Joining Catherine at the studio was sixteen-year-old Charlotte Nevins. The advert had said ‘18 years or over’, 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”’, 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.’
And the girls did exactly as instructed. They were ‘a happy, jolly lot’ and they frequently practised 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’.
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,’ 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.’ When the dial-painters visited the drugstore for home-made 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.’ The women were ‘humorously termed the ghost girls’.
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’. 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.’ After all: ‘We made more money that way.’
The girls declared, ‘We were extremely happy in our work,’ 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.’
But for Catherine and Charlotte and Mary, this place felt very, very right indeed.
7
Newark, New Jersey
November 1922
‘Miss Irene Rudolph?’
Irene got tentatively to her feet as she heard her name being called by Dr Barry and shuffled into his office. Her trouble had first started in her feet, though they were currently the least of her worries; she could just about get by if she took things slow. Her family, including her cousin Katherine Schaub, helped out a lot. It was now her mouth that was the real problem.
She had been attending this dental practice since August, though she’d been having tooth trouble since the spring of 1922. Despite the attentions of various dentists, her condition had worsened; so much so that, in May, she’d had to give up her job in a corset factory. Without a job, yet with increasing medical bills, Irene soon found her financial position precarious. She’d been sensible when she’d worked as a dial-painter, squirrelling away her high wages, but her mysterious condition had exhausted her hard-earned savings.
With every expensive appointment, she hoped for improvement. As she levered herself into Dr Barry’s chair, she opened her mouth wide and prayed that, this time, he would have good news to offer.
Walter Barry, an experienced dentist of forty-two, examined Irene’s mouth with deepening confusion. He and his partner, Dr James Davidson, had been operating on Irene since the summer. Yet every course of treatment they tried, such as cutting out the diseased bone in her mouth and removing teeth, seemed only to increase her suffering. Their surgery was located at 516 Broad Street, practically opposite the Newark Public Library, yet it appeared no textbook or medical journal on the shelves of the library or their own practice contained the solution. As Barry examined Irene’s butchered mouth at this latest appointment, on 8 November 1922, he could see that, still, there was only more infection, inflaming her empty gums with an unhealthy yellow sheen.
James Davidson had experience of treating phossy jaw and he and Barry now became convinced this was Irene’s trouble. ‘I immediately started to question [Irene] as to what [her] occupation was,’ Barry recalled. ‘I made an effort to ascertain whether there was any phosphorus in this material she was using.’
Unknowingly, he was following in the footsteps of Dr Knef, who had treated Mollie Maggia – but the two investigations didn’t cross, nor did Knef have opportunity to share his own discovery: how Mollie’s jaw was destroyed faster and faster, the more of her he removed. The same accelerated decline was now affecting Irene.