The files at Argonne are filled with hundreds and hundreds of dial-painters’ names; or rather numbers. Each woman was given a reference number, by which she was always known. The Argonne List of the Doomed makes for chilling reading, charting as it does each woman’s suffering with cool detachment. ‘Bilateral amputations of both legs; amputation of right knee; died of cancer of ear; brain; hip; cause of death: sarcoma; sarcoma; sarcoma’ over and over through the files. Some women survived for forty years or more – but the radium always came calling in the end. The newspapers followed some of the deaths: RADIUM, DORMANT KILLER, AT WORK AGAIN screamed the headlines through the years.
Mercedes Reed is said to have died in 1971; she was eighty-six. ‘I’m absolutely unequivocally convinced,’ said one researcher, ‘that the radium level would be huge in her bones. She supposedly died from colon cancer, but maybe it was misdiagnosed.’ The Reeds did not continue their association with Radium Dial, even before it went bust. ‘Ultimately, Mr Reed was fired from the plant and it is understood that he [was] bitter about this,’ researchers discovered. After his dismissal from the company to whom he had been, some might say, unforgivably loyal, he became a maintenance man for the YMCA.
Reed’s former president, Joseph Kelly, died about 1969, after a series of strokes ‘reduce[d] [his] mental capacity . . . he just got frailer and frailer’. In his final years, he would often say, ‘Have you seen so-and-so lately?’ of someone who had worked with him in the 1920s. Given his distance from the dial-painters he had sentenced to death, when he signed his name to the advert that told them they were safe, it seems unlikely his damaged mind was being haunted by the ghost girls.
As for those girls he used to employ in Ottawa, against all the odds a few of them had long, good lives. Pearl Payne lived to be ninety-eight years old; she and Hobart embraced the extra time they had unexpectedly been given. ‘They travelled all over the world,’ revealed their nephew Randy. ‘They went to Jerusalem, England . . . they were in every state in the union.’
Before she died, Pearl called Randy over to her house one day. ‘She asked me to go up in the attic and pick up some boxes and bring ’em down,’ he recalled. He picked his way through the items Pearl kept in her loft: a baby stroller, a crib; strange things for an old lady to have in her attic, but perhaps Pearl had found herself unable to let go of these final traces of the many children she had wanted, but could never have. Randy found the boxes she meant: they were full of newspaper cuttings about Catherine Donohue and letters and documents to do with her case.
‘This is what happened to us,’ Pearl told Randy urgently. And she said emphatically, ‘These need to be safeguarded. This stuff is important. Be sure that Pearl [her daughter] gets these if anything happens to me.’
Hobart and Pearl ‘were two very fine people,’ said Randy. ‘I don’t [normally] visit graves, but I go to theirs. And I wanna tell you, I say thank you every time I’m there. That’s the kind of people they were.’
Charlotte Purcell lived to be eighty-two. She was adored by her grandchildren. ‘She was probably one of my most favourite people in the whole world,’ raved her granddaughter Jan. ‘She was one of the most courageous, loved and influential people in my life. What my grandmother taught me was: it doesn’t matter what life throws at you, you can adapt.
‘When I asked her to teach me how to jump rope, she said, “Well, I don’t think I can teach you because I only have one arm.” I suppose that was upsetting to me so she said, “Well, wait.” She tied a rope to a chain-link fence and then she jumped rope with one arm and showed me how to jump rope.’
Jan’s brother Don added, ‘It was nothing out of the ordinary to me [that she didn’t have an arm] because she made it that way.’
The kids would chorus, ‘Tell us the story of how you got your arm cut off!’
‘She would repeat the story,’ remembered Jan. ‘She would repeat it over and over, any time we asked.’
‘When I was a young girl,’ Charlotte Purcell would say, ‘I got paid a lot of money to paint numbers on watches and clocks.
‘We didn’t know that the paint was a poison.
‘After I had left there, my friend Catherine Donohue got very sick. And a lot of the girls started getting very sick. The poison settled in my arm, but with my friend Catherine it went throughout the body and she died. She died and left her husband and children without a mom.’
She was always ‘pretty sad’ when she got to that part of the story.
Though Charlotte had been unable to attend Catherine’s funeral, her son remembered something from his mother’s life that maybe, to a poetic mind, suggested that the friends got to say their own goodbye. ‘When the weather was nice,’ Donald recalled, ‘my mother used to go out to the porch and sit on the glider they had there, and swing back and forth. While she was there, a little yellow-and-black canary used to come and sit on her left shoulder [where her arm was missing] and might stay with her about thirty minutes and then leave. That happened several times. Normally, birds don’t have anything to do with people.’
The women didn’t talk to their families about the incredible legacy they had given the world. And the radium girls did not simply set safety standards and contribute incalculably to science – they left their mark in legislation too. In the wake of Catherine Donohue’s case in 1939, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins announced that the fight was ‘far from won’ when it came to workers’ compensation. Subsequently, building on what the women had achieved in life, further legal changes were made to protect all employees. The dial-painters’ case ultimately led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now works nationally in the United States to ensure safe working conditions. Businesses are required to inform employees if they work with dangerous chemicals; workers certainly won’t be told that those corrosive elements will make their cheeks rosy. There are now processes for safe handling, for training, for protection. Workers also now have a legal right to see the results of any medical tests.