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 neighbourhood 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’ – 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 at high school her favourite hobby had been ‘trying to hide behind the dictionary’, which she used to read in a ‘delightful sunny nook’. 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’ of a clock, with a dial that measured about 10 centimetres 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 centimetres 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. ‘I was working for the bakery downtown,’ Marie later recalled, ‘and I thought, “Gee, I believe I’ll go over there [to the radium studio], see how much you get.” Well, I was gonna get about twice as much. And in them days you liked money ‘cause you got very little of it.’ She was sold.
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 sales girl at the dimestore. 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.’
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’ 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 her ‘closest friend’.
At first, however, Marie wasn’t sure about staying there. ‘My first day at work,’ she recalled, ‘I said I didn’t like it . . . they learn you to put the thing in your mouth, that’s the first thing they taught you. I said when I went home at noon that I’d never come back [but] I went back the next morning. I didn’t like the work but I thought, “There’s money involved, see.” I just stayed.’ Those high wages were so hard to say no to.
Not that Marie saw them. ‘Well, you know where my first pay cheque went,’ she commented drily. ‘It went to my stepfather . . . you turned your cheque over to him and he spent the money. I never liked it.’ It was especially hard for her because most of the other girls at work 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’.
Marie dreamed of spending her wage packet 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, ‘Gee, this week when I get paid I’m gonna go in [that shoe shop] and cash my cheque.’ And she did. ‘I bought my first high-heeled slippers and I told the guy to leave them right on because I was gonna wear them home!’ She had a ‘ruckus’ with her stepfather about not handing over her cheque and 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. Peg’s sister said of the dial-painters, ‘They were all pretty young girls just raring to go out and lick 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.’ 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 swivelled 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.’
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 just figured,’ said Marie, ‘well, we’ve got a little radium left in our jars . . . we gotta get new [material] for starting after lunch . . . so we started fooling around. We’d paint our faces up and put [on] moustaches. I always did paint by my nostrils and then my eyebrows and a moustache and a chin. We went in the darkroom to make faces at each other.’ 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!’