Illinois Town to Honor Memory of ‘Radium Girls’ Poisoned at Work

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6876/illinois_town_to_honor_the_memory_of_radium_girls_poisoned_at_work/

Thursday Jan 20, 2011 12:33 pm

By Lindsay Beyerstein

The town of Ottawa, Ill., is banding together to honor the memories of watch dial painters who were poisoned by a radium paint in the town during the 1920s and 1930s.


The Orange, N.J., radium dial factory in the mid-1920s. (Courtesy Argonne National Labs via Radford University)


The campaign to build a monument in their honor is being spearheaded by Madeline Piller, 17, a local high school senior who became captivated by the story of the "Radium Girls" while working on a play about their story as part of an 8th grade history project.

The Peoria chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) awarded Piller its Young Feminist Award in 2007 for her work. When Piller got back from Peoria, she started raising $40,000 to erect the first monument to the Radium Girls in her home town. Laborers Local Union 393 has contributed $7,000 to the project so far.

Piller's father, William, is a sculptor who has donated most of the labor to make the bronze statue of a young dial painter. The memorial will be erected on the site of a former dial painting plant, on a plot of land donated by the city. If all goes according to plan, the monument will be unveiled on April 28, Workers' Memorial Day.

The U.S. Radium Corporation started making glowing watches in Ottawa in 1922. Instructors at the Ottawa Radium Dial Studio, as the plant was known, taught the girls to "tip" their camel hair brushes between their lips to maintain a fine point. It was a technique borrowed from the china painting industry.

Brush-sucking was probably an unsafe way to hand paint china, but with radium the technique became a death sentence.

The women were told that the paint—a mixture of glue, water, and radium powder—was harmless. An instructor once made a show of swallowing some just to prove the point. The girls entertained themselves by playing with the "harmless" paint, decorating their nails and teeth with the luminous mixture.

FULL story at link.

[newscott]

1. I think this happened in my hometown too.

Brockton MA.

[Possumpoint]

2. Thanks For Sharing

That's a piece of history that I've never heard before.

[derby378]

3. There were also a lot of quack radium cures being marketed then, too

One of them was called Radithor, water that was impregnated with radium for drinking. The government finally began to move against this stuff when this one guy in New England drank a bunch of bottles of Radithor, only to watch half his face drop off before he died a slow, painful death.

[DoBotherMe]

4. A nice remembrance for them

I saw a documentary about the girls that included an interview with a survivor. Quite heartbreaking. Dana ; )