Some even wore their party dresses to work so they would glow. On their breaks at work, a lot of the painters did the same thing, according to Moore. "They would go into their bedroom with the lights off and paint their fingernails, their eyelids, their lips and then they'd laugh at each other because they glowed in the dark." Looney wasn't alone. "I can remember my family talking about my aunt bringing home the little vials (of radium paint)," says Halm, who still lives in Ottawa. She was the oldest sister in a family of 10. Looney started working at Radium Dial when she was 17. The radium became a toy.ĭarlene Halm's aunt, Margaret "Peg" Looney, was one of the first Ottawa painters to die from radium poisoning.
They told the girls it would make them beautiful. Their bosses said the paint wouldn't hurt them. Precision was key, so the girls were taught to create a fine point of the paintbrush bristles with their lips. Radium Dial hired women, girls mostly - some as young as 11 and 13 according to Moore's book - to paint the watch dials. They became top sellers and production ramped up. In the 1920s, watch advertisements touted the wonderful radium dials that let owners tell time in the dark. Although dial painters in other states sought retribution for their fatal illnesses, those in Ottawa were the only ones "to win state sanctioned compensation for radium poisoning," wrote Claudia Clark in Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935. Illinois' law led to the creation of the Illinois Industrial Commission in 1917, and it was this body that sided with one of Ottawa's most well-known dial painters in 1938. The final state to adopt it was Mississippi in 1948," says Russell Lewis, executive vice president and chief historian of the Chicago History Museum. "Illinois was one of the earliest adopters of workers compensation law in 1911. Because of Illinois' progressive workers' compensation laws, some of the Radium Dial workers received financial awards. Some of the Ottawa painters, despite their long, agonizing illnesses with crippling sarcomas, crumbling jawbones, crushed spines, amputated limbs and other maladies, were among the luckier ones. Besides the Ottawa plant, the women had worked at radium companies in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. There were likely thousands of dial painters who died from radium poisoning, although there's no definite number, according to Kate Moore, author of the 2017 book, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Luke's Hospital," the AugRockford Register-Republic reported. "The real source of her trouble wasn't found until she was examined at Presbyterian-St. Workman first experienced pain in 1936, but doctors told her it was arthritis. The 54-year-old Park Ridge, Illinois resident had worked in the 1920s at the Ottawa, Illinois Radium Dial Company, which hired women to paint watch and clock dials with radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark paint. On August 25, 1959, Beatrice Workman died of radium poisoning. She was among the last of her kind, but longevity in this club was a mixed blessing. 'Oops' is never good occupational health policy.Part 1: Radium poisoning took the lives of perhaps thousands of female factory workers, many in Ottawa, Illinois, in the last century. "We really don't want our factory workers to be the guinea pigs for discovery. By the time World War II came around, the federal government had set basic safety limits for handling radiation.Īnd, she says, there are still lessons to be learned about how we protect people who work with new, untested substances. At 107 years old, she was one of the last of the radium girls.īlum says the radium girls had a profound impact on workplace regulations. You just don't know what to blame," she said. "I was left with different things, but I lived through them. There's no way to know if her time in the factory contributed. Over the years, she had some health problems - bad teeth, migraines, two bouts with cancer. In all, by 1927, more than 50 women had died as a direct result of radium paint poisoning.īut Keane was among the hundreds who survived. Many of them ended up using the money to pay for their own funerals. At a factory in New Jersey, the women sued the U.S. Their spines collapsed."ĭozens of women died. "There was one woman who the dentist went to pull a tooth and he pulled her entire jaw out when he did it," says Blum.
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