Radium Poisoning Killed Perhaps Hundreds of "Ghost Girls" in Ottawa, Illinois.

A BRIEF BACKGROUND OF RADIUM
In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie, two of the most prominent pioneers in researching radioactivity, discovered the element radium. Radium was particularly intriguing because it glowed in the dark, and as Marie noted, “These gleamings seemed suspended in the darkness and stirred us with ever-new emotion and enchantment.” Soon enough, the radium craze was on. After it was observed that radium could treat cancer, many people mistakenly thought it could also be used to treat other diseases as well.

Pierre and Marie Curie in the laboratory, demonstrating the experimental apparatus used to detect the ionization of air, and hence the radioactivity, of samples of purified ore which enabled their discovery of radium. Marie is operating the apparatus.

Around this time, American inventor William J. Hammer went to Paris and obtained a sample of radium salt crystals from the Curies. Hammer discovered that by mixing the radium with glue and zinc sulfide, he could make glow-in-the-dark paint. His discovery would soon be used by the U.S. Radium Corporation to manufacture wristwatches with radium-painted dials. 

Employees of the U.S. Radium Corp. paint numbers on the faces of wristwatches using dangerous radioactive paint. Dozens of these women later died of radium poisoning.

Advertisements for the product, which they called "Undark," boasted of how it was all "made possible by the magic of radium!" U.S. Radium would also receive government contracts during World War I to produce watches and airplane instruments for American soldiers.

Before long, radium was widely considered a “miracle” substance, sold in pharmacies for all kinds of ailments. It was also widely believed that radium could prevent aging, and companies sold radium toothpaste, radium cosmetics, and even radium water.

New York Tribune ad for Radior Toilet Requisites, 1918.

Marie Skłodowska Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields.

RADIUM POISONING TOOK THE LIVES OF THOUSANDS OF FEMALE FACTORY WORKERS DURING THE 20th CENTURY.
On August 25, 1959, Beatrice Workman died of radium poisoning. The 54-year-old Park Ridge, Illinois resident had worked in the 1920s at Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, which hired women to paint watch and clock dials with radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark paint. 

Workman first experienced pain in 1936, but doctors told her it was arthritis. "The real source of her trouble wasn't found until she was examined at Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital," on August 27, 1959, reported by the Rockford Register-Republic newspaper. That was 23 years after her first medical examination.

There were likely thousands of dial painters who died from radium poisoning, although there's no definite number. Besides the Ottawa plant, the old Elgin Watch factory in Elgin, Illinois used radium on watch dials. Women had worked at radium companies in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Most died young, decades before Workman.

That included many women in Illinois. Some of the Ottawa painters, despite their long, agonizing illnesses with crippling sarcomas (cancer that grows in connective tissue that connects other kinds of tissue in your body), crumbling jawbones, crushed spines, amputated limbs, and other infections, were among the luckier ones. Because of Illinois' progressive workers' compensation laws, some of the Radium Dial workers received financial awards.

Illinois was one of the earliest workers' compensation law adopters in 1911. The final state to adopt it was Mississippi in 1948. 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. 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.

1920s № 579 Rolex
Sterling Silver Tank Style

In the 1920s, watch advertisements touted the wonderful radium dials that let owners tell the time in the dark. They became top sellers, and production ramped up. Radium Dial hired women, girls mostly — some as young as 11 years old, according to Moore's book — to paint the watch dials. 

Precision was key, so the girls were taught to create a fine point of the paintbrush bristles with their lips. With each lick, they ingested radium.

Their bosses said the paint wouldn't hurt them. They told the girls it would make them beautiful. The radium became a toy.

Darlene Halm's aunt, Margaret "Peg" Looney, was one of the first Ottawa painters to die from radium poisoning. Looney started working at Radium Dial when she was 17. She was the oldest sister in a family of 10. "I can remember my family talking about my aunt bringing home the little vials (of radium paint)," says Halm, who still lives in Ottawa. "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. On their breaks at work, a lot of the painters did the same thing, according to Moore. Some even wore their party dresses to work so they would glow.

Six years later, Looney became sick. Problems had begun much earlier when she had a tooth removed, and the site never healed. She was anemic, couldn't walk from hip pain, and her teeth and bits of jawbone were falling out. Her fiancé "used to pull her around the neighborhood in a wagon when she was too ill to walk," says Halm. "She collapsed at work one day, and they sent her to a company hospital. My grandparents and her siblings had no say about her going to the company hospital and were not allowed to visit. They were told she had diphtheria and was quarantined." Looney died in the hospital. She was 24.

