The Radium Girls

this is almost likely the delta variant. There's no way to prove that because I've done a lot of research there. They're only testing for variants and like specific places than using statistics to like blow that out to the whole mhmm. But it is the it just like this week it was breaking news that it dropped from about the vaccine effective to against the delta variant. Yeah, I mean that would that alone would make me suspect that's what it is. Yeah,

And it's the most dominant strain. It's most likely to bust the vaccine. Uh. I went out of town over the weekend with friends and like of that group have COVID now so and they were vaxed. So, oh my god, it is no joke. Everyone, We're not out of the woods. Please keep taking it seriously. Please get vaccinated if you haven't, And if you can use this, I know we're probably preaching to the choir mainly, but if you can use this example to try and convince someone you love to

get vaccinated that is hesitant, then that's why I'm saying this. Well, Chuck, I know Jerry would never come on and say this, but we're very very glad that you're doing okay, and we love you very much. We're very proud of you. Jerry doesn't express herself emotionally like that, not like you do.

Know I'm well known for that kind of thing. But the good news and the final reason I mentioned it is is also get vaccinated because it is doing at least part of its job, and that I had a couple of days of feeling pretty bad with a cold and have had four days now and feeling pretty good, and it is it is doing its job and keeping it very mild. And uh, I took off a couple of categories where if I wasn't vaccinated, it may not

be so mild. Yeah, you know that. That's why you're l u c k y. You ain't got no alum bi you lucky? All right, Well, now we can talk about some not so lucky young women. That's true. I'm hats off to you for that. P. S A too. By the way, as I never finished, I never finished, Chuck, there's Jerry Jerome Roland over there. Stuff you should not. That's right. So now you can take over my former duties of introing the episode. Well, I mean, it's just funny.

This is another are not funny. But I feel like we're diving more and more into sort of the horrors of not only just the workplace. But I feel like we've covered a lot more over the past couple of years, these situations in America's history where corporations have tried to just bury things that made them look bad at the expense and the lives of people that work for them. Yeah, we've been examining how terrible life is without government regulations.

That's right. Another p s A. It's true. And and like you said, we're talking about some unfortunate women who um were gravely mistreated in part because of like the place and time that they occupied. But also because they were women, and because there were again no workplace safety laws or anything like that. Um. But they despite you know,

everything that was stacked against them, including things like their gender. Um. They they basically rose up and and established some of the first successful lawsuits against employers for basically workplace abuse or at the very least workplace um dereliction of duty of the employer to look out for workers safety. I think that's the technical way to put it. Yeah, and you know, we're talking about the Radium Girls, and uh,

there was a movie about this. It's not we we loved the hundreds of emails about the Ghost of how do you pronounce it again? The Brotherhood of the Beast, Brotherhood of the Wolf. That was the name of the movie. And apparently I'm the only ship. Yeah, the only person who has never seen that movie. Yeah. Same here, same here, Like I think we are the only two. I don't. I can't remember getting more emails about a single thing

than that one. Yeah, they're literally still coming in and I uh, I do remember once I saw the trailer, was like, oh, I know that movie a little bit, but I didn't know this worry. But there was a Radium Girls movie from three years ago that I sort of half watched today. Um, it's I don't want to I don't want to disparage anyone because filmmakers tried to get the word out about an important event in history. But I'll just say that the Roger Ebert dot com

website gave it one and a half stars. And that's the only thing I'll say out of how many stars, Wow, it was not very You got a one and a half percent? That is wow. Yeah, I I I did not watch that one. I haven't read the book yet either.

But um, one of the problems with taking up something like this is, like it was the same thing with Henriett Alas when we did our episode of Kila Cells, where it's it's really hard to kind of dig past the wall of journalism surrounding like the release of a popular book and anything that is written in that book,

and that books take on the story. All of that stuff basically be ums it like that's it, that's that's just that, that's this person said this and this person played this role, and you know it just becomes like the story, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Fortunately for Radium Girls. And I'm not taking away from Kate Moore's book at all. Um, from everything I've seen, it was extremely well researched and like it did a really great job of bringing this to the to the

