The women found the publicity got them motivated again. Charlotte’s son Donald remembered: ‘Mom used to get dressed up and take her friends and they’d go up to Chicago to see these lawyers.’ A few months later, Charlotte, Catherine and Marie engaged a new attorney, Jerome Rosenthal, for their case before the IIC. They also decided to approach the government for help: their target was Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor; the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet. It was Tom who contacted her, having ‘telephone conversations and personal correspondence’ with the Secretary. Whatever this quiet man said clearly made an impact, for no less than three federal departments began investigating.
The case was snowballing, and Tom now dug deep for the most important act of all. His wife had told him about the company tests and he judged – since it was clear Radium Dial had lied about the results – that getting hold of the original data would provide powerful evidence in court. On 20 May 1936, he decided to ask Mr Reed outright for the results. He felt they should have been given to the women anyway; or at least to him as Catherine’s husband. He was only asking for what was rightfully theirs. ‘This day,’ Tom said, ‘I wanted to find out the name of them doctors, who was supposed to examine them women that was working there, that didn’t give them a report.’
Reed might have seen him coming. At any rate, the two met each other not in the studio, but on the streets of Ottawa.
Tom started out calmly enough. ‘Why wasn’t the report given to me?’ he asked.
Reed, taken aback by Tom’s direct question, did as he had always done and tried to ignore the situation. He brushed by him.
‘I only have another question to ask you!’ shouted Tom at the superintendent’s retreating back – then he ran to catch up with him. ‘I only want to help the women!’
Mr Reed had had enough. Perhaps there was a guilt eating away at him which led to what happened next. ‘He started to swing at me,’ Tom remembered with some astonishment.
Tom, though small, had an ‘Irish temper’. ‘I don’t think anybody in our family,’ one of his relatives later said, ‘would go out of their way to cause a confrontation, but they wouldn’t let one go if it came to them. I’m sure he’d have been angry. I’m surprised he stayed as level-headed as he did.’ With Reed – the man who had overseen his wife’s slow murder and then fired her when the poison’s effects started to show – now hitting him, Tom dropped all pretence of civilised conversation. ‘I swang at him,’ he remembered with some satisfaction. He said Reed ‘got excited’.
The two men brawled in the street, hitting out at one another in a ‘fisticuff encounter’. Tom found himself landing blows for Catherine, for Inez, for Charlotte’s lost arm, for Ella, for Mary, for Peg. Reed floundered under the attack and the police were called. Even though Mr Reed had started it, the respected superintendent of Radium Dial had Tom Donohue arrested. He brought charges of assault and battery and disorderly conduct.
Tom was now in the hands of State Attorney Elmer Mohn, facing two criminal charges.
47
Assault, battery, disorderly conduct . . . and insanity. The ‘controlling interests’ in the affair now even tried to bring a charge of insanity against Tom. In Hobart Payne’s opinion, it was because he had ‘vigorously opposed the operation of [the Radium Dial] plant’; he considered Tom had been ‘persecuted’.
Tom’s relatives thought such a move ‘typical of a company with its back against the wall’. ‘They know that they’re gonna go down,’ said his niece Mary. ‘They’ll do anything. They’ll try anything.’ Fortunately for Tom, the police case against him was not reported to progress further than a handful of initial hearings; perhaps because there was no foundation to the trumped-up charges.
Like all cowards with their backs against the wall, the company now chose to turn and run. In December 1936, Radium Dial abruptly closed its doors and upped sticks – to where, nobody knew. Nobody left behind did, at least. The Reeds followed the company out in the New Year, packing up their house on Post Street. No longer would the Donohues and Purcells run into the girls’ old boss when they made their way about town.
Radium Dial had been ‘run out of business’ by Joseph Kelly’s new firm, Luminous Processes. After more than fourteen years of the radium company operating in the old high school, the rooms fell silent. No chatter from the girls, no laughter from the darkroom: just empty rooms, haunted by the memories of all that had gone on.
With Radium Dial gone, Joseph Kelly had a monopoly on radium dials in the little town of Ottawa. It may have been the Great Depression, but things were turning out rather well for the company president. The same, however, could not be said for the husbands of the former dial-painters. They had just about managed to cling on to work through the Depression so far, but in 1937 their luck ran out. Workers were laid off from the Libbey-Owens glass factory and Tom Donohue and Al Purcell were among them.
For the Purcells, who had three children to feed, it became almost impossible to cope. ‘They struggled really hugely, financially,’ said a relative. Charlotte ended up feeding the children mustard sandwiches. ‘You took whatever you could get,’ remembered Tom’s niece Mary of that period. ‘It was a very tough time.’
Charlotte and her sisters agreed a solution: move to Chicago. But even in the city it was challenging. Charlotte’s son Donald recalled: ‘We used to go to a bakery and ask for day-old [bread]. We heated the apartment with a coal stove, and we used to walk around the [train] tracks in Chicago and pick up coal.’
It was hard – but it was harder still back in rural Illinois. Pearl Payne said there was no ‘steady work; just periodic streaks of work’. Tom Donohue was not lucky enough to land even those streaks. With the house already mortgaged to the hilt, he was running out of ideas. ‘Tom was nearly bankrupt,’ remembered a brother-in-law. ‘Catherine was full of radium and dying by inches. She suffered agonies, and [he spent everything] buying medicines to try to relieve Catherine.’ The family now had debts of some $2,500 ($41,148).
There was nothing else for it. ‘They were on relief for a while,’ confided their niece Mary. ‘[They felt] very ashamed. Not wanting people to know about it.’
Yet they weren’t the only ones needing help: lines of desperate people queued outside the soup kitchens in Ottawa. Everyone was living hand to mouth. The Donohues had almost no thought of a lawsuit anymore – this was a battle for survival. By the spring of 1937 their lawyer, Rosenthal, had dropped the case anyway. The women were due to have a hearing before the Illinois Industrial Commission later that year but, as things stood, they had no attorney to represent them.
Time passed. On 28 March 1937, Catherine Donohue and her family marked Easter Sunday, one of the most important dates in the Catholic calendar. Someone gave a gift of a ‘timid-looking bunny rabbit’ to Mary Jane and Tommy, who were then aged two and almost four. Tommy liked to paint, just as his mother and father had once done; he had a watercolour set that he played with often.