‘The girls,’ remembered a local resident of the time, ‘were “good Catholic girls” who were raised not to challenge authority.’
And what was there to challenge? The test results were fine and the paint contained no deadly mesothorium. These were simple facts – printed in the paper, pinned up on the notice-board – as certain as the sunrises that bled each morning across the yawning Illinois skies. Back up in the studio, the old routine continued anew. Lip . . . Dip . . .
Only one family, it seems, was unconvinced by the company.
For the day after the advert ran, Ella Cruse’s family filed suit against Radium Dial.
33
Orange, New Jersey
Summer 1928
For those five New Jersey dial-painters who had triumphed over their former firm, life was sweet. From her award, Katherine gave her father, William, $2,000 ($27,700) towards his mortgage: ‘I could find, I knew, no greater happiness than that which would be mine by making the folks happy,’ she pronounced. ‘It made me so happy to see Father relieved of those worries.’
For herself, she declared she would live ‘like Cinderella as the princess at the ball . . . Today was mine.’ The budding author bought a typewriter, as well as splashing out on clothes: silk dresses and lingerie. ‘I bought the kind of coat I had always wanted,’ she enthused, ‘and a tan felt hat to match.’
Edna, who had always loved music, invested in a piano and a radio. Many of the women bought automobiles so they could get around more easily. Yet the girls were also financially astute, investing in building and loan shares.
‘Not a cent of [the money] has ever entered this house,’ Grace informed a reporter. ‘To me, money doesn’t mean luxury. It means security. Those $10,000 are safely invested.’
‘What for?’ asked the journalist.
Grace smiled enigmatically as she answered. ‘For the future!’
And the money wasn’t the only boon to their spirits, for many of the doctors they consulted now offered hope. Von Sochocky announced that, ‘In my opinion, the girls are going to live much longer than they themselves believe.’ Even Martland, noting that there had been no deaths for some years of the ilk suffered by Mollie Maggia and Marguerite Carlough, theorised that there were now ‘two kinds of dial-painter cases, early ones and late ones. The early ones were marked by severe anaemia and jaw necrosis . . . The late cases lacked (or had recovered from) the anaemia and jaw infections.’ Martland thought the faster decay of mesothorium accounted for the difference; the girls were under attack ferociously for the first seven years, but once mesothorium moved to its next half-life, the attack diminished sufficiently to spare the girls; almost as though their poisoning was a rising tidal wave, and the women had managed to scramble to safety just as the waters began to recede. Although the radium was still bombarding their bones, radium was notoriously less aggressive than mesothorium. Martland now posited that if the late cases ‘survived the early maladies, they had a fair chance of surviving radium poisoning altogether’ – although they would always have those moth-eaten bones from the radium rippled right through them. ‘I am of the opinion that the girls we are seeing now,’ he said, ‘while they may be permanently crippled, have a considerable chance of beating the disease.’
That prognosis, bleak as it sounded in some ways, gave the women that most precious of commodities: time. ‘Someone may find a cure for us, even at the eleventh hour,’ Grace said brightly.
Most of the girls went away for the summer. Albina and James set off on ‘the dream of a lifetime’: a motoring trip to Canada. Louis Hussman took his wife on ‘a long, leisurely tour’; Edna wrote to Berry, ‘We have a cottage overlooking the lake and enjoy the beautiful scenery.’ While Quinta and James McDonald took a few trips to Asbury Park, they didn’t go mad; Quinta was aware that this money was to see her children all right, no matter what happened to her.
However they spent the summer, the girls could rest easy that help was coming to other women similarly afflicted; in the light of the tremendous publicity caused by their case, a national conference into radium poisoning would be held at the end of the year. In addition, Swen Kjaer was now undertaking a much more detailed federal study into radium poisoning. ‘There is no question that this is an occupational disease and that there should be a reinvestigation,’ commented Kjaer’s boss Ethelbert Stewart. He was asked why some firms were still using the old brush application method when others had been invented and replied shrewdly: ‘The new methods probably were too slow for the greatest profit to the manufacturers.’
Katherine Schaub, who spent the entire summer away from Newark, experiencing ‘real country life’, was feeling so much better and declared her summer ‘splendid’; ‘a vacation like I have never had’. ‘I loved to sit on the porch in the sun,’ she wrote dreamily, ‘and look out over the wide stretches of woodlands and hills.’
While sitting on that porch, she wrote to Berry to thank him for all he had done. ‘I myself know,’ she wrote, ‘that from a humanitarian viewpoint it would be difficult to find another like yourself . . . there was nothing too much for you . . . and to think that the result now was such a tremendous success overwhelms me indeed.’ She also wrote to Martland, as did the other girls, saying simply: ‘I am writing to express my sincerest appreciation for your great assistance in bringing it all to a happy ending.’
A happy ending . . . if only that could be. Behind the scenes, Berry was most concerned that Katherine’s ‘happy ending’ was as fictional as a fairy tale. ‘I think that the matter is not, by any means, over,’ he wrote to an associate, ‘and that the actual contest has only been deferred.’