Forefront team. Um. But fortunately there's also like a lot of scholarship that was written and researched before that that still exists on the internet, so you can kind of like get into some other details too. Besides, well, the book said this, and the book said that, and then also fortunately we had our buddy Dave Ruse help us out with some research too, and Dave hates books, he does,

He's always burning books now. David, in fact, is the one that said we should definitely mention Kate Moore's seventeen book The Radium Girls, that we should have a sound effect for Colin's. Now, what if we had, like, um, one of those in studio chorus as they go colon, they're colon. Be great? Okay, we need a barbershop quartet, Yeah, that'd be good. The Radium Girls in search sound effect The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Yes, but not one,

but two punts the Dark Story America's Shining Women. So the whole thing about Radium and the Radium Girls, and that's what the press dubbed them. They also, I believe, called themselves the Society of the Living Dead, which is some pretty serious gallows humored considering like the state in

shape that they were in. Um. They they were. Um. They kind of came out of this era where Radium, like the nineteen teens, the early nineties, the first the first Radium Girls are actually two sets, as we'll see, but they came out as era where three Radium was there three. Yeah, there was another factory that we're not even gonna have time to talk about. Okay, well, let's say there's what what decade was that one. I think

it was the same decade. I think it was just another factory that you know, we just can't do a two hour show, I got you. So they well we're

well on our way already. So um. But they existed in a in an era where radium was seen as this thing that was just this amazing cure, all tonic, a wonder of nature that was um put in all sorts of different products from cigarettes to condoms to there's a water called Rata thor that was irradiated water, that radioactive water that you would drink to get the radioactivity in your body, because it was you know, thought to give you um like health, energy, vitalization, cure all sorts

of diseases. It said that it bathed the stomach and liquid sunshine and all of this was pretty new stuff because it wasn't um more than two decades before, uh that Marie Curry and Pierre Cury Um discovered radium in the first place. Back. Yeah, I mean they discovered it,

and I think they even named it. I think Latin radius means ray, and they knew that it emitted rays of energy even at that time, and you know, or very early on, they started using radiation to try and help treat cancer, Like hey, let's put this in a lead box and cut a hole in it and then put that whole over the human body, like aiming it towards where a tumor might be. Like very obviously rudimentary stuff, and you have to make up boop boopo sound the whole time. That was kind of one of the roles

of the technician at the time, that's right, Uh. And you should have seen the audition tapes. Some people played zero rhythm. It would be like, Pep'm sorry, you're well qualified, but uh so Cury. Actually she died um in four from a plastic anemia, which is a bone marrow disorder

caused by radiation exposure. So they knew that it was dangerous and uh but it was still like like you said, it was in the you know, it was known as a cure for the living dead in that ratath or water, and I mean basically used for everything from gout to fatigue. And it was just one of those crazy times in American history where now we look back and we're like, this is just nuts. But back then they didn't know well.

So there were two tacks. From what I could tell, there was the beginnings of um academic scholarship, and both of the curies had some sort of suspicion, and there was this idea that there was easily you could be exposed to too much. You didn't want to have too much radium, but a little bit was good for you. But then there was also this academic tack that was like, no, this stuff might not be good at all, like we

should really be careful with this. But the popular, the popular idea of it read in the newspapers, or you know, maybe even what your doctor thought about it. Um all came from radium research that was almost exclusively underwritten and in a lot of cases carried out by companies that

made their money off of radium. Like they were just touting this stuff as an amazing wonder element basically um and and so there was like almost these two overlapping worlds that weren't connected at the time in our understanding of radium in like the nineteen teens and nineteen twenties, right, So one of the other kind of cool and interesting things about radium is that it can make things glow

in the dark. And glow in the dark is very sort of like who cares now, it's still kind of fun, But in the nineteen twenties, glow in the dark was a very big deal. It was basically the future and kind of space age. And if you had a glow in the dark watch or a glow in the dark clock, then you felt cool basically because you could see that

thing in the dark. And so of course these companies wanted to start painting watch faces and clocks with radium, and they've got young women and sometimes even girls as young as like fourteen years old to do this stuff. Yeah, I think the first company at first they were working on military clocks and military dials like you might put

in an airplane or something. And the first company I think that was established to do this was United States Radium back in nineteen sixteen in New Jersey, Orange, New Jersey, I think. And like you said, they hired young girls, very very young girls. Um. I think the oldest one I saw by far was twenty eight, but for the most part they were in their teens to early early twenties. And this was like a really big deal job like

