In Chicago, however, Joseph Kelly, president of Radium Dial, was finding the opposite. By October 1934, perhaps in light of the lawsuits, he had clean run out of friends in his company. An executive called William Ganley wrested control of Radium Dial and Kelly and his associates were voted out. ‘There were very hard feelings,’ recalled one company officer, ‘because of the corporate shenanigans that went on.’
But, Kelly had decided, he was not finished with Ottawa. Every current dial-painter at Radium Dial now received a letter. Mr Turner – a manager at the plant under Mr Reed – invited them all to a restaurant, where they were fed while he talked to them. He had an announcement – a new dial-painting business was going to be opening in town – and he had a question: how about you highly skilled girls join us at Luminous Processes?
It seems the women weren’t told it would be run by Joseph Kelly and Rufus Fordyce, who’d had charge of Radium Dial during the radium-poisoning scandal. They were told something extraordinary though. Mr Turner ‘informed them that earlier dial-painters had died because they put brushes in their mouths, and since brush-licking was no longer permitted, exposure to radium would not be harmful’. It was an admission of guilt, but the original dial-painters never got to hear of it.
The new studio opened just a few blocks over from Radium Dial in a two-storey red-brick warehouse. Thanks to the clandestine meeting in the restaurant, most of the dial-painters moved across, thinking the new operation safe. They applied paint using hand-held sponges and wooden spatulas, using fingers to smooth it over, and wore thin cotton smocks to give them some protection from the dust.
Not every worker went, however. Mr Reed stayed on as superintendent of the old firm. Loyal to the end, he and Mrs Reed stuck with the company that had made them. They faced ‘a fiercely competitive situation’, for Radium Dial now competed directly with Joseph Kelly’s new business in the same small town.
Just down the road from this battle of big business, however, Catherine Donohue cared not a jot for the corporate infighting going on that fall. All that mattered to her was the tiny little girl she was cradling in her arms. She and Tom named their daughter Mary Jane, after Tom’s mother. ‘We always called her Mary Jane,’ remarked her cousin. ‘Never Mary. Just Mary Jane.’
Catherine Donohue vowed that she would make her daughter proud.
45
As 1935 began, Jay Cook was busy working on the women’s lawsuit. He filed two separate claims for them: one in the normal law courts and a second with the Illinois Industrial Commission (IIC). The lead case, Cook determined, would be that of Inez Vallat. ‘She was a living corpse,’ Catherine said of her former desk-mate, ‘hobbling around like an old woman.’
But, as the case got going, almost immediately the women ran into trouble. Radium Dial was being represented by a team of top lawyers who found several legal loopholes, through which they twisted the case. There was that old chestnut: the statute of limitations. Inez had filed suit years after she left Radium Dial and her disability did not occur while she was employed. There was the fact that radium was a poison; injuries caused by poison were not covered by the Occupational Diseases Act. And there was the law itself: Radium Dial charged that its antiquated wording was ‘vague, indefinite and did not furnish an intelligible standard of conduct’.
‘When Attorney Cook filed his test case,’ the Chicago Daily Times later wrote, ‘Radium Dial did not even bother to deny the women’s charges. In effect, the company’s reply was, “Even if it is true, what of it?”’
On 17 April 1935, a ruling was given. ‘The court ruled the legislature failed to establish any standards by which compliance with the law could be measured,’ reported the Ottawa Daily Times. The women had lost, on a legal technicality. They could not believe it – yet they fought on. Cook, at his own expense, took the battle all the way to the Supreme Court. Yet it was all to no avail: the law was declared invalid.
The Chicago Daily Times called it ‘an almost unbelievable miscarriage of justice’. But there was nothing the women could do: they’d had their day in court, and the law itself had been found wanting. ‘There was never a trial of this case on its merits,’ lamented the newspaper.
Cook, reluctantly, had to drop their case, even though the girls still had a claim filed with the IIC and legislators now vowed to rewrite the law in light of the women’s case. ‘I hated to have to do it, but I simply couldn’t afford to keep on,’ Cook later said. ‘If I had the money, I’d fight their case free. It’s one of those things that should be fought through to a finish. I hope they get another lawyer.’
But finding another lawyer was easier said than done. There were forty-one attorneys listed in the Ottawa town directory, but not one would help them. Just as the native physicians had done, the legal profession was shutting down what was seen as a scandalous attack on a loyal local business.
As if to rub it in, on the day the Ottawa paper reported the loss of the women’s case, it featured an article on Clarence Darrow, one of the nation’s leading lawyers. That was the kind of person the girls needed, but they had no money to secure legal aid.
The Donohues now found the mortgage on their house had crept to $1,500 ($25,000). ‘There are medicines that ease the pain,’ Catherine said; and on these she and Tom were spending hundreds of dollars. They found themselves playing make-believe, trying to ignore what was happening to their family of four. ‘We never talk about it,’ confessed Tom. ‘We just go along as if we were all going to be together forever. That’s the only way.’
‘We’re so happy together,’ Catherine said with a too-big smile. ‘As long as we’re together, it doesn’t seem so bad. We just pretend I’m the way I was when Tom married me.’
They hadn’t given up looking for a cure. Catherine found herself trying various Chicago hospitals and dentists, pushing herself to get to the appointments, even though she frequently ‘fainted during the course of the examinations’ due to the pain. ‘She was looking for help,’ a commentator said, ‘any way she could get.’ But no one could stop the disintegration of Catherine’s mouth, which grew more serious by the day.
The women struggled on: downcast about the devastating loss of their court case; in denial about the looming demise that seemed inevitable. And then, just at the end of the year, word of another legal judgment reached them. It didn’t necessarily affect their case, but it was of considerable interest nonetheless.