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Radium Dial
The year was 1923, a giddy time for a small-town
teen-ager who had no money for college but found
herself able to buy silk dresses and high-heeled
shoes.
Margaret Looney, a soft-spoken redhead known as Peg,
was fresh out of high school when she and dozens of
other young women were hired to paint glow-in-the-dark
watch dials at the newly arrived Radium Dial Co.
It was no easy task to trace the tiny numbers on the
watches, made popular by their use in World War I. So
the women were encouraged to make a fine point on
their brushes by rolling the tips on their tongues
before dipping them in the radium-laced paint.
"Not to worry," their bosses told them. "If you
swallow any radium, it'll make your cheeks rosy."
Discovered in 1898 by Marie Curie, the naturally
occurring radioactive element was the wonder substance
of the new century, thought to cure everything from
arthritis to cancer. The women at Radium Dial
sometimes painted their teeth and faces and then
turned off the lights for a laugh.
What they didn't know was that the substance was
killing some of them.
Radium Dial and its successor, Luminous Processes, are
gone. But the radium scattered when their buildings
were destroyed in 1969 and 1984 remains in Ottawa, a
sleepy river town in north-central Illinois.
"The tragedy really still lives there," said Ross
Mullner, an associate professor of health policy at
the University of Illinois-Chicago.
That tragedy, he says, began with the dial painters,
who worked in studios in Ottawa; Orange, N.J.;
Waterbury, Conn.; and on Long Island.
Peg Looney was one of an estimated 4,000 workers
nationwide.
A 1922 yearbook from her all-girl Catholic high school
describes the senior as a bookworm, with "a voice ever
so soft, gentle and low" prone to the occasional
giggling fit.
At Radium Dial, Miss Looney would make about $ 18 a
week, compared with the $ 5 she could make elsewhere.
The company prospered as the glow-in-the dark concept
expanded for use on military aircraft controls and the
hugely popular Westclox "Big Ben" alarm clock.
All the while, staff doctors routinely checked the
dial painters for radioactivity, though the women
didn't know it at the time.
Miss Looney's family later learned that she tested
positive for radioactivity in 1925 and again in 1928
-- the year before she died. "I'm angry because they
knew years before she died that she was full of
radium," her sister said. "And then they lied."
Results of the tests would become public in a Chicago
courtroom in 1938 after one worker, Catherine Wolfe
Donahue, sued Radium Dial.
She testified that she and a co-worker asked
supervisor Rufus Reed why the company didn't post the
results of the physical exams.
"My dear girls, if we were to give a medical report to
you girls, there would be a riot in the place," Reed
said, according to testimony in court records.
Ms. Donahue, who was so ill she had to be carried into
the courtroom, died that same year, shortly after the
company agreed to pay her a few thousand dollars.
Earlier lawsuits filed by five Radium Dial workers in
New Jersey also ended in settlement.
But most women who got sick never sued.
"Let's just say they didn't have a whole lot of social
authority. They couldn't just bang on doors and get
noticed," said Claudia Clark, an assistant professor
of history at Central Michigan University in Mount
Pleasant, Mich., and author of the new book "Radium
Girls."
Deaths were often attributed to other causes, anemia
one of the most common. But experts, including
scientists at Argonne National Laboratories, now
affirm that radium did kill some of the women.
There is still disagreement about how many. Some say a
few; others believe radium caused hundreds to die or
suffer bad health for years. "There are a bunch of
cases where people know there's something wrong,"
Clark said.
Some women had tumors bulging from their jaws or leg
bones, where radium was said to settle. Declining
health forced Miss Looney to leave Radium Dial on Aug.
6, 1929. Eight days later, age 24, she was dead.
An autopsy by a Radium Dial doctor listed diphtheria
as cause of death. But her family has never believed
that, in part because the company asked them to rush
the funeral.
"They wanted the whole thing done with -- just gone,"
said Miss Looney's niece, Darlene Halm of Ottawa,
recounting the story her mother told her. "It was like
a big cover-up."
A 1997 study at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb
documented an above-average cancer rate near the
factory. But no follow-up search for a direct link has
begun, in part due to lack of money and staff. "And,
frankly, the community is not screaming," said Ruth
Anne Tobias, the researcher who oversaw the 1997
study.
Besides Illinois, at least two other states have
radium hot spots. Cleanup on radium-laced landfill in
Glen Ridge, N.J. -- the last of four towns in that
state -- is beginning this month, according to EPA
spokesman Rich Cahill.
In all, the EPA expects to spend more than $ 144
million for radium cleanup in New Jersey and New York,
with detoxification begun in West Orange and Orange,
site of the defunct U.S. Radium Co.
A site in Montclair, N.J., is now free of radium, said
Cahill, as is the site of the former Radium Chemical
Co. in New York's borough of Queens.
Officials at the Connecticut Department of
Environmental Protection have found contamination --
including in apartment buildings that are former dial
painting studios -- in Waterbury, Bristol, New Haven
and other cities.
With a report due early next year, state officials say
they are asking the EPA to help with federal funds.
Scientists at Argonne do know, at least in part, what
happened to Peg Looney.
Twenty years ago, they exhumed her body and those of
about 100 others nationwide. Using a tiny measurement
named for Madame Curie, they found 19,500 microcuries
of radium in Miss Looney's bones, more than 1,000
times the amount scientists consider safe.
Robert Rowland, the Batavia, Ill., scientist who
oversaw the Argonne study, calls this "an awful lot of
radium . . . one of the highest we found."
The results were used, in part, to develop safety
standards for plutonium workers.
"I guess you could look at this story and say, 'It's
the canary in the coal mine,' " said Katie Troccoli, a
real estate agent and outspoken environmental activist
in Ottawa.
"It was a terrible thing to happen," she said.
"Somehow, we have to get the word out."
=====
Mark S. Sasser
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance!
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