![]() Assured that the radium-laced compound was completely safe, even digestible, the young women painted their dress buttons, fingernails, eyelids and even their teeth for fun. Besides the promise of decent work for decent pay, Clark writes, part of what must have made dial painting an attractive job was working with such a sensational product, glow-in-the-dark paint. These luminous paint workers and their struggle to have their mysterious symptoms recognized as an industrial disease is told in finely researched detail within the new book, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 by Central Michigan University historian Claudia Clark. The tragedy, which became a major news story of the 1930s, evolved to a classic text book workplace hazard case that continues to generate controversy and affects city residents in the 1990s. More than 30 of these area co-workers (among others in dialpainting plants across the country), each of whom painted a radium-laced solution onto clock faces, watch dials and military equipment so they would glow in the dark, found that the simple habit of licking their brushes into a fine point eventually gave them terminal head and bone cancer. ![]() Catherine Donohue was a charter member of the nonexistent organization, "The Society of the Living Dead," so called because members had two things in common: all worked at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois and all eventually suffered an agonizing death from radium radiation poison. ![]() The doomed young mother weighed only 65 pounds. Cancer was eating away at her bone marrow. Her teeth and a large portion of her jawbone were gone. She had to write the words for she could not speak them. ![]() She asked for a novena to bring her a miracle. They say nothing can save me, nothing but a miracle." Ottawa native Catherine Donohue wrote those words and more from her bed to the Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church in Chicago in the mid-1930s. I have too much to live for- a husband who loves me and two children I adore. "The doctors tell me I will die, but I mustn't. ![]()
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