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.
‘You don’t see nothing, no body, all you see is the radium,’ recalled Marie. ‘All you’re looking at is eyebrows and moustaches and your teeth.’ But, as she said, it was all ‘just for fun’.
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.’ 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.’
9
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.’ 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 check-up; 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; 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 anaemic 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 3 June 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, ‘a progressive painful infection with ulceration, swelling and sloughing off of dead tissue from the mouth and throat due to the spread of infection from the gums’. 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 the lives of those who knew her; now, suddenly, she was gone.
Six weeks later, Irene Rudolph followed her to the grave. She died on 15 July 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’. 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’.
Katherine Schaub, who had watched her cousin suffer through every stage of what she called her ‘terrible and mysterious illness’, 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 18 July, the Schaubs buried Irene, who had lived such a short, sad life, and the next day, fuelled 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.’ And she said clearly: ‘They have to point the brushes with their lips.’ 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.’
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,’ observed Quinta McDonald, ‘began to die off alarmingly fast. They were all young women, in good health. It seemed odd.’