"The company wanted to bury her right away," according to Halm. "Several family members were at the hospital when she died, although they weren't allowed to see her. (One of them) refused to allow the company to bury her and insisted she has a Catholic funeral." Radium Dial agreed to autopsy her body and to have the Looneys' doctor present for it. But when their doctor arrived, the autopsy was finished, Halm says.

The Looneys were suspicious. They tried to find an attorney to look into Peg's case. No one would take it.

Radium Dial knew what was wrong with Looney; it had known for years. Halms says the family learned this later and found out the company had hired doctors to examine the painters starting in 1925. "They told (Looney) she was very healthy," says Halm. "They never told her she had tested positive for radiation."

"There is evidence, particularly in Illinois, that the executives at the Radium Dial Company... had the knowledge that the radium was poisoning the women," says Moore. "They deliberately lied to the women."

Another one of those women was Catherine Donohue. She started feeling ill in 1925 and limped from pain. In 1931, Radium Dial fired her "because my limping was causing much talk," Donohue said, according to the July 27, 1938, Rockford Register-Republic. By this time, other dial painters in New Jersey and Illinois had also become sick and died.

Donohue's maladies increased and worsened. She lost half of her body weight. Parts of her jaw fell out. She couldn't eat and became nearly bedridden. A local doctor couldn't diagnose her but denied that Donohue had radium poisoning. Later, a Chicago doctor confirmed she did. Donohue and some of the other ailing dial painters (one had her arm amputated) decided to sue. They became known as "the society of the living dead," reported on April 6, 1938, in Springfield Illinois State Journal. Their first effort failed. Then Illinois passed the Illinois Occupational Disease Act because of the women, according to Moore.  

The "society" tried again but had trouble getting a lawyer. Eventually, they found Leonard Grossman in Chicago. "My father had been working in the area of workers comp for some time," says Leonard Grossman Jr., Grossman's son and a retired attorney in River Forest. "Workers' rights were a major issue for him. He was asked, from what I understand, to take the case by Clarence Darrow, who was one of his heroes." 

Grossman Sr. took the case to the Illinois Industrial Commission. His clients were "quite poor, that was one reason they were suing," so he handled their case for free, according to his son. During the trial, the "emaciated" Donohue, as of February 11, 1938, Rockford Register-Republic called the young wife and mother of two, learned from a doctor that her condition was fatal and collapsed. The trial was continued at her home because she was too weak to travel. In his closing brief, Grossman Sr. said Radium Dial had denied the women's requests to see their physical examination results, had produced no witnesses to contradict the workers' testimony and had admitted that radium was a poison, then denied it. He called the company a "predator" and said the radium would "bombard through Donohue's very casket like it wrecked and destroyed her jaw bone and her hip."

The women won. But "at great personal cost," says Moore, who spent a month in Ottawa talking to locals and doing research. "The town didn't really want to acknowledge what had happened. That was certainly true in the time the women were prosecuting the case. There's evidence I've seen in their letters that their neighbors, the clergy, and business people kind of shunned them." It was the Great Depression, and Radium Dial was providing well-paying jobs. Locals "kind of wanted the women to put up and shut up," she says.

Although they had won, the women's individual financial awards were fairly small. "The company only had to pay $10,000 to the women, collectively, because it fled the state and started a business in New York," Moore says. "There was no way the Illinois Industrial Commission could reach across state lines and grab those assets." Some of the women got nothing. Radium Dial unsuccessfully appealed the decision many times, up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Donohue died before the appeals were finished. "She weighed less than 60 pounds," Moore wrote.

Radium Dial's president, Joseph Kelly, was ousted in 1934. He opened another company to produce radium clock dials. Halm says he called it "Luminous Processes" and located it in Ottawa, just a "few blocks away" from Radium Dial. "They hired a lot of the same girls." Radium Dial went out of business.

