Catherine took her communion gratefully from the visiting priest – she received it at home now, being unable to get to church – and prayed. Easter Sunday was all about Christ being reborn: salvation, hope, the repairing of a broken body.
It was all the more horrible, then, that this was the moment Catherine’s body fell further apart. ‘Part of her jawbone,’ Hobart Payne wrote, ‘broke through the flesh and [came] out into her mouth.’ Her tongue stumbled over it: unfamiliar object. Catherine picked it out with tears in her eyes. It was her jawbone. Her jawbone.
‘It was so horrible,’ remembered her niece Mary. ‘[It] just dropped out. I mean it was just . . . You thought, Oh dear God. Can’t even eat! Just so sad.’
Tom Donohue was forced to watch his wife literally disintegrate before his eyes. It was horrifying – yet, on this supposed celebration of renewal, Tom found himself renewing one thing at least: his desire for justice. And he knew just who Catherine needed to help her now.
Her friends.
‘[Catherine’s] husband called me,’ remembered Marie Rossiter, ‘and wanted to know if I could call some of the girls [who] might want to help hire a lawyer.’
Tom Donohue had chosen the friend he had reached out to wisely. Marie Rossiter ‘would always take the bull by the horn’ – she was a fighter. ‘If she [thought] maybe she could help [a] person,’ said a relative, ‘she would get involved. She was a protector.’ And not only a protector, but a hugely popular girl.
‘I said [to Tom], “Well, I knew enough of them [girls],”’ recalled Marie. ‘So I did [help]. I called some by phone . . .’
Charlotte Purcell took up the story. Though she was now living in Chicago, she was still very much involved: ‘All through [it] she [was] with us,’ recalled Marie. ‘She was faithful all through it.’ Charlotte continued, ‘And they said no.’
No, they wouldn’t help. For there were dial-painters who didn’t want to face up to what was happening. While there were countless people in the town who denied radium poisoning existed, the reasons for that denial could vary. ‘They pull back in fright,’ said Olive Witt, ‘asking if it’s catching.’
Marie was frustrated by the townspeople’s attitude. ‘She used to say,’ recalled a relative, ‘“Nobody wants to listen to us!” And I think that hurt.’ Nonetheless, she kept trying with the dial-painters. ‘We got a few,’ Marie said in the end. ‘We continued with the few we had and we kept plugging right along with [Catherine].’
That band of girls now shot for the moon, targeting the best lawyer they had ever heard of. The women felt the approach would be best coming from the men who backed them, so Hobart Payne and Tom Donohue wrote to the most famous American lawyer of the era, the one who ‘always took the impossible cases’.
They wrote to Clarence Darrow.
‘Dear Sir,’ Hobart’s letter read. ‘It is as a last resort that I turn to you for assistance or advice . . . These cases are to come before the Industrial Commission for a final hearing [soon] and there is no attorney to represent these girls. Would it be possible for you to take up this case?’
But Darrow was turning eighty in 1937 and not in good health. Though he said he was sympathetic to the women, he was unable to help – he did, however, promise to refer the case to another lawyer.
Next, remembering their experience from the year before with Mary Doty, the women turned to the media to generate publicity of their plight.
RADIUM DEATH ON RAMPAGE! cried the front page of the Chicago Daily Times on 7 July 1937. WALKING GHOSTS JILTED BY JUSTICE! Charlotte Purcell, with her single arm, was the cover girl for the piece; she told the paper she ‘lives in daily fear of [the] end that is inevitable’. Charlotte, Marie and Catherine were only three of the girls involved; others were the Glacinski sisters, Pearl Payne, Olive Witt, Helen Munch (who now lived in Chicago) and a handful more.
As the girls had requested, the paper reported that they had no lawyer for their upcoming hearing before the IIC, which was scheduled for 23 July: sixteen days away. The hearing was ‘their last stand – their last hope of collecting damages’. ‘Without a lawyer,’ the paper wrote, ‘the women fear legal trickery. Indeed, so hopeless is their outlook that many of them may stay away.’
Catherine Donohue spoke up. ‘That’s what the company’s lawyers would like, I suppose,’ she said archly, ‘for all of us to stay away.’
‘The Radium Dial Company,’ the piece went on, ‘has closed its plant in Ottawa [and] “skipped out from under”, leaving only a $10,000 [$164,595] bond posted with the Industrial Commission.’ That $10,000, in the light of Radium Dial’s vanishing act, was the sole pot of money available to the girls for compensation and medical care.
Though Joseph Kelly had set up an identical business now doing a roaring trade, Jay Cook, the women’s former lawyer, explained: ‘This is a “new” corporation. Under the law, the “new” company isn’t liable for any of the acts of the “old” concern.’ It was Radium Dial, not Joseph Kelly, that was being sued. ‘All they’ve really got to levy on is the $10,000,’ said Cook. ‘That is, of course, unless they were able to locate other assets of the “old” company somewhere . . .’
The following day, the girls’ ally in the media struck again. OTTAWA RADIUM COMPANY NOW IN NEW YORK! chorused the Times in triumph. ‘The Radium Dial Company,’ the article read, ‘was found here by the Times today doing business on New York’s lower east side.’ They were hiring young women to paint dials . . .
Having been located, Radium Dial’s new president, William Ganley, came out fighting. ‘These women’s claims are invalid and illegitimate,’ he stated defiantly. ‘A lot of those women were with us only a few months; practically all of them have been out of our employ for many years.’
And then, dismissing the firm’s secret test results, dismissing Peg Looney’s company-led autopsy where the doctor had been instructed to destroy the evidence of the real cause of her demise, he declared, ‘I can’t recall a single actual victim of this so-called “radium” poisoning in our Ottawa plant.’
Radium Dial was not going down without a fight. They had won this case before in the courts and were supremely confident they would win again.
The president’s attitude underlined to the women just how much they needed an attorney. Yet as the clock counted down to the all-important hearing, no lawyer came forward. Letters and press appeals and word-of-mouth had so far had zero effect. Despite their crippling illnesses, the girls decided they would have to take matters into their own hands.
It was time for the Suicide Club to take a trip to the Big City.
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