‘If you will play ball with me,’ Knef told the gathered executives, ‘I will play ball with you people. Get [me] a list, the names of the girls, [and] I will keep my mouth shut as long as I can. Quite a few cases will just die a natural death. I can hold these girls off for four or five years . . . There are my cards on the table. I have to be compensated somewhere.’
Knef wasn’t at his wits’ end in sympathy for his patients, mind you, but because he wanted to be paid. Perhaps it was the Carlough settlements that had set him off; he was itching to be remunerated for all the free treatment he had given: ‘Took it all out of my own pocket!’ he now exclaimed in vexation. His appeal to the company for payment might have been fair enough – after all, their paint had caused the sicknesses for which he had treated the women – but this scheme he was now presenting, of lying to the girls, of letting them die in ignorance to protect the firm, went way beyond being paid what he was owed. All loyalty to the girls had vanished.
‘What is your proposition?’ asked the executives, seemingly intrigued.
‘I told Mr Roeder I ask $10,000 [$134,000]. I don’t think I ask one cent too much.’
USRC gave due consideration to his offer. ‘Are you sure that all these girls will come to you?’
‘I believe now that the majority will come to me,’ Knef replied, confident that the women saw him as a friend.
‘Would you tell them that [your services were] being paid for by the company?’
‘I won’t tell them that I have any connection with you people,’ Knef said with a smile.
Perhaps encouraged by the positive way the meeting was unfolding, Knef now made another suggestion. ‘If you people want me,’ he said, leaning forward on the boardroom desk to stress his point, ‘I can get up on the stand and testify . . . “Do you believe that this girl is troubled with radioactivity?” I’d have to say no. I can [say] whatever I want to believe; [the] moon is made of blue cheese!’
‘You can make it go one way or the other, can you?’ asked the executives.
‘I could if I wanted to; that is, if I am working for you people. It [is] customary for experts to testify for the people who pa[y] them.’
The money was all-important to Knef. And here, perhaps, he made a fatal error. This dentist from Newark, who had worked his whole life only in dentistry, now tried to play it tough with the big boys of big business. ‘I am going to get this one way or the other,’ he said threateningly. ‘Do you want me as a friend or do you want me as an enemy? If I can’t come to an agreement with you people, I am going to sue these people [the girls; then] they will have to sue [you] to get the money. Fair warning: when I fight, I fight ferocious as a lion. I am a very valuable man to be with you.’
That had gone well, he must have thought. He must have smiled with his next line, confident that he had them on a hook. ‘I am going to be as reasonable with you as I can. I am not here to gouge you or bleed you or anything else.’
The executives summed up the position: ‘Unless we pay you $10,000, you are in a position to make a lot of trouble for us. If we do pay it, you will help us.’
‘I can help you, yes,’ said the dentist eagerly.
Another director spoke up. ‘The future by itself [i.e. Knef getting paid for treating the girls in future, and holding them at bay from filing suit] is not sufficient? You must get the $10,000?’
‘As I tell you,’ said Knef cockily, ‘I must have my compensation.’
He had blown it. He may not have known, either, that the corporation already had Dr Flinn in place, doing such fine work for them. Roeder stood up swiftly, ready to dismiss him. ‘Your proposition is immoral,’ he declared. ‘We will have nothing whatever to do with it.’
‘Immoral, is it?’ echoed Knef. ‘Is that final?’
It seemed it was.
When evidence of his proposition came out, down the line, USRC would take the moral high ground for the fact that they had sent the dentist packing.
The meeting had lasted for fifty-five minutes exactly.
23
Ottawa, Illinois
1926
The bells of St Columba pealed out joyously across Ottawa. A wedding seemed to happen every other week these days as the dial-painters got married; many were bridesmaids for each other. Frances Glacinski married John O’Connell, a labourer; Mary Duffy wed a carpenter called Francis Robinson. Marie Becker got engaged to Patrick Rossiter; Mary Vicini courted Joseph Tonielli; and Peg Looney and Chuck Hackensmith eventually made plans to marry in June 1930. Charlotte Nevins – who hadn’t worked for Radium Dial since 1923 – was also one of those falling head over heels; she was still in touch with lots of the girls and told them excitedly of the charms of Albert Purcell. They’d met at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago dancing; Charlotte knew exactly how to swivel as she showed off her Charleston and in so doing she caught the eye of Al, a labourer from Canada. ‘They were best friends,’ revealed a close relative; within two short years, Charlotte Nevins became the latest bride walking down the aisle of St Columba.
The church where many of these weddings took place was a white-stone building with a grey slate roof and a beautiful altar that was the envy of the region – it was imitation marble and filled the whole space. St Columba was fairly narrow, but its arched ceiling was so much higher than the building was wide that the effect was breathtaking. One of its few parishioners not caught up in this maelstrom of marriage was Catherine Wolfe. A young man at church had caught her eye, however: his name was Thomas Donohue.
He was thirty-one to Catherine’s twenty-three. Tom was a diminutive man with bushy eyebrows and a thatch of dark hair; he had a moustache and wire-frame glasses. He did a variety of jobs, including engineer and painter, a rather apt parallel to Catherine, as the dial-painters were listed as ‘artists’ in the town directory, in a nod to the glamour of their work. Later in life, Tom would labour in a local glass factory, Libbey-Owens, where he worked alongside Al Purcell and Patrick Rossiter.
He was a ‘real quiet man who never talked much’. That may have been due to his upbringing, for Tom came from a large Irish-immigrant family. As a relative said: ‘He was the sixth of seven kids; he was never gonna get much word in.’ The whole family grew up on the Donohue farm, which was based in Wallace township, just north of Ottawa; one of those places where you could see forever across the fertile fields and the sky seemed to swallow you up. Like Catherine, who said a rosary every day with her own set of beads, Tom was highly devout; so much so that he’d attended an all-male Catholic school with the idea that he might join the priesthood, but that didn’t come to be.