Luminous hummed along for decades, until 1976, according to Clark's book. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission fined it that year for having radiation levels "1,666 times" the allowable amount. After failing to make the necessary improvements, Luminous closed. April 2, 1984, a United Press International article, which called the company a "death factory," reported that former workers were suing the company; cancer ran high among the former dial painters. "To escape financial liability for environmental pollution and industrial diseases, Luminous Processes shuffled corporate assets into other holdings, in much the same way that Radium Dial had in the 1930s," Clark wrote.

In 1978, the same year Luminous Processes closed in Ottawa, Peg Looney's body was exhumed. Earlier, when the Cold War threatened nuclear attacks, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission began to study radiation's effects on humans. Dial painters, living and dead, were perfect study subjects. Looney's family gave permission for her body to be exhumed and researched by Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont for the study. "The family was told that they brought her body back encased in lead because she was still so radioactive," Halm says. Halm's mother had saved one of Looney's white gloves that Halm liked to try on occasionally. "She threw it away. She was afraid it was contaminated."

Looney and the other ill-fated dial painters had helped start a "movement that ultimately led, not until 1971, to the adoption of the federal OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) Act, which was the big change in having federal workers' safety laws," Grossman Jr. says. He worked for the U.S. Department of Labor for 30 years on workers' rights cases.

He adds that the dial painter's case was very important to his father. "He talked about the frailty, particularly of Catherine Donohue, and the strength of the other girls in supporting her. One of the girls gave him a little piece of wood that looked like a chess pawn with a band of radium painted around it. It was so tiny it wasn't dangerous, but it still had a faint glow when I was a kid."

Grossman Jr. believes their case has lessons for today: "In my work with the Department of Labor, employers make the same kinds of arguments that they made in the Radium Dial case. They say, 'We would never harm our employees. This process is not harmful…' The battle has to keep being won over and over and over."

"It's so easy in our day, 100 years on from the time when the radium girls' story first started happening, to say our health and safety (are) just red tape, bureaucracy, getting in the way of companies' profits," says Moore. "The radium girls' story is a kind of warning call from history that lest we forget, we will repeat the same mistakes."

One day, over 40 years ago, Grossman Jr. recalls getting a call out of the blue. "The voice on the other end said, 'Is this attorney, Grossman?' I said, 'That was my father.' She said, 'Well, I'm one of the descendants of Catherine Donohue, and I just wanted to thank him.'"

In 2011, thanks to an idea from local high schooler Madeline Piller, Ottawa erected a sculpture to honor its radium girls.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Contributor Tara McClellan McAndrew

The History of Chicago Boarding Houses.

Residential boarding arrangements in the Chicago area are at least as old as the Fort Dearborn trading settlement taverns. During Chicago's early boom years, when housing facilities lagged behind population growth, many visitors and newcomers found lodging and meals in the households of private citizens.

By the 1880s, boarding was an established way of life. Private boarding houses typically consisted of a married couple (with or without children) who kept several boarders, generally single, unrelated individuals. While married couples occasionally boarded, families with children rarely lived in boarding houses.

Women usually took primary responsibility for borders. For many women, keeping boarders and lodgers was a readily available way to earn money that permitted a flexible schedule and was compatible with caring for children. A married woman's income from boarding was often more reliable than her husband's income and could well be the primary income for the household. Keeping borders was also a source of income for some widows and mature single women.

Chicago Boarding House, 1890s.
A Chronology of Early Chicago Area Hotels.

For many landlords and boarders, the household intimacy of boarding was part of its appeal. Boarders took their meals within the household and often participated in family activities. Boarding house residents met daily in the shared dining room and parlor spaces. Late-nineteenth-century reformers approved the family environment of boarding houses, which they felt was a welcome social restraint on boarders.

Native-born white and negro Americans often lived in boarding houses when they were single and new to the city. After the 1880s, more and more single young women and men were employed in clerical jobs in the new skyscrapers, and many lived in boarding houses.

H.H. Holmes Murder Castle (the arrow is the front entrance), circa 1893.

Boarding was more prevalent among immigrants than native-born in early twentieth-century Chicago and other large cities. Boarding provided a cultural haven for homesick new immigrants who sought out households where they could speak their native tongues. Housing arrangements were often made through informal networks rather than public advertising.

The Transit House, 43rd and Halsted, Chicago, (1868). This boarding house served the visitors and patrons of the Union Stock Yards.