that was very highly paying. I think they were in the women who painted radium or watch dials with radium paint. We're in the top five percent of earner is in America at the time. This is a factory job. Yeah. And then also its prestigious to from what I saw, Yeah, the movies and you know, God, I don't know if it's accurate or not. I'm gonna say what the movie said. The movie said that they were paid a penny per face, and a high earner could crank out two day, So

that's about to two dollars a day. Okay, so that's like a million dollars today. I think that's also what the movie said, Well a million dollars double that, and that's about what a gram of radium cost. Uh yeah, and today's dollars that is, I think it's like a hundred grand a graham in the nineties for a graham

of radium. So they were they were they were themselves highly paid, but they also, um, we're working with what was at the time the most expensive material on Earth um, and it makes sense that it would be so expensive, Like radium is really rare. It's super radioactive, but it's really um. It occurs in very small amounts, which kind of let you realize how radioactive it is. That you know,

it's a daughter isotope of uranium. Whereas uranium decays, one of the things that it becomes is is radium UM and in uranium or I think the curies when they first um discovered radium, they they found that after they took uranium out of this or pitch blend, which we talked about in the uranium mining episode, that the pitch blend was still radioactive, So like what else is in here?

And out of ten tons of uranium or they managed to extract one milligram, So it would make sense, especially at the time, that it would cost a couple million dollars for a single gram of that stuff. Yeah, and so these girls and young women were, uh, this stuff was getting in their hair, it was getting on their clothes. Um. It was sort of a badge of honor because you would go out that night dancing or something and you would glow a little bit. Uh. They would even purposely

put it on their teeth. Sometimes they were called ghost girls, and it was it was. It wasn't a fad in that it was widespread because only a select few like had their hands on it. But I think that's one of the reason the girls like these jobs is because they could go out and like attract attention because they had this glow in their hair and on their dresses. Yeah.

I think also people knew that they were working with radium, and radium at the time was like um, Missy Elliott mixed with ecstasy back in the late nineties, like as cool as it got, you know what I mean? Goodness, thanks, I'm just trying out some new stuff. How's it going. It's good. In fact, I think maybe we should take a break. I need to re examine that analogy so

I can really fully grasp it. All right, you just let it sink a buddy, So, Chuck, I gotta say before we start back again, you don't seem like you have COVID. Are you faking? I'm not faking. Uh, I am a little spacey though. You're doing great. I mean you've researched an episode of stuff you should know, probably the most challenging podcast on the planet, and you're presenting it like just like an ace. So hats off to you again. Well, thanks man, you got it. So um.

You were saying before that the radium girls were covered in um radioactive dust, and they were because they would mix their own paint, uh, And they worked with a specific kind of paint called un Dark. It was a proprietary blend where they would mix them um. They would basically mix it with water and a little bit of solvent and create their own paint from this radium dust. So radium dust was like all over the place, which

is bad enough. You know, you can get pretty radioactive for me exposed radium radium dust like that, but it was far far worse in those working conditions because they were actually ingesting the radium through the paint as well. Yeah.

I mean this is where if you think this already sounds like a workplace violation, this is where it just gets bonkers because they would actually, you know, if you're painting one millimeter wide number on a watch, uh, and I think the watch faces themselves were like three and a half centimeters, you have to have a tiny little

point on the end of that paint brush. And painters know one way you can achieve this is something called lip pointing, which is when you dip the the brush and the paint, in this case radium, and then you put it in your mouth and just sort of press it down with your lips to make that point finer. And they were doing this with radium. They were literally ingesting, like orally ingesting radium in their mouths, which means orally and in inviting cancer into their bodies unknowingly, yes, which

is some pretty um. I mean, that's not good, like when you're ingesting the paint itself. Apparently, there was a guy who worked for Prudential, the insurance company back in published a paper. His name is fred Hoffman, Frederick Hoffman, and he calculated that, um, the radium girls who who painted these watch faces. Because of that lip pointing technique, they were ingesting something like one and three quarter grahams of this paint every day. It's a lot of money

