Grace Fryer limped into Dr Humphries’s office, trying not to cry out with pain. Humphries was shocked at the change in Grace; he hadn’t treated her for some time. She had been sent to him by Dr Martland, who said she was ‘in rather a serious condition on account of her spine’.
Dr Martland and Dr Hoffman had both tried to help her, Grace mused, as Humphries ushered her straight to radiology for a new X-ray. Hoffman in particular, she thought, had been very kind. Seeing a sharp deterioration in her health, he had written to President Roeder on her behalf, to appeal to him to help Grace ‘in a spirit of fairness and justice’.
Hoffman was surprised by USRC’s response: ‘Mr Roeder is no longer connected with this corporation.’
It seems the firm hadn’t appreciated being put in the position of having to settle lawsuits. Roeder’s fingerprints were all over the company’s questionable handling of the Drinker report, and perhaps it was felt it was best all round if he moved on to pastures new. He had resigned in July 1926. While no longer the public face of the company, he remained a director on the board.
Despite the change at the top, the company’s attitude towards its stricken former employees hadn’t changed one bit. The incoming president, Clarence B. Lee, immediately declined Hoffman’s appeal for assistance. When Hoffman wrote to Grace to let her know, he added: ‘You must take legal action at once.’
Well, Grace thought, she was trying. Despite her poor health, she had not stopped looking for a lawyer and was even now waiting to hear back from a firm the bank had passed her on to. In the meantime, she had come to see Humphries to find out what was wrong with her back.
It is difficult to imagine how she might have reacted to the news he had to share. ‘X-rays taken at that time,’ Humphries later said, ‘showed a crushing of the vertebrae.’
Grace’s very spine had been shattered by the radium. In her foot, meanwhile, there was ‘destruction of the entire’ affected bone through ‘crushing and thinning’. It must have been agonising to endure.
‘Radium eats the bone,’ Grace later said, ‘as steadily and surely as fire burns wood.’
Humphries could do nothing but try to find ways to make life more comfortable for her; ways to help her live her life. And so, on 29 January 1927, he fitted Grace Fryer, then twenty-seven, with a solid steel back brace. It extended from her shoulders to her waist and was held in place by two crossbars of steel; she had to wear it every single day and was permitted to take it off for only two minutes at a time. It was a demanding schedule of treatment, but she had no choice but to follow her doctor’s orders. She later confided, ‘I can hardly stand up without it.’ She wore a brace on her foot, too, and some days she felt the braces were the only things keeping her together, helping her to carry on.
She needed them more than ever when, on 24 March, she finally heard back from the latest set of lawyers: ‘We regret to say that in our opinion the Statute of Limitations barred your right of action against [USRC] two years after you left the[ir] employ.’
It was another dead end.
Grace had just one final card to play. ‘[Dr Martland] agrees with me,’ Hoffman had written, ‘that it is of the utmost importance that you should take legal steps at once. [H]e suggests that you see the firm [Potter & Berry].’
She had nothing more to lose; she had everything to gain. Grace Fryer, aged twenty-eight, with a broken back and a broken foot and a disintegrating jaw, made an appointment with the firm for Tuesday 3 May 1927. Maybe this Raymond H. Berry would be able to help where no other attorney had.
There was only one way to find out.
Grace dressed carefully for the appointment. This was make-or-break time. She’d had to change her wardrobe after the brace had been fitted. ‘It’s awfully hard,’ she revealed, ‘to get clothes that don’t make it show. I can’t wear the sort of dresses I used to wear at all.’
She styled her short dark hair smartly, then checked her appearance in the mirror. Grace was used to dealing daily with well-to-do clients at the bank; she knew from experience that first impressions count.
And it seems her potential new lawyers appreciated that sentiment too. Potter & Berry, despite being a small law firm, had its offices in the Military Park Building, one of Newark’s earliest skyscrapers; it was then the tallest building in the whole of New Jersey and had been completed only the year before. The lawyer she was meeting inside it, Grace soon realised as he introduced himself, was just as fresh-faced as his office.
Raymond Herst Berry was a youthful lawyer, not even in his thirties. Yet his baby-faced good looks – he had blond hair and blue eyes – belied a brain as sharp as a tack. He was not long out of Harvard and had been valedictorian of his class; already, he was a junior partner in the firm. He had served his clerkship at none other than Lindabury, Depue & Faulks, USRC’s legal firm, and perhaps that experience gave him some insider knowledge. Berry took a lengthy statement from Grace. And it seems she may have shared her new lead with her friends; for just three days later, Katherine Schaub also called on Berry.
He was not a man to jump into things. As any lawyer should, he first scrutinised the girls’ claims. Berry went to Martland’s lab, and interviewed von Sochocky; he then summoned Grace and Katherine back to his office on 7 May. He had conducted his initial investigation, he told them, and he had seen enough. And then Raymond Berry took their case. He was a married man with three young daughters – a fourth would be born the following year – and perhaps having so many girls influenced his decision. Berry was also a veteran; and this case, he could see, would be one hell of a war. In his agreed terms with Katherine, Berry contracted to take the then-standard split of one-third of any compensation. With Grace, however, she seems to have negotiated him down to just a quarter.
Berry’s tack-sharp brain had been working hard on the statute-of-limitations question. His theory was this: the girls could not possibly have brought a lawsuit until they knew that the company was to blame. As the firm had actively conducted a campaign to mislead the girls, it should not be allowed to rely upon the delay, which it had caused, as a defence. After all, due to the misdirection, the girls’ certain knowledge came only with Martland’s formal diagnosis in July 1925. In Berry’s view, therefore, the two-year clock did not start ticking until that moment.