She had not been back since she fell ill. But on this funeral day Catherine Donohue, once again, made her slow way down the aisle of the church and rested once more in the grace of God beneath that towering, arched ceiling that had been so familiar to her in life, bathed in the coloured light from the stained-glass windows that her husband’s family had helped to buy.
Father Griffin led the Mass. He ‘spoke of the relief that death made for Mrs Donohue after her long and patient sufferings’. It seemed, to Tom, too short a service – for when it was over, all that was left was the burial. The burial; and then the rest of his life to live without her. He was ‘near collapse’ as he bade farewell to his wife.
The other mourners joined him in his helpless grief. ‘In a silent but impressive few moments,’ a witness wrote, ‘Catherine’s best friends – the girls who worked in the plant with her and contracted the same poisoning – said goodbye. The scene brought to mind the words of the ancient gladiators of glorious Rome: “Moritamor te salutmamus – we who are about to die salute thee.”’
Their heads and their hearts were filled with Catherine, filled with her even as they left the church and blocked out the sight of the old high school across the road, where she had been poisoned. Their hearts stayed full of her, as Pearl wrote to Grossman later that same day:
When I returned home from Catherine Donohue’s funeral with my heart full of her and thoughts of your great work at the inquest and the circuit court, I felt I must drop this little note and let you know my heart is filled with gratitude when I think of the courageous battle you are waging on behalf of us girls.
She closed ‘with prayers and best wishes for further successes’.
For even on the day of Catherine’s funeral, Grossman was in court, defending her claim. The company had been denied the right of appeal, but they were appealing even that. They appealed over and over and over. In fact, Radium Dial fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
Other lawyers might have dropped the case, citing lack of funds – for Grossman was still covering the expenses – but Leonard Grossman had vowed to stand by the women and he did not let them down. ‘He just collapsed after over-working on this case,’ his wife, Trudel, said. Perhaps Radium Dial were hoping either he or the girls would give up the fight, maybe run out of money, but they were battling in Catherine’s memory now and that was a powerful motivator.
Grossman had to get a special licence to be admitted to the Supreme Court. ‘[That] licence was under glass in our house forever,’ said his son. ‘He talked about [the case]. He was proud of it and the scrapbooks were always in the middle of the bookshelf. I heard some of the stories over and over again; I grew up with this case.
‘When the case went to the Supreme Court,’ he went on, ‘my parents both went to Washington for it. I looked it up. “Cert denied.” The court decided not to hear it. It meant they were upholding the lower court.’
Catherine Wolfe Donohue had won her case. She won it eight times in total. But the final victory came on 23 October 1939.
The papers described her battle for justice as ‘one of the most spectacular fights against industrial occupational hazards’. Now, that battle was at an end – finally at an end. It was a pure, clean victory, with no clouds or contingencies to sully it.
No settlement. No board of doctors to poke and prod and say that there was no such thing as radium poisoning; no firm reneging on an out-of-court agreement that had been made in good faith. Now there were no more legal machinations; no lawyers’ twisting words; no law itself whose unclear wording tied mercy up in knots. It was outright justice, plain and true. The women had been vindicated. The dial-painters had won.
And it was Catherine Wolfe Donohue, in the end, who had led them to victory.
‘If there are saints on earth,’ one commentator said, ‘and you believe in that, I think Catherine Wolfe Donohue was one of them. I really do.’
She was buried in St Columba Cemetery. She has a simple, flat gravestone, as unobtrusive, and as neat and tidy, as she herself had been in life.
EPILOGUE
The radium girls did not die in vain. Although the women could not save themselves from the poison which riddled their bones, in countless ways their sacrifice saved many thousands of others.
Fifty days before the final triumph in Catherine Donohue’s case, war was declared in Europe. It meant that there was, once again, an enormous demand for luminous dials to light the dashboards of military machines and the wristwatches of soldiers taking up arms. Yet thanks to Catherine and Grace and their colleagues’ bravery in speaking out about what had happened to them, dial-painting was now the most feared occupation among young women. No longer could the government sit idly by: the radium girls’ demise demanded a response.
Safety standards were introduced which protected a whole new generation of dial-painters, based entirely on knowledge gained from the bodies of those women who had come before. The standards were set not a moment too soon, for seven months later America formally entered the war. The US radium dial-painting industry exploded, with USRC alone increasing its personnel by 1,600 per cent. Radium dials were even bigger business than the first time round: the United States used more than 190 grams of radium for luminous dials during the Second World War; in contrast, fewer than 30 grams were used worldwide in the earlier conflict.
In addition, a chemist called Glenn Seaborg, who was employed on the most secret mission of them all – the Manhattan Project – wrote in his diary: ‘As I was making the rounds of the laboratory rooms this morning, I was suddenly struck by a disturbing vision [of] the workers in the radium dial-painting industry.’ Atomic-bomb-making involved widespread use of radioactive plutonium and he realised at once that similar hazards faced those working on the project. Seaborg insisted that research be undertaken into plutonium; it was found to be bio-medically very similar to radium, meaning it would settle into the bones of anyone exposed to it. The Manhattan Project issued non-negotiable safety guidelines to its workers, based directly on the radium safety standards. Seaborg was determined that the women’s ghosts would not be joined by those of his colleagues who were working to win the war.