had to lip point so much. It is a lot of money. From the viewpoint of the of the factory owners, you'd think they would have been like, no, we gotta stop that, because that is a lot of paint. But that's also a lot of radium that they were taking into And the big problem with that is not just that you know, it's getting inside of you now and it's burning a hole right through you. It's not really doing that. Radium is a an alkali earth metal, and it just so happens that calcium is also an alkali

earth metal into your bones. They're they're the same thing. Your body doesn't differentiate between the two, and we our bodies are set up to divert calcium basically from the bloodstream right to the bones to help build strong bones, you know, um, And we do the same thing with radium to our bodies too. So when you ingest radium, it enters your blood stream and it goes right to your bones and it sets about screwing you up big time. From that point on. Yeah, And apparently some of these

young women were saying, you know, they're asking questions. Early on, they were saying, like this, it's bad for you. Can it hurt you? Um? And the you know, the US Radium Corporation was I mean, they started covering up very early what was going on. They were doing their own research and they said and of course the people that

were making that radium water did the same thing. They would have They would hire out these private companies to do this research basically and say everything's fine, and said, you know, ingesting a little bit is just fine. It will pull a rose in your cheek and it's great. And I guess they just sort of full stop there. They didn't talk much about how much ingesting a graham every time you did that over time would be like

over a period of years. Um. I think in nineteen sixteen they put out their own publication UM from the Radium Publishing Company that said, uh, the physiological action of radium sounds not unlike a fairy tale, right, which is weird. And they said that the red blood cell count surges, um, so you you will actually kind of seem a little healthier. I couldn't find that anywhere. From what I saw you, Um, it causes hemo license, which is like the rupturing of

red blood cells. But um, this is the kind of stuff that like these publications were peddling and doctors in the public we're just taking it wholesale. Um. And that was where that idea that Radium was good for you came from, was from publications from people like the Radium Publishing Company. There was just a lot of credulity at the time, I guess, um, which is weird because this is also like one of the most avaricious periods in

American history as well. What does that mean? It means that like people were praying on other people for for profit and money, that like that you would do anything for a dollar, you know, avarice. Okay, makes sense. In fact, I will, man, I'll let that one slide. And I don't know if I've said this or not. I know Jerry wouldn't, but we're really glad you're doing that. Uh. And it's funny in that factory, they didn't say anything about the fact that, like, oh, you know, can this

be dangerous? Because I've noticed all the men that are working around Radium are wearing these big lead smocks and aprons, and uh, they're handling this stuff with ivory tipped tongs. What's when we're putting this in our mouth? And they're like, don't worry about that. Yeah, And it wasn't so at at Us Radium in Orange, New Jersey. It was it's it was part of the corporate culture to basically just

treat it really cavalierly. Like even the head chemist, um Edwin Lehman, who would pay dearly for his cavalierness, was recorded by an investigator who will talk about in a little bit um as as basically just handling blumps of radium or or like radi like radium powder without any kind of gloves, no protection, no lead apron anything, and just kind of just you know, scoffing at the idea that that it was it was, you know, dangerous. So you know, some people there knew that it was dangerous

and treated it so. But the corporate culture in that company and in particular was that, you know, don't be don't be ridiculous, who cares, Stop stop talking, stop asking questions kind of thing. Yeah, So this next part I'm going to issue a trigger warning because it's certainly got me with my tooth fears. So if you have dental

fears and tooth fears, uh, just be warned. Uh. This is from Kate Moore's book and it's about the very first I think the first young woman to fall ill at the U s r C. Her name was Molly. I don't know if it's Maggia or Maggia. And this is she was twenty four years old. She said she

felt like she was about ninety. Um, she had this really, I mean she ached all over, but she had this pain and her lower jaw specifically, and then eventually went to the dentist, had these um, these abscesses that were just oozing in her mouth, and her dentist tried to pull some of her teeth that were rotting, and a part of her jaw literally came out. And it says in in the book he removed it not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in the mouth and

lifting it out. Uh. And I think a few days later took out her entire lower jaw the same way, just pulled it out of her mouth. Yes, that's horrifying. And if you have what's known as dentophobia, you're probably on the floor right now. It may never go see a dentist again. It got me as well, man, when I was just like, this is not this is so wrong.