Larger and more commercial boarding houses existed in outlying industrial areas, such as near suburban railroad stops. Workers shared bedding in some more crowded arrangements and slept in shifts in a "hotbed." In some working-class boarding houses, each boarder's food was purchased and cooked separately. In other situations, residents themselves took turns cooking.

Notice the building's main entrance has been moved to the second floor because Chicago raised the street level to improve water drainage, raising the streets out of the mud in 1858.

Well before 1900, other arrangements began to replace boarding. Many tenants preferred to lodge without common meals or to live in larger, more anonymous rooming houses, where a "light housekeeping room" included a gas fixture for cooking on a single burner. Residents could keep their own hours in a rooming house, enjoy greater privacy, and entertain guests more easily.

Packingtown (Back of the Yards Neighborhood), Chicago.

Landlords, too, could prefer lodgers to boarders for many of the same reasons. Boardinghouse families began to desire their privacy to the affective ties of an extensive surrogate family. 

The decline of boarding could be seen as a parallel to the transformation of the semipublic "parlor" or front room (frunchroom in Chicagoese) into the twentieth-century private "living room."

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

The Pullman Building at Michigan and Adams Tip Top Inn and Black Cat Inn Restaurants, Chicago.

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In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY

When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:

• The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.

Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:

• "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
• "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
• "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM —

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.

 

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As the massively solid Pullman Building at 79 East Adams Street was under construction on Michigan Avenue in 1884, Adolph Hieronymus traveled to Chicago from his native Germany. Within a few years, he would run a renowned restaurant on the building’s top floor.

The Pullman Palace Car Company (established in 1862) was first located in the Tremont House at 92 Lake Street in February of 1867. The firm moved in 1868 to offices at Randolph and the Lake, a fortuitous move. The building was close to the rail lines running along the lakefront, and a rail siding ran next to the building. 

The day after the Great Chicago Fire, Pullman quickly moved what he could save to stables at 18th Street, where business presumably carried on via the Illinois Central tracks. Between 1871 and 1884, Pullman's primary offices were located on the east side of Michigan Avenue south of 18th Street and later in the old Peoples Gas building at 122 South Michigan Avenue, the site which is still the site of the Peoples Gas building.

A new fire-proof building was built as the new headquarters of the Pullman Palace Car Company. It was completed in 1885 at the southwest corner of Michigan Avenue and Adams Street. 

When owner George Pullman died in 1897, Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham's son, filled in as the acting president. His role transformed into a permanent one in 1901. He resigned in 1911, citing health concerns. Lincoln remained involved as the chairman of the board, a position he held until 1922.

The Pullman Company was renamed on December 30, 1899, several years after the death of George Mortimore Pullman (1831-1897), and the headquarters remained in the Pullman Building until 1948, after which offices were moved to the Merchandise Mart.

When the imposing building was completed, the company occupied two and a one-half of its nine floors. At the same time, the rest of the space was rented for 125 offices and 75 apartments, which were known as “bachelor apartments,” probably because it lacked anything but the most rudimentary cooking facilities.

George Pullman's office was located on the ninth floor, just below the flag-pole-topped corner turret. The offices of the company were located elsewhere in the building.

The Pullman company ran its own restaurant, "The Albion, " for the first few years," on the 9th floor. It was considered advanced, at the time, to locate restaurants on top floors so that cooking odors would not drift throughout the building. In addition, diners at The Albion, and later the Tip Top Inn restaurant, had excellent views of Lake Michigan.

The Corner of Michigan Avenue and Adams Street, Chicago.

During the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, Adolph Hieronymus left his job as the chef at the Palmer House. He took over the Pullman building restaurant, renaming it the Tip Top Inn. Under his management, it became one of Chicago’s best gourmet restaurants, hosting society figures and professional organizations. Until the Pullman company expanded its offices onto all eight floors below the restaurant, the men living in the 75 apartments on the upper floors were also steady customers of the Inn, often having meals sent down to them.

The space occupied by the Tip Top Inn was divided into a bewildering number of rooms, at least five and maybe more at once. Each had its own decorating scheme. Over the years – but surely not simultaneously — there were the Colonial Room, the Nursery, the Whist Room, the Charles Dickens Corner, the Flemish Room, the French Room, the Italian Room, the Garden Room, and the Grill Room. The Whist Room was decorated with enlarged playing cards and lanterns with spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. The lantern and suits also decorated the Inn’s china and menus.

