It was Loffler who helped the women take the next step, connecting them with an acquaintance of his: the stenographer of a Chicago lawyer, Jay Cook. Cook was formerly with the Illinois Industrial Commission, which oversaw all industrial-compensation cases, and he agreed to represent them ‘virtually on charity’.
Though the women never met him, he nevertheless gave advice from the big city. Like so many New Jersey lawyers before him, he saw at once that the women’s case was complex and that an early settlement might be to their advantage. The girls told him there were rumours that their former colleague Mary Robinson might have been given some compensation, after she’d had her arm amputated at the start of the year. ‘The Dial people gave her some money,’ Mary’s mother confirmed. ‘They sent it to her husband, Francis. Not very much, probably not over $100 [$1,768] altogether.’
It may not have been much, but it was an open door through which the other women hoped to find some financial aid. There was another reason to approach the company: the statute of limitations. Under Illinois law, at the earliest instance of diagnosis, the women had to give Radium Dial notice of their condition; such notification should then lead the company to act lawfully in providing medical care and compensation, since the women had been injured at work.
It was Charlotte and Catherine, as they had done from the start, who led the way. They only hoped that the company would now be fair. With the help of Jay Cook, and working with their husbands, the women came up with a plan. Catherine wrote a letter on behalf of them all on 1 May 1934 and then Al Purcell telephoned the studio so that Catherine could read it down the line to the manager. Immediately afterwards, Tom took the hard copy and ran it down the street to the mailbox. The company had been given their notification. Now, the women only had to wait.
They waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. By 8 May, there had been no reply: not one word.
On the advice of Cook, the women now took matters into their own hands – and headed back to Radium Dial to confront their old manager Mr Reed.
It was a journey Catherine had undertaken so many times before. Turn right out of the house, walk straight to Columbus Street, turn left and walk one block to Radium Dial. But it had never been a journey like this before. She felt nervous, but knew she had to stand up for herself – and for all the other girls; they had agreed that she and Charlotte would be ‘spokesmen for the other women’.
Charlotte walked slowly by her side, keeping pace with Catherine’s limp. It felt so strange walking, Charlotte thought; she had never realised before how much you used your arms when you walked. Now, there was nothing but air by her side.
Charlotte was a woman who didn’t dwell on herself. ‘She never felt sorry for herself, ever,’ said a relative. Though she had said after her amputation, ‘I can’t do housework,’ already she was finding ways to cope: she had managed to open and close her baby’s diaper pins with her mouth; washing up the frying pan, she had discovered, could be achieved if she set the handle under her chin. It was Al, of course, who picked up the rest of the slack.
But Al wasn’t here now. It was just the two of them: Catherine and Charlotte. The women walked along, so different from how they’d been when they’d first entered the studio. Catherine hobbled up the six front steps and tried to straighten up as much as she could. They made their way inside and found Mr Reed.
‘I have received a letter from my doctor, who has been treating me for weeks,’ Catherine said formally to him. She had a ‘cultured voice’ and her words were sure. ‘He has come to the definite conclusion that my blood shows radioactive substance.’ She gestured at Charlotte to include her: ‘We have radium poisoning.’
There it was: fact. Hard to say out loud, but fact. She paused to see if there was a reaction, but there was nothing from the man who had been her manager for nine years.
‘Having consulted legal advice,’ Catherine went on, in spite of Mr Reed’s silence, ‘[my lawyers] have advised me to ask the company for compensation and medical care. We have legal advice that we are entitled to compensation.’
Mr Reed looked over his former employees. Catherine had barely been able to get into the studio; Charlotte no longer had an arm.
‘I don’t think,’ he said slowly, ‘there is anything wrong with you.’
The women were gobsmacked.
‘There is nothing to it at all,’ he said again.
‘He refused,’ Catherine remembered angrily, ‘to consider our request for compensation.’
She notified him about the condition of the other women, too, but he didn’t back down. He didn’t back down even when, two days later, Mary Robinson died.
Her death was important. ‘Mary’s was the first case definitely called radium poisoning,’ her mother Susie recalled. ‘[Her doctors] sent a sliver of bone to a New York laboratory. They sent back word it was radium poisoning. The Ottawa doctors couldn’t deny it then.’
But Susie had reckoned without the stubbornness of the Ottawa physicians. Just because these hoity-toity New York and Chicago folk were saying Ottawa girls had radium poisoning, it didn’t make it true – not in their eyes. The Ottawa doctors remained sceptical and ‘steadfastedly refused to admit that radium poisoning was the cause of the women’s illnesses and deaths’. When Mary’s death certificate was signed, the attending doctor answered ‘no’ to the question: ‘Was disease in any way related to occupation of deceased?’
But although the local doctors were not convinced, the women absolutely were. In light of the company’s refusal to aid them, in the summer of 1934 a large group of dial-painters – including Catherine, Charlotte, Marie and Inez Vallat – filed suit for $50,000 ($884,391) apiece. Jay Cook thought they stood a good chance of winning: Illinois law was progressive and a pioneering act passed in 1911 had long commanded companies to protect their employees.
But not everyone was pleased with the possibility of bringing the firm to its knees. The town ‘bitterly resented these women’s charges as giving a “black eye” to the community’. Ottawa was a close-knit and folksy town, but the girls soon realised that when it turned against you, it turned hard. ‘They weren’t treated too nice,’ commented a relative of Marie with understatement.
After all, Radium Dial had long been a valued employer. With the country in the middle of its worst-ever economic depression – what some were now calling the Great Depression – communities were even more protective of the firms that could give them work and wages. The women found they were disbelieved, ignored and even shunned when they spoke out about their ailments and the cause.