Everybody would go down the Shack; Marie Becker would have a hoot there. She would zip about between friends if a party was taking place, encouraging everyone to attend. Marie was courting Patrick Rossiter, a labourer who had a large nose and big features, whom she’d met at the National Guard Armory while skating. He was ‘a devil’, said his family. ‘He used to like to have fun.’ Catherine Wolfe, too, would attend as a good friend of Peg; she was single at that time. And all the Looneys would be there as well – ‘The whole family!’ exclaimed Jean. ‘And there were ten of us!’
There was so much happening in Ottawa in that spring of 1925 that the visit from the government inspector to the studio barely registered with the women. But that, of course, was just what Radium Dial wanted. In the wake of the New Jersey cases, a national investigation into industrial poisons had been launched by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which was based in the capital, Washington, DC. The bureau was run by Ethelbert Stewart; his agent on the ground was a man called Swen Kjaer. And when Kjaer met with Rufus Fordyce, Radium Dial’s vice president, ahead of coming to inspect the Ottawa studio, he was ‘requested to handle the subject carefully, so as not to cause an alarm among the workers’. Maybe as a result, only three girls would even be questioned.
Kjaer began his study in April 1925. He went first to the Chicago office of Radium Dial, where he interviewed Fordyce and some laboratory workers; Kjaer noticed the latter had lesions on their fingers. The lab workers acknowledged that radium was a dangerous material to handle ‘unless proper safeguards are provided’. Consequently, the men in Radium Dial’s laboratories were provided with them: Kjaer noted that operators were ‘well-protected by lead screens’ and also given vacations from work to limit their exposure.
On 20 April, Kjaer arrived in the little town of Ottawa for the studio inspection. His first port of call was to speak with Miss Murray, the superintendent.
‘Why,’ she told him, ‘[I] never heard of any illness which might in the slightest manner be caused by the work.’ In fact, she went on, ‘Instead of proving detrimental to the health of the girls, [I] know of several who had seemingly derived benefit from it and showed decidedly physical improvement.’
Kjaer asked her about lip-pointing. She told him that the girls ‘had been admonished not to tip the brushes in the mouths without washing them carefully first in the water provided for such a purpose’. But she conceded, ‘Tipping in the mouth is constantly practiced.’
Kjaer could see that for himself as he toured the studio the same day. Every single girl there was lip-pointing; yet they were all, he noted, ‘healthy and vigorous’. On the day he toured the plant, he observed that the girls did have water on their desks in which they were cleaning their brushes – but later, when Fordyce supplied him with a photograph of the studio taken at a different time, Kjaer noticed that water was not in evidence on the tables.
As part of his inspection, Kjaer also interviewed Ottawa’s dentists to find out if they’d come across any extraordinary conditions of the mouth in their patients. In New Jersey, it had been Drs Barry and Davidson who had first raised the alarm; should there be a problem in Ottawa too, it seemed logical that its dentists might be the first to know of it. And so he called on three different dentists on that April afternoon, including one who had the largest dental practice in town. That dentist took care of a number of the girls employed at the factory; he told Kjaer there had been ‘no evidence of malignant disorder’. He promised to notify the bureau promptly in case anything should turn up. The other dentists, too, gave the girls a clean bill of health. They took pains to state, in fact, that ‘there seemed to be very little dental trouble among those workers’.
Kjaer spent only three weeks on his national study – an incredibly short time given the size of the country and the potential gravity of the situation – before it was suddenly stopped. Kjaer’s boss, Ethelbert Stewart, later said of the decision: ‘Radium paints came to our attention in connection with our campaign against white phosphorus; phosphorus then was our chief interest and we found that it was not used in the elements which go into luminous paint.’ The investigation had been but an offshoot of a wider study into industrial poison.
Yet there was another reason, too. Stewart later confessed, ‘I abandoned the inquiry not because I was convinced that no problem existed outside of the United States Radium Corporation, but because the expense of follow-up made it impossible for the Bureau to continue.’
In those three short weeks, however, Kjaer had reached a conclusion. Radium, he determined, was dangerous.
It was just that nobody told the girls . . .
16
United States Radium Corporation HQ
30 Church Street, New York
1925
Arthur Roeder was having a very bad day. Ever since the Carlough girl had brought her lawsuit, every day seemed to be a bad day. The publicity had been horrendous – his company’s name dragged through the mud, as this little upstart charged that the firm had made her ‘totally incapacitated for work’ and had ‘seriously injured’ her. The coverage was affecting business; there were now only a few dial-painters left.
Roeder didn’t necessarily know it, but the scandal had also impacted on the dial-painting studio his firm had helped set up at the Waterbury Clock Company; following local news reports of the Carlough case, the watch firm had banned lip-pointing.
In fact, there might have been another reason for that, though the clock company would never admit it. In February 1925, a dial-painter there by the name of Frances Splettstocher had died, just a few weeks after falling ill in agonising pain; she’d had a jaw necrosis that had bored a hole right through to her cheek. Her death was not formally linked to her job, but some of her colleagues made the connection. One Waterbury girl said she ‘became frightened when Frances died and would not work in the dial-painting department again for any money’.
Frances’s father also worked for the firm. Though he was ‘sure’ that Frances’s job had killed her, he ‘did not dare make any kick about it’ for fear of being sacked.
Oh, for such obedient employees.
Roeder was fighting the Carlough case via the highly skilled (and highly expensive) USRC company lawyers. They’d immediately filed a motion to strike out the girl’s complaint, arguing that the case should be presented to the Workmen’s Compensation Bureau, where it would fail as the girl wasn’t suffering from one of the nine compensable diseases. So far, however, their legal manoeuvring wasn’t working – the judge had directed that a jury should decide the case.