The Colonial Room

The Whist Room

The French Room

Mr. Hieronymus employs negro waiters, and many people wonder how he gives such good service to negroes. In reply to this subject, Hieronymus said:

“I have tried to be a friend of the negro in this business. and have always employed them. It is in the Palmer House and The Tip Top Inn that the negro has held his position all these years in Chicago. I have their work systematized. Each waiter knows his station and what he has to do, arid each station has its captain, who is my representative, and I am always accessible. There is discipline, but no bad language. Every employee must be self-respecting and a credit to the establishment. The waiters appreciate the treatment and are loyal. It is the same way with the cooks; they are loyal, and have time and again given evidence of it. The policy here is to minimize waste. The high cost of living today is due in a large measure to waste, not alone in material, but in time."

Hieronymus was employee-centric and compensated his entire staff better than other local fine-dining restaurants. The meals were expensive for the time period, and the waiters made an excellent living on tips.

A single tenant who had a meal sent down to his apartment might order; Tomato Crab Cumbo soup, Allice Salad, Fillet of Sea Bass, Peach a la Bellevue, and French Drip Coffee paid $2.95  in 1920 ($40.25 today).

Tip Top Inn Partial Menu - In 1920, $1 = $13.65 today.

Perhaps to attract new customers, Hieronymus created an associated restaurant on the 9th floor called "The Black Cat Inn," with somewhat lower prices than the Tip Top Inn and a menu featuring prix fixe meals (fixed price).

The Tip Top Inn and The Black Cat Inn occupy the entire top floor of the Pullman Building. The Black Cat Restaurant takes the west wing of the building and is operated with less overhead for service than The Tip Top Inn; consequently, the bill-of-fare prices are lower. 

There was a new departure in service in the Black Cat Inn in that negro waitresses were employed. These young women had been carefully trained, serving a sort of apprenticeship as bus girls for some months before advanced to waiters. They are intelligent, respectful, clean, and work side by side with the negro waiters. Hieronymus watched them work for half an hour, and they gave satisfactory service. 

The Black Cat Inn. (c.1910)

Negro waitresses served in restaurants far less often than negro men. The Tip Top Inn, just like the Albion and the Pullman dining cars, had always been staffed with negro waiters, some of whom worked there for decades. It was said that anyone who worked at the Tip Top could find employment in any restaurant across the country. 

In the book “Black Bolshevik,” author Harry Haywood (the son of former slaves who became a leading member of the Communist Party and a pioneering theoretician on the negro struggle. Originally published in 1978) wrote in his autobiography that he quickly worked his way up from Tip Top Inn busboy to a waiter and then landed jobs on the ultra-modern Twentieth-Century Limited train and with Chicago’s Sherman Hotel and Palmer House.

By 1931 when the Tip Top Inn restaurant closed, it was regarded as an old-fashioned holdover from a previous era. Its extensive menu of specialties, such as Stuffed Whitefish with Crabmeat, Suzettes Tip Top, and Alice Salad[1], some of the more than 100 dishes created by Hieronymus, was no longer in vogue. 

The outlawing of alcoholic beverages proved challenging to the Tip Top Inn, as it did to other leading Chicago restaurants of the pre-Prohibition era, such as Rector’s, the Edelweiss, and the Hofbrau, all of which would go under before the ban on selling alcohol ended. 

Aside from Prohibition (1920-1933), Hieronymus attributed the restaurant’s demise to the death of gourmet dining. Hieronymus died in 1932, but he and his restaurant were remembered by Chicagoans for decades. 

The Pullman Building was demolished in 1956.

INDEX TO MY ILLINOIS AND CHICAGO FOOD & RESTAURANT ARTICLES.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

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[1] Salade Alice (Alice Salad) Recipe:

Ingredients: 

• Medium-sized red dessert (sweet) apples
• Lemon juice
• Apple balls cut with a very small vegetable ball-cutter
• Redcurrants
• Almonds or walnuts
• Salt
• Cream
• Lettuce

Directions:

• Cut the apples into 4 or 6 wedges and remove some of the fruit, making a bowl. 
• Rub the inside of the apple with lemon juice to prevent it from discoloring. 
• Mix the apple balls, redcurrants, and chopped nuts. 
• Sprinkle with salt and lemon juice and bind with the cream. 
• Fill the apple bowls and serve on bibb lettuce.