Melanie Marnich's 'These Shining Lives' and the Dial Painters

In These Shining Lives, Melanie Marnich writes about something I wasn’t aware of until I read the play: The exposure of dial-painters to radium in the early decades of the twentieth century. 

Warren Winkelstein, Jr. of the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley reiterates what he has read about the incident. “Most epidemiologists are conversant with the major American epidemiologic ‘events’ of the 20th century,” Winkelstein writes, “namely, the poliomyelitis epidemic of 1916, the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, the ischemic heart disease and lung cancer epidemics of the last half of the 20th century, and the pandemic of human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome that began in the 1980s and continues into the 21st century.  However, there are many ‘lesser,’ but still important occurrences about which many may wish to be informed. Such an event is the saga of the radium dial painters.”  Winkelstein writes that Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium and shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics with Henri Becquerel, who had discovered the radioactivity of elemental uranium.  Soon the Curies “observed with ‘amazement and delight’ that radium glowed in the dark.”  In 1902, William J. Hammer, an American electrical engineer, used small amounts of radium to invent paint for watches and scientific instruments so that people could use them in the dark.  Radium cost $225,000 an ounce, so “Hammer did not pursue the commercial potential of his discovery in America” (290).  But radium-painted watch dials quickly gained popularity in Europe, especially in Switzerland.  In 1914, the first major company in the US to manufacture these dials was established in Newark, New Jersey.  When the US entered World War I in 1917, there arose a great demand for various radium-treated devices.  There also arose a demand for workers to manufacture these devices.  Many young women became dial painters.  They applied the radium paint to these objects with fine-tipped brushes, and since they were paid based on how many dials they painted, they often pointed the tips of their brushes with their tongues to make it easier to apply the paint to the dials.  Because of this, they absorbed the radium over time.  In the 1920s it became noticeable that many of these dial painters were dying young and had a variety of illnesses. Often they had “disfiguring cancers and osteomyelitis [(bone infection)] of the upper and lower jaw” (290-291).

       Catherine Donohue, the protagonist of These Shining Lives, was a real person.  Marnich didn’t invent this person or change her name when she recreated these events in the play.  Catherine was one of the workers affected by radium poisoning.  She reportedly worked at Radium Dial in Ottawa from 1922 to 1931 for several years before she started to have pains in the bones of her left leg.  By 1931, she was limping so pronouncedly that her company dismissed her on the grounds that her “physical condition was frightening other employees.”

  At first doctors said they thought Catherine had rheumatism, but then she went to Chicago and found out that her illness was indeed radium-related.  Donohue’s cousin, Agnes Miller, said that she and her family visited Catherine weekly after Catherine was ill, but Agnes had to wait in the car.  “[Catherine] was falling apart from the radium,” said Agnes. “They didn’t want us to see her. They said she looked so terrible.”  Jim Donohue, a relation, saw Catherine, and he said, “She glowed in the night.  You could see every bone in her body” (Szuda).

       Physician and forensic pathologist Harrison S. Martland, chief medical examiner of Essex County, New Jersey, was not the first person to suggest that the dial painters’ illnesses were caused by their exposure to radium (a team from Harvard University proposed it first), but he “carried out the most extensive clinical investigations of affected dial painters and established the cause of their afflictions as ‘radium poisoning’.”  Although the statistics “provided overwhelming support for the causal role of radium poisoning,” is not known exactly how many dial painters died from it.  At least a few hundred of these deaths were documented, but judging by how many people were dial painters, the actual number of deaths was likely much higher.   The last documented dial worker died in 1983 (Winkelstein, 291).

        In 1938, Catherine Donohue helped file a class action lawsuit against Radium Dial. She was thirty-five years old and weighed seventy-one pounds when she gave her testimony at the Industrial Commission hearing.  She was so ill that she had to be carried into the courtroom.  During her testimony, she brought out a small jewelry box containing two pieces of her jawbone.
  Marnich includes this event in These Shining Lives:

REPORTER 2:  Shortly before her testimony ended, Mrs. Donohue took out of her purse a small jewelry box.  (Catherine reveals a small box, holds it out.)

GROSSMAN:  Can you tell the courtroom what exactly is in this box, Mrs. Donohue?

CATHERINE:  Two pieces of bone.

JUDGE 2:  Bones of what, Mrs. Donohue?

CATHERINE:  They’re mine.  They were removed from my jaw.  (Marnich, These Shining Lives, 63.)

        Individuals and groups sought compensation for their illnesses, but even though there were a few small settlements, it was not effective because the industry continually denied culpability. “I won my case six times,” Catherine says in the play.  “The Radium Dial Company appealed six times.  After losing all six, the company appealed one last time, to the United States Supreme Court.  Finally—” the line changes to Frances, here: “The Illinois Industrial Commission awarded Catherine $5,661 on July 6, 1938.”  The line changes to Pearl: “She died 21 days later.” Then Charlotte: “After fighting the company for seven years” (Marnich, These Shining Lives, 65).

       Before she died, Catherine wrote a letter to Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, asking for a novena to save her.

  “The doctors tell me I will die,” she wrote, “but I mustn’t. I have too much to live for—a husband who loves me and two children I adore. . .They say nothing can save me—nothing but a miracle.”

  Catherine’s son, Tom, later died of cancer, and her daughter, Mary Jane, “never developed quite right” according to Agnes Miller.

  “She was real small,” Agnes said.  “She was only about [4 feet, 10 inches].  She was kind of slow with her school work.”  Agnes’s sister-in-law, Jill Miller, died in 1965 of cancer caused by radium exposure.  Agnes estimates that her sister worked at a company called Luminous Processes for ten years (Szuda).



       The lawsuits did, however, cause “considerable public outcry and certainly influenced the establishment of standards for industrial exposure to ionizing radiation” (Winkelstein, 291).  In the play, Frances says, “[Catherine’s] case changed Illinois law so that companies could finally be held responsible for the safety of their workers.”  Then Pearl says, “She was a test.”  Then Charlotte: “She was an experiment”  (Marnich, These Shining Lives, 65).

        Because many of the events in the play occurred in history, Marnich describes These Shining Lives as being “a work of creative nonfiction” (Marnich, These Shining Lives, 5).  Marnich constructs relationships between Catherine and her coworkers in order to convey her delight of being able to work and the horror of her work-related illness.  It is a play that causes me to think about what happened to these women, and because I have now learned about it, I will never forget about it.  There are other issues in history and in current events that deserve a voice onstage, and I believe it is well within a playwright’s interest to mention them so that no one forgets them or allows them to reoccur. 

Works Cited

Marnich, Melanie.  These Shining Lives. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2010.

Szuda, Stephanie. “Too Ill to Visit.” The Times.  11/17/2010.  Web.  December, 2010.

Winkelstein, Warren. “Book Review: Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy by Ross Mullner.” American Journal of Epidemiology.  155.3 (2002): 290-291.  Web. December 2010.

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