'The company wanted to bury her right away,' according to Halm. NPR Illinois | 91.9 UIS Darlene Halm, niece of Margaret 'Peg' Looney, one of the first to die of radium poisoning, tells stories of her aunt Friday in Ottawa. They were told she had diphtheria and was quarantined.' Looney died in the hospital. My grandparents and her siblings had no say about her going in the company hospital and were not allowed to visit. 'She collapsed at work one day and they sent her to a company hospital. Her fiancé 'used to pull her around the neighborhood in a wagon when she was too ill to walk,' says Halm. She was anemic, couldn't walk from hip pain, and her teeth and bits of jawbone were falling out. Problems had begun much earlier, when she had a tooth removed and the site never healed. 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. Part 1: Radium poisoning took the lives of perhaps thousands of female factory workers, many in Ottawa, Illinois, in the last century.

Man who lost his jaw to radium