A warning shot had been fired – and the Orange dial-painters were determined that this would be only the start of it. Marguerite in particular could not stop thinking that she had given her all to that company – and this was how they repaid her. Out in the cold; not a cent to spare to ease her suffering. And not just her; her friends, too.
Though it had been a long time since she had felt like herself, Marguerite could dimly remember how she used to be: a dynamic young woman in sleekly fitted tailored clothes with fabulous millinery. That winter, as the calendar pages turned and the New Year began, she gathered all her courage and what little strength she had left. She asked her family for help, being too weak now to do what she needed. But this was important. This she would do, even if it was her last act on earth.
Against all the odds, Marguerite Carlough found a lawyer to take her case. And on 5 February 1925, she filed suit against the United States Radium Corporation for $75,000 ($1 million).
The dial-painters’ fightback had begun.
15
Ottawa, Illinois
1925
Marguerite’s legal case made the local news in Newark. It’s unlikely that the Radium Dial girls in Ottawa got to hear of it – but their employers certainly did. The radium industry was a small pond, and Radium Dial was one of the biggest fishes of them all.
By 1925, the studio in Ottawa had become the largest dial-painting plant in the country, supplying 4,300 dials a day. Business was booming – and Radium Dial wanted to take no chances of having a hold-up in their operations, such as their fellow radium corporation had suffered when the rumours first started in New Jersey.
Radium Dial now conceived a master plan to avoid the same problem. They opened a second dial-painting studio in Streator, sixteen miles south of Ottawa, where less was known about radium. Both plants ran simultaneously for nine months, but once it was apparent the Ottawa workers hadn’t heard the rumours from the east and weren’t going to quit, the firm shut down the second studio; some employees transferred to Ottawa, others simply lost their jobs.
The company also decided, just as USRC had done before them, to have their workers medically tested later in the year; the exams were conducted by a company doctor in Mr Reed’s home on Post Street. Not all the women were tested; Catherine Wolfe was not among them. That was a shame, because just lately she had not been feeling too well. After two years of working at Radium Dial, she later remembered, ‘I began to feel pains in my left ankle, which spread up to my hip.’ She’d started to limp just a little, every now and again, when that ache made itself known.
Another dial-painter who wasn’t tested was Della Harveston, who had been part of the original clique with Catherine, Charlotte and Mary Vicini, Ella Cruse and Inez Corcoran. She had died the previous year of tuberculosis.
Red-haired Peg Looney, however, was summoned by Mr Reed to his home for a test. Yet when her colleagues asked her how she’d got on, she had to tell them she hadn’t a clue. In Orange, the medical-exam results had been secretly shared with the company behind the women’s backs; in Ottawa, they went straight to the corporation and cut out the middle woman entirely. Neither Peg nor any of her tested co-workers were told the results. Peg settled back at her desk in the studio without worry, however, picking up her brush and licking her lips in preparation for painting. She wasn’t at all concerned; the company, she was sure, would tell her if anything was wrong.
All the girls in Ottawa still lip-pointed, little knowing that 800 miles away the practice had been banned. Yet behind the scenes at the head office of Radium Dial, its executives, mindful of the New Jersey lawsuit, now started putting some thought into finding an alternative method of applying the paint – just in case. Chamois was trialled, but found too absorbent; rubber sponges were employed, but they didn’t work right. Radium Dial’s vice president Rufus Fordyce admitted, however, that their endeavours were somewhat half-hearted: ‘No strenuous effort,’ he later acknowledged, ‘ha[s] been made to find and provide any suitable manner to eliminate the procedure.’
The company eventually tasked Mr Reed with the job of finding an alternative method. Soon, he would start tinkering with the idea of a glass pen, such as was employed by Swiss dial-painters, and began to work up various designs. In the meantime, the Ottawa girls kept on. Lip . . . Dip . . . Paint.
Their fun times kept right on too. These days, many of them had a man on their arm as the young women started courting. Back in high school, Peg Looney’s favourite song had been the independent-minded ‘I Ain’t Nobody’s Darling’, but now she had changed her tune: she was stepping out with a bright young man called Chuck. Anyone with half a brain could see that any one of these days he was going to propose.
Chuck was his nickname; his full title was the much more distinguished-sounding Charles Hackensmith. He was a gorgeous, well-muscled, broad-shouldered and tall young man with curling fair hair; his high-school yearbook said the phrase that defined him was: ‘And the cold marble athlete leapt to life.’ Yet to be the beau of clever Peg Looney, you couldn’t be all brawn and no brain, and Chuck was as smart as could be: he made the Senior Honor Roll at high school and was a college guy. ‘He was big educated,’ said Peg’s sister Jean. ‘He was everything. He was just elegant, really. Awful good.’ He grew up living just around the block from Peg and her large family and although he was now away at college, he came home on weekends – and that was when the young couple really let their hair down.
Chuck had a shack at his house, where he would throw parties and play records on his beat-up old gramophone. As spectators clapped along and drank illicit home-brewed root beer, the dancing would begin. Whenever Chuck hugged Peg to him, he left not an inch between them: two bodies pressed close as they danced to the latest jazz tunes. Chuck was flirtatious; this girl, he knew, was something special.