‘My parents took her to a doctor in Chicago,’ remembered Jean. The city physician told her she had a honeycombed jaw and that she should change employment.
Perhaps Peg planned to look for a new job, when she felt better. Yet Peg was smart; she knew she wasn’t getting better. Though the Ottawa doctors seemed clueless – one, who treated her in June 1929, simply put an ice pack on her chest – Peg herself seemed to divine what was happening. ‘She knew she had to go,’ recalled Peg’s mother sadly. ‘You could see her slowly dying. There was nothing you could do.’
‘Well, Mother,’ she used to say. ‘My time is nearly up.’
It wasn’t just her hip or teeth that caused her agonising pain: it was her legs, her skull, her ribs, her wrists, her ankles . . . Though she’d been ill for months, every day she still went to work to paint those dials. To the end, she was a conscientious girl.
Radium Dial – warned by Kjaer that Peg’s was a special case in which the government was particularly interested – watched her very closely. They knew she had tested positive for radioactivity in 1925 and 1928; they knew from their own medical tests exactly what was wrong with her. And so, when Peg collapsed at work on 6 August 1929, Mr Reed made arrangements for her to be admitted to the company doctor’s hospital.
‘We had no say whatsoever about that,’ said her sister Edith. ‘They wouldn’t let us in there.’
‘Radium Dial probably paid the bills,’ added Darlene, Peg’s niece. ‘We didn’t have money for big medical bills; that was for sure.’
It was so lonely for Peg in that distant hospital, far from her home by the railroad tracks. The girl who had nine brothers and sisters and slept with them all in the one tiny room, three to a bed, was completely on her own. Her siblings weren’t permitted to visit. ‘I went one time,’ recalled Jane, ‘and they wouldn’t let me into her room.’
Peg had displayed symptoms of diphtheria and was promptly quarantined. In her weakened condition, she also soon contracted pneumonia. Radium Dial, in a show of concern, paid close attention to her progress; to her decline.
At 2.10 a.m. on 14 August 1929, Margaret Looney died. This girl, who was to marry Chuck next year, who loved to read the dictionary, who had once had dreams to be a teacher and was well known for her giggling fits, was no more.
Her family, though isolated from her, were still in the hospital when she died. Peg’s brother-in-law Jack White, who was married to her sister Catherine, an imposing man who worked as a car oiler for the railroad, was one of the relatives present. He was the type of man who stood up for the right thing to be done. Which was why, when the company men came in the middle of the night and tried to take her body to bury it, Jack said no.
‘No way is she going to be buried that way,’ he said firmly to them. ‘She’s a good Catholic girl and she’s going to have a mass and a whole funeral.’
The company men tried to protest. ‘They wanted the whole thing done with – just gone,’ said Darlene. ‘It was like a big cover-up.’ But Jack wouldn’t allow them to take Peg’s body.
Radium Dial lost that particular battle – but did not give up. It seems the firm was concerned that Peg’s death would be attributed to radium poisoning, which would scare all the girls at the studio and possibly lead to innumerable lawsuits. The executives needed to take control of the situation. What did the family think, they asked, of having Peg autopsied?
The Looney family were already suspicious, given the Chicago doctor’s comments, that it was her work that had killed Peg. They readily agreed, on condition that their own family doctor could be present, because they wanted to find out the truth. Their proviso was all-important: after the firm’s midnight machinations, they did not trust them.
The company agreed easily. Yes, yes, they said, no problem. What time?
When the family doctor arrived at the appointed hour, bag in hand, he found the autopsy had been performed an hour before he got there.
He wasn’t there to see the multiple fracture lines on Peg’s ribs, nor the way ‘the flat bones of [her] skull showed numerous “thin” areas and “holes”’. He didn’t examine the radium necrosis that was found ‘very strongly’ in the skull vault, pelvis and at least sixteen other bones. He did not witness the widespread skeletal changes that were evident throughout Peg’s battered body.
He was not there to see as the company doctor ‘removed by post-mortem resection’ the remains of Peg Looney’s jaw.
He took her bones. He took the most compelling evidence.
The family was not sent a copy of the report, but Radium Dial received one. It was an incredibly intrusive record for them to have of Peg’s last moments. It told them what she was like inside: the weight of her organs, their appearance; whether she was ‘normal’ or not. When it came to her bone marrow and her teeth, according to the company doctor, she most certainly was.
‘The teeth are in excellent condition,’ read the official autopsy report. ‘There is no evidence of any destructive bone changes in the upper or lower jaw.’
Her death certificate was duly signed: diphtheria was the cause of death.
The family may not have been given a copy of the report, but Radium Dial made sure to issue the local paper with a summary of it. And so, in Peg Looney’s obituary, the following information was included at the request of the firm:
The young woman’s physical condition for a time was puzzling. She was employed at the Radium Dial studio and there were rumours that her condition was due to radium poisoning. In order that there might be no doubt as to the cause of death [there was] an autopsy . . . Dr Aaron Arkin . . . said there was no doubt that death was caused by diphtheria. There was no visible indication of radium poisoning.
There was a curious final comment, perhaps inserted on a press release by a company executive with a bright idea of how to win support in the community. ‘Miss Looney’s parents,’ read the piece, ‘appeared well pleased with the result of the autopsy.’
They were not ‘well pleased’. They were devastated by their daughter’s death.
‘It just killed my mother to lose her,’ said Jean. ‘She was never the same after she died. My mother was just terrible. We used to walk up to the cemetery all the time, early in the morning, pushing an old push-mower to keep the grass cut up with it; it was a few miles. We’d walk up there all the time.’
As for Chuck, losing his beloved Peg was something he would never get over. He moved on with his life, eventually, and followed the dreams that once they both had shared. He became a professor at a university and published several books; Peg, no doubt, would have loved to have read them. He married, and had children. And he kept in touch with the Looney family for more than forty years. His wife confided in Peg’s mother how every year, when it was near the anniversary of Peg’s birthday or death, he would become quiet and withdrawn.
‘She knew,’ Darlene said simply, ‘he was thinking about Peg.’