The Radium Girls: Chapters 26–35

Their experts were allegedly going abroad for several months and would not be back until after the summer.

And the public was transfixed. “Letters came pouring in from all corners of the earth,” Katherine remembered. Seemingly overnight, the girls became famous.

On May 30, Judge Clark was reported as an unofficial mediator.

“Radium Victims Reject Cash Offers: Will Push Cases; Parleys Now Off!” yelled one headline.

The firm had offered them $10,000 ($138,606) each in settlement, but all the girls’ medical and legal bills were to be deducted from that sum, leaving only a pittance.

In the Essex County courthouse in Newark, its elaborate murals are dedicated to four things: wisdom, knowledge, mercy...and power. In this case, the last seemed cruelly apt.

Clark himself wrote to the women, “I want to express to you my very great personal sympathy, and my earnest hope that some way will be found of helping your physical condition.”

She said she was “quite pleased” with the settlement. “I’d like to get more, but I’m glad to get that. It will help in so many ways; it will alleviate some of the mental anguish.”

“There were meetings at the plant that bordered on riots. The chill of fear was so depressing that we could scarcely work—scarcely talk of our impending fate.”

Divided into their groups, the women apprehensively went to meet the doctors.

Didn’t they have a right to know? Marie, who was always forthright, determined that they shouldn’t take it lying down.

Full of fear and indignation, she and Catherine confronted Mr. Reed.

“The health of [our] employees is always foremost in the minds of [company] officials,” they promised.

He posted them prominently in the studio and deliberately called the girls’ attention to them.

Yet the girls were also financially astute, investing in building and loan shares.

Grace smiled enigmatically as she answered. “For the future!”

“I am of the opinion that the girls we are seeing now,” he said, “while they may be permanently crippled, have a considerable chance of beating the disease.”
That prognosis, bleak as it sounded in some ways, gave the women the most precious commodity: time.

“I am of the opinion that the girls we are seeing now,” he said, “while they may be permanently crippled, have a considerable chance of beating the disease.”
That prognosis, bleak as it sounded in some ways, gave the women the most precious commodity: time.

He replied shrewdly, “The new methods probably were too slow for the greatest profit to the manufacturers.”

They’d wanted to have these famous radium girls deemed free of radium to help them fight the other suits.

Unlike in New Jersey, there were no throngs of journalists, no star witnesses, no dueling attorneys.

Though the Ottawa doctors seemed clueless—one, who treated her in June 1929, simply put an ice pack on her chest—Peg herself seemed to divine what was happening.

One of the relatives present was Peg’s brother-in-law Jack, an imposing man who worked as a car oiler for the railroad. He was the type of man who stood up for the right thing to be done.

After the firm's midnight machinations, they did not trust them.

In fact, in many ways, Katherine was better. She now lived quietly in a rural convalescent home set on a hilltop, which she called “the jewel of the east.”

Quinta asked James to leave early so that she could rest, and he did so, departing with no sense of foreboding.

“I found a bedridden patient extremely emaciated and filled with a huge sarcoma,” he remembered.

On May 4, 1931, as she lay dying in the hospital, she filed a claim for damages against USRC.

Since they had muzzled Berry, they were not too concerned about the opponents to follow.

She felt inexplicably anxious and turned to face the windows, lit by the August sun.

Katherine opened her eyes warily, not wanting to look down at her leg.

It informed them that USRC would no longer pay for certain medicines, routine doctors’ visits, or home nurses. The latter was a service the women increasingly relied on to help clean and dress themselves. The board was acting, it said, to prevent “exploitation” of the radium company.

Katherine had read the stories about Byers with sadness for the victim but also an overwhelming sense of vindication.

Radium was a poison. The girls knew that intimately.

It was a picture from before the poisoning had set in. She looked forever young: her lips smooth and shining, her eyes piercing, as though she could see into souls.