The crazy thing is is Molly Magia. She she lived for um I believe another year or so um with this increasing abscess and like the radium was sitting in her bones in this particular case, in her jaw and her teeth um and just decaying the tissue around it, the bone around it, and she just basically rotted from radiation poisoning from the inside of her jaw out. She suffered from abscesses and eventually died from an abscess. The this abscess apparently your whole the whole left side of

her face. The different abscesses grew into one mega abscess and it finally reached her jugular vein and just ate away at her jugular vein and she could no longer pump um, uh, pump pump blood from her heart. Yeah. That see now I sound like I have COVID the I mean, that is horrific as you can imagine. And it gets worse in that when her doctors were asked what their best guess was of the cause of death,

they blamed it on syphilis. The company jumps on this and says, and this was a big part of the movie. They basically start saying that these girls are are spreading syphilis around each other and that's what they're sick from. I think in the movie they called it v D of course, but um, it was you know, one part to sort of shame them into being quiet, and to say that in another part to just obviously, you know,

take the blame as far away from radium as possible. Men. Yeah, for real, so all you know, not to say in the in the doctor's defense, but they did. No one knew what what radium poisoning was at the time, right, So it's not like syphilis wasn't an entirely you know,

just bonkers diagnosis. But there was another thing I saw that that um, that they considered too, that just didn't make sense but had kind of come and gone before among match stick makers, UM, which was something called fossey jaw or phosphorus jaw, where you're you're like, if you were exposed to white white phosphorus, which matchmakers were, when you're making the head of a match. Um, it basically gets um absorbed into your jaw and rots your jaw.

So they had kind of seen something like this before, but not since like the early nineteenth century. It was much more prevalent in the eighteenth century, and they didn't think that these these women were working with phosphorus anyway,

So it was kind of baffling. But yeah, the idea that that you know, even if the doctor did naively or innocent, you know, say it was syphilis or something like that, the company very much jumped on that kind of thing to use it to paint that unflattering picture of the women who would go on to litigate this company. And it was totally that kind of a company and it was run by those kind of people for sure. US dial was yes. So twelve uh, and up to

this point, twelve of them died. Think about fifty of them were ill at this point, and they are still full steam ahead. They don't haul production at all. They don't even call for an investigation until nineteen when it leaks out to the press a little bit and they start to get, you know, some sort of bad press about what might be going on. So they commissioned an independent investigation that found out that there was definitely connection going on and that their exposure to radium is leading

to these illnesses and deaths. And they buried it and got their own, uh not dependent commission together they investigated and came back and said, oh, no, no, no, these young ladies are suffering from a hysterical condition brought on by coincidence. Yeah, and that was actually not even like a panel's opinion. That was um Arthur Rhoder, the president of us DIAL, that was his opinion. Yeah, that was his opinion of the whole thing, and that the independent

investigation was a legitimately independent investigation. It was led by Dr Cecil Drinker and his wife, Dr Katherine Drinker, who are both Harvard Harvard public health professors. And when they came up with these findings like yeah, this is this. These women are all dying horrible deaths from radiation poisoning from eating this paint because of this stupid lip pointing technique, UM, and the company did bury it. Not only UM did

they bury it. It's even worse than that. They took the Drinker's report and altered it so that it said that every girl is in perfect condition and then submitted it with the Drinker's name on it to the new Jersey Labor Department UM and like the drinkers had no idea. They also told the drinkers if they published their initial report, they would sue them that they've been working confidentially and UM, like I was saying, like it was just that kind

of company. They were just they would engage in dirty tricks. They would do some of the most underhanded stuff you can imagine, like they I've got one more anecdote, Chuck, this is gonna knock your socks off. They hired a UM industrial toxicologist named Frederick Flynn from Colombia to basically pose as a doctor to examine one of the UM the dial painters UM and basically tell her that her

health was fine. She was in fine shape. And they had a VP from U S. Di'll sit in and make it seem like he was a colleague of this person who she thought was a doctor who emphatically agreed and backed up his position. That's the kind of stuff us dial did. Reprehensible, agreed, Chuck. All right, so we should probably take another break and we'll talk about how everything changed a little bit right after this. Alright, So everything changed when a man got sick, and that's that's

basically the way it went. Ut six year old chemist at U s r C died of anemia and the Essex County Health Examiner, guy little figure in pretty prominently here going forward, Dr Harrison Martlin got involved and you know this is this is what it took. It took a man dying for them to sit up and pay attention. Um.

