columba Cemetery for an unexpected journey. The scientists ran their tests, and she made her unique endowment to medical knowledge. Catherine was reinterred on August 16, 1985—where she rests, to this day, beside her husband Tom.

When Mary Jane wrote to CHR, she said, in an uncanny echo of her mother’s final letter to Father Keane, “I pray all the time that God will let me live a long life. I certainly try hard enough to fight all the time for a life of fulfillment and happiness.”89

But it was not to be. After a life full of physical challenges, Mary Jane Donohue died—from heart failure, according to her relatives—on May 17, 1990. She was fifty-five years old.

For a long time—too long—the legacy of the radium girls was recorded only in the law books and in scientific files. But in 2006, an eighth-grade Illinois student called Madeline Piller read a book on the dial-painters by Dr. Ross Mullner. “No monuments,” he wrote, “have ever been erected in their memory.”90

Madeline was determined to change that. “They deserve to be remembered,” she said. “Their courage brought forth federal health standards. I want people to know [there] is a memorial to these brave women.”91

When she began to champion her cause, she found that Ottawa, at last, was ready to honor its native heroines and their comrades-in-arms. The town held fish-fry fund-raisers and staged plays to secure the $80,000 needed. “The mayor was supportive,” said Len Grossman. “It was a complete turnaround. That was wonderful to see.”92

On September 2, 2011, the bronze statue for the dial-painters was unveiled by the governor in Ottawa, Illinois. It is a statue of a young woman from the 1920s, with a paintbrush in one hand and a tulip in the other, standing on a clock face. Her skirt swishes, as though at any moment she might step down from her time-ticking pedestal and come to life.

“The radium girls,” the governor announced, “deserve the utmost respect and admiration…because they battled a dishonest company, an indifferent industry, dismissive courts and the medical community in the face of certain death. I hereby proclaim September 2, 2011, as Radium Girls Day in Illinois, in recognition of the tremendous perseverance, dedication, and sense of justice the radium girls exhibited in their fight.”93

“If [Marie] saw that memorial down there today,” said Marie Rossiter’s daughter-in-law, “she wouldn’t believe it. When I go downtown and I go past, I say, ‘Well, Marie, they finally did something!’ If she was alive today to see the statue, she would have said, ‘About time.’”94

The statue is dedicated not only to the Ottawa dial-painters, but also to “dial-painters who suffered all over the United States.”95 This bronze radium girl, forever young, forever present, stands for Grace Fryer and Katherine Schaub; for the Maggia and Carlough sisters; for Hazel and Irene and Ella too. She stands for all the dial-painters: whether they lived and died in Orange, in Ottawa, in Waterbury, or anywhere else. It is a fitting and most deserving memorial. After all, there is so much to thank the women for.

“The studies of the radium-dial workers,” wrote Dr. Ross Mullner, “form the basis of much of the world’s present knowledge of the health risks of radioactivity. The suffering and deaths of these workers greatly increased [scientific] knowledge, ultimately saving countless lives of future generations.”96

“I always admired their strength,” said Catherine Donohue’s great-niece, “to stand up and unite.”97

And, united, they triumphed. Through their friendships, through their refusal to give up and through their sheer spirit, the radium girls left us all an extraordinary legacy. They did not die in vain.

They made every second count.