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.
Unbeknown to the Carloughs, or to any of the dial-painters, that same month the US 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 anaemia 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.
10
Ottawa, Illinois
1923
The caretaker at Radium Dial wiped his bare hands down his workshirt: he was covered in luminous material, his clothing stiff with it. The only clear spots on his face were where two big drools of chewing tobacco ran down his chin; he liked to chew as he worked – and he wasn’t the only one. The dial-painters kept candy on their desks, snacking between dials without washing their hands; a habit that suited the many teenagers employed. As time went on, the current Ottawa high-school students were among them; they would work ‘one summer between high-school years from a few to several weeks’, just to earn a bit of pocket money.
As in Orange, the girls encouraged friends and family to join them at the studio. The old high school was a lovely building to work in: a grand Victorian brick edifice with huge arched windows and high ceilings. Frances Glacinski was thrilled when her little sister Marguerite, two years younger, came along to work on the second floor with Catherine, Charlotte, Marie, Peg and all the rest. Marguerite was a pretty girl who was described as ‘comely’; she and her sister were of Polish heritage. The girls also welcomed fifteen-year-old Helen Munch, a thin, dark girl who wore scarlet lipstick and painted her nails to match; she was the kind of person who ‘wanted to be going all the time’.
The exception to these teenagers was Pearl Payne, a married woman from nearby Utica. Pearl was twenty-three when she started at Radium Dial, a good eight years older than some of her colleagues. She had married Hobart Payne, a tall, slender electrician who wore glasses, in 1922; she described him as a ‘fine husband’. He was a man who told jokes and loved children; folks described him as a ‘very knowledgeable guy’.
In fact, his wife was full of smarts too. Pearl was the eldest girl of thirteen children, and although she had to leave school at thirteen to earn money for the family, she revealed, ‘During my employment [I] attended night school and a private teacher, completing seventh [and] eighth grade and one year of high school.’ And her education didn’t stop there: during the war she’d gained a nursing diploma and was all set to start a career at a Chicago hospital when her mother was taken ill; Pearl had quit to care for her. Now her mom had recovered, Pearl was returning to work – and dial-painting, which was better-paid than being a nurse, was what she ended up doing.
Pearl and Catherine Wolfe got on especially well. Pearl was a gentle woman; ‘never an unkind word from her mouth, ever,’ said her nephew Randy. The two women’s personalities dovetailed neatly, and their shared experience of nursing relatives – for Catherine took responsibility for her elderly aunt and uncle – brought them closer. Catherine, three years younger than Pearl, described her as a ‘dearest friend’. Funnily enough, the two women also looked alike: Pearl had thick dark hair and pale skin too, though she was rounder-faced and more full-figured than Catherine, and her hair was curly.
Pearl overlapped with Charlotte Nevins by only a few months. In the fall of 1923, Charlotte quit her job at Radium Dial to become a seamstress; she had been a dial-painter for only thirteen months. As had been the case in Orange, however, any time a girl left, a dozen more arrived to take her place; Olive West now joined the studio, becoming close with Catherine and Pearl. All were overseen by assistant superintendent Mr Reed, Miss Murray’s deputy, with whom the girls often shared a joke. On his occasional forays into their studio, the dial-painters would tease him – and it was an affectionate repartee that cut both ways. One young woman remembered, ‘I was [to be] married and [I] remember going to work that morning in the dress and telling the supervisor, Reed, I was quitting and on my way to be married. He joked and said, “Don’t come back, you won’t have a job!”’ But she concluded, ‘I was back at work in a couple of weeks.’
As Mr Reed was deaf, the girls would sometimes talk back to him as he couldn’t hear them, but it was all good-natured and they enjoyed working with him. ‘I never heard of any of them not getting along, never,’ said Peg’s sister Jean. ‘Everybody was generous and good to one another.’
It was such a lovely atmosphere that Peg Looney found herself falling for the job and forgetting all about her ambition to become a schoolteacher. She was extremely conscientious and would even take dials home to paint, carefully tracing the numerals in that cramped house next to the railroad tracks that she shared with her large family.
‘She looked after us real good,’ remembered her sister Jean of Peg sharing her good fortune with them. ‘I remember [Peg] buying me a beautiful blue dress, trimmed in white, for my eighth-grade graduation,’ recalled another sister, Jane. ‘It was so pretty.’ The sisters all agreed: ‘She was everything you’d hope a big sister would be.’