Charlotte Purcell simply said, thankfully, ‘This is the first ray of hope we have had after years of discouragement.’
It had been a long, long battle. In many ways, it was a battle that had begun on 5 February 1925, when Marguerite Carlough had first filed suit in New Jersey: the very first dial-painter ever to fight back. Catherine’s triumph in court, thirteen years later, was one of the first cases in which an employer was made responsible for the health of its employees. What the girls had achieved was astonishing: a ground-breaking, law-changing and life-saving accomplishment. The Attorney General’s office, which had followed the case closely, heralded the verdict as ‘a great victory’.
It was the Ottawa Daily Times which claimed to break the news to Catherine Donohue. As the verdict came down the wire, a reporter raced to 520 East Superior Street to talk to the woman at the centre of it all.
He found her alone; Tom had taken the children for a walk. She was – as she had no choice but to be – lying in bed in the front room, her silver-banded watch still hanging loosely on her wrist. As the reporter excitedly told her that a verdict had been given, five days early, Catherine blinked in surprise. ‘I never dreamed of the decision this soon,’ she croaked with great effort.
The good news spilled from the journalist’s lips: a secret he could not wait to share. Yet Catherine was so ill, she showed little emotion at her victory and did not smile. Tom would later confide that she ‘cries but rarely smiles; she has forgotten how to laugh’.
It could have been that she did not quite believe it. ‘She half-rose in bed in an effort to look at the compensation decision, which was written out for her’, but she did not have the strength to do so fully. She sank back against the pillows; and as the news, too, sank in, her primary thought was for Tom. ‘Her first words,’ wrote the eager journalist, ‘formed a wish that her husband Thomas would quickly hear of the decision.’
‘I am glad for the sake of my children and my husband,’ Catherine whispered. ‘The lump sums will help [Tom], who has been out of work for many months.’
As though remembering, she then said with a weak smile to the reporter: ‘This is the second good news we had in a week. My husband just got back on the payroll at the glass factory.’ Some workers had been recalled to Libbey-Owens, and Tom had managed to get on the night shift.
As the reporter lingered in the room, hoping for more copy, Catherine spoke on. ‘The judge is grand,’ she commented. ‘He’s so wonderful. He’s very fair. That means a lot.’
As though the idea of fairness had triggered something in her, an anger blazed within her for a brief moment. ‘It should have been done a long time ago,’ she said, almost bitterly. ‘I’ve been suffering. I’ll have to suffer more . . . I wonder if I will live to receive any of the money; I hope so. But I am afraid it will come too late.’
Yet Catherine had not put her life at risk for herself; she had done it for her family and friends. ‘Now maybe [Tom] and our two children can really live again,’ she said in hope. ‘I may not live to enjoy the money myself, but [I hope] it will come in time for the other girls. I hope they get it before their conditions become as bad as mine.’
She added one final comment, a croaked whisper that fell flat in the oddly quiet, stale-aired room, which held none of the jubilation of the courtroom in Chicago.
‘I hope the lawyers don’t upset it . . .’ Catherine Donohue said.
55
Two weeks after the judgment, Radium Dial filed an appeal against the verdict, ‘upon contention the award was contrary to the evidence’. Having anticipated such a move, Grossman and the Society of the Living Dead instantly staged a media photo call and launched an appeal for immediate funds for Catherine. ‘She has no money, no prospects of getting any through her own efforts [and] mounting doctor’s bills,’ declared Charlotte Purcell. ‘I fear Mrs Donohue will die before her case is adjudicated.’
Catherine was touched by her friends’ support, but her overwhelming concern was for Tom. He had taken the news of the appeal hard. ‘He doesn’t say much,’ Catherine confided to Pearl, ‘but it has been such a strain on him.’
The women continued to enlist the help of the media in their campaign for justice; the Donohues invited the Toronto Star into their home for an interview. ‘The eggshell woman in the bed may be dying,’ wrote Star journalist Frederick Griffin, ‘but she is fighting.’
They were all fighting – the women, and their supporters too. As Griffin visited 520 East Superior Street one quiet April evening, he met all the dial-painters who had filed suit, as well as the men standing behind them: Inez’s father George; Tom, Al, Clarence and Hobart. This senseless tragedy had affected them as well as their wives and daughters. ‘They’re scared,’ Clarence Witt said of the women, as his wife readied Catherine in the other room. ‘Every little ache or pain scares them.’
It was now more than two months since Catherine had battled to give her evidence from her sickbed; the intervening weeks had wrought havoc with her body. ‘I looked at the shrunken face, arms, form, the shapeless jaw and mouth,’ Griffin remembered as he entered her makeshift bedroom. ‘A glance at her skeleton outline beneath the coverlet makes you wonder if she will see the week out.’
Yet as Catherine fluttered open her eyes and fixed them on the reporter, he realised that she had more grit in her than he’d thought. ‘Mrs Donohue, this remnant of a woman, took on her role as president of this strange society,’ he later wrote. ‘She lay motionless, but she was business-like.’
‘Please publish this,’ she said candidly. ‘I want you, when you write about us, to put in a good word for our lawyer, Mr Grossman.’
She was commanding; her voice at this meeting, Griffin said, was ‘brisk’ and ‘strong’. Grossman had paid for the entire legal proceedings himself – including the continuing expenses of the appeal – and Catherine wanted to be sure he would be rewarded with publicity at least.
‘You hear the voice of the Society of the Living Dead,’ Grossman himself now intoned. ‘That is the voice of the ghost women speaking not only here in this room but to the world. This voice is going to strike the shackles off the industrial slaves of America. You girls have rights to better laws. That’s what the society is going to work for.’
Griffin interviewed them all; each woman had her own heart-rending story. ‘I’d hate to tell you [how I feel now],’ Marie sighed. ‘My ankles and jaw pain [me] all the time.’
‘I don’t know what day’s going to be my last,’ said Olive anxiously. ‘I lie at night staring at the ceiling and thinking maybe it’s my last on earth.’