SPRING IS IN THE AIR chorused the Chicago Daily Times the weekend after the trial. The newspapers were full of Valentine’s adverts for romantic gifts, bridge parties and dances, but there was only one date that the dial-painters of Ottawa were keeping; and that was with Catherine Donohue.
They found her in good spirits when they called on her. When a reporter tagging along asked Catherine ‘what slim thread binds her to life’, she replied, ‘It’s the fighting Irish,’ with a fond glance at Tom. ‘I will live,’ she said determinedly. Doctors had said that she would ‘never leave her bed alive’, but she was not done fighting yet.
Together, the women prayed for a cure, yet ‘there was no horror among them of death itself’. ‘Each declared,’ said the Chicago Herald-Examiner, ‘that if the fates decree, she will face the next world with the realisation that her sacrifice may have saved others.’
For the women, somewhat to their surprise, had become poster girls for workers’ rights. Already, they had effected a significant change in the law that protected thousands of vulnerable employees and removed a loophole by which corporations could shirk their responsibilities. Inspired by what they had achieved, that same day Pearl Payne wrote to Grossman with an idea:
Sensing your humanitarian zeal for helping those on the lower rungs of life’s ladder, it has occurred to me as well as the other participants in the Radium Dial suit that you forge the beginning of a society, whereby those, of which there must be thousands, could band together, secure legal aid and in general use our organised presence to simplify, promote and improve the laws relative to those who are maimed due to occupational hazards.
Grossman thought it brilliant. And so, on Saturday 26 February 1938, the society had its first meeting. The founding members were Pearl Payne, Marie Rossiter, Charlotte Purcell and Catherine Donohue. Three of the four went to Chicago to meet Grossman; Catherine, far too ill to travel, was represented by Tom. They called themselves, with an instinct for a media hook that possibly came from Grossman, The Society of the Living Dead.
‘The purpose of the society,’ announced Grossman to the gathered press, ‘is to obtain better protection by legislation and otherwise for persons endangered by occupational diseases.’
The meeting coincided with the filing of Grossman’s first legal brief to Marvel, which was probably deliberate (‘He loved the press,’ said his son). As the camera bulbs flashed, Grossman gave the girls their own copy of the pale green brief, signing Pearl’s with the slogan ‘In Humanity’s Cause’. The dense document was some 80,000 words in length, and it saw Grossman in full flow.
‘The circumstances call,’ he wrote, ‘for the sharpest pen I can unsheathe. I ask simply that [the law’s] protecting folds ever serve as a shield to protect, and not a sword to destroy the human right of Catherine Donohue to compensation. Give Catherine only what is justly and rightly due her under the law of God and Man, and you will give her the award we ask!’
The brief was filed in the late afternoon, just in time to catch the evening papers, and the press were all over it; coverage of the case jostled for space on the front page with stories about the Nazis in Germany. And if it was a trial by media, the girls would have won hands down – the papers called Radium Dial ‘criminally careless’.
The press asked Tom Donohue if there was any hope of a cure. He replied that Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor, had ‘sent medical authorities to investigate’. There’d been some hope that a calcium treatment might prolong Catherine’s life, but her illness was too advanced for her to survive the process.
The federal investigations Perkins had ordered into the women’s poisoning appear to have come to nothing. The government, struck by a double-dip recession within the Great Depression, had other priorities. One politician admitted they were ‘floundering’ about the economy: ‘We have pulled all the rabbits out of the hat, and there are no more rabbits,’ he said. It was cold comfort to Tom, who was still without a job.
Although the calcium treatment was not possible, Catherine still refused to surrender. ‘I am hoping for a miracle,’ she said. ‘I pray for it. I want a claim to life, and to stave off the end for the sake of my husband and children.’ Catherine’s own mom had died when she was six; she knew what it was like to grow up without a mother and she was determined her own children would not suffer the same fate.
But for all Catherine’s courageous talk, as the weeks passed and they all waited for the verdict, her health deteriorated rapidly. ‘Once that [stage of the] illness began,’ remembered her niece Mary, ‘it was just like a spiral down, down, down . . . It wasn’t a gradual thing. It was fast.’
It left Catherine utterly unable even to direct her children’s care via the housekeeper. ‘She was so ill,’ said Mary, ‘I truly do not remember her interacting with the children. She wasn’t able. You can’t imagine . . . It had just sapped all the energy and everything out of her.’
All Catherine could do was lie weakly on her bed in the front room with the shades drawn. Her days were punctuated by the taking of her medicine, and by the frequent rattle of the train tracks behind the house: the sound of carriages bearing people away on journeys that Catherine Donohue could never now undertake. The house had ‘a smell of urine’. Her entire world was that front room. She lay under a blanket, the tumour on her hip a malignant mountain rising beneath, with every bone in her body aching. She was in so much pain.
‘I just remember her moaning, moaning,’ remembered Mary quietly. ‘You knew that she was in pain, but she didn’t have the energy to scream. Moaning was about the best she could do. I think she just didn’t have the energy to cry or cry out. She’d just moan.
‘I can’t describe,’ she went on, ‘how sad that house was. You felt the sadness when you came in there.’
As Catherine’s illness worsened, some of her relatives considered her condition too horrific for her young nieces and nephews to see. ‘She was falling apart from the radium,’ recalled her niece Agnes. ‘They didn’t want us to see her; they said she looked so terrible.’ So although Agnes’s parents would visit Catherine once a week, she always had to wait outside.