He launched an investigation. He it was. It was very sneaky. Actually, he actually secretly recruited the technical director from U s r C as a radiation expert, and his name was this is one of the best names we've ever said on the show, Dr sabin A von Sakaki m hm. And they took autopsied tissue from uh, some of the bone from these young women who had died or I'm sorry from the original chemists, and they analyzed it and they said, yeah, he's he is basically glowing with radiation. Yeah.

I have to say also, um, Dr von so Chalky or he Um was even more than just the technical director. He was the co founder of US Radium and he actually created the radium paint undark that the company used. So the idea of him basically turning on the company in order to get to the to the bottom of you know, what was going on. You know, I think that's pretty commendable in that sense. It is um he

got he in March, Markland got a Geiger counter. I think it was sort of an early crude version basically, and they started going around to the houses and in the hospitals where some of these young women were and everything was radioactive. Um. They tested employees at the plant that even weren't sick, they were radioactive. Basically, everyone that

worked there was radioactive, including uh Von Sakaki himself. He breathed into the thing and I think he registered the highest radioactive level of everybody and died within a few years from from jaw cancer. Yeah, at age forty. And the from what I saw also, if you took a Geiger counter to the grave site of um these people who worked at these factories still today, the Geiger counter would measure set off. It would be set off by the radioactivity coming from six six ft of earth separating

you and in the remains and that nuts, dude. It will do that for one thousand years. Wow. And supposedly the bodies are still glowing underground. I saw that one woman who worked at another one we'll talk about um Radium Dial company. She was exhumed to be examined UM for I think a lawsuit later on, and they found that she was so radioactive that when they reburied her, they buried her in a leadline coffin. Yeah, I mean

this is super radioactive, right. I think we've established that it's just hard to wrap your mind around how radioactive these people were, and it's crazy that they even live. Some of them live for you know, a few more years, like like um, Molly Magia, she died pretty quickly. The woman whose jaw came out, she she died within a couple of years. Some women lasted four or five, six,

even I think even seven years possibly. And the amount of radiation they were exposed to and the effects that it had on their body made from the time they got sick to the time they died just basically like

a living hell. Um and the fact that they're still radioactive today it really kind of drives home like how how painful that must have been for them, because apparently bone pain is not it's not like regular pain at all, Like you know, if your muscle hurts or joint hurts, you can just kind of like move your arm or something and starts to feel a little bit better. With bone pain, you can't do that. Nothing makes it feel better. It's just like constant pain. Uh. And that's what you

get when you have radium in your bones. So five of these women got together that we're still living obviously, and went to court, or they didn't go to court right away. It took a long time. It took a long time for them to get enough money together to hire attorneys because there wasn't anyone initially he would take these cases pro bono um and so it took years to raise the money to do this. And uh. One of the woman's name was Grace Fryar. She was basically

the leader of the factory workers. And she had to wear a back brace because her spine had basically rotted out from the inside and was crushed. She had twenty at least twenty surgeries on her jaw. Another woman's name was Albina Larisse. She had to still bursts and couldn't walk. Another woman was Katherine schalb Um. She I think her cousin died was another fellow worker there. And so they were like we have to do something here. Um. They were you know, they had all these medical bills, they

couldn't even basically pay rent. And finally, after a couple of years, managed to find an attorney who would take it on pro bono, and um, you know they did. They knew they didn't have long to live at this point, and it's not like they wanted some windfall of money. They just wanted to get by until they died, and they wanted to make sure that this didn't happen again. Yeah, and again. This is like new stuff basically where workers are like, these were unsafe working conditions. We're gonna see

our employer. This is pretty like groundbreaking. So initially the women asked for I think two fifty thou a piece um each for all five of them and their lawyer, UM Raymond Barry. He apparently was a really good lawyer

and really kind of fought the good fight for him. UM. And one of the ways that they were ultimately successful, because it's kind of an understatement to say that US Radium fought this lawsuit rather than settling UM, was that they recruited the press, basically, and in particular the editor of the New York World, The guy named Walter Littman, UM took up this cause, and like you know, at the time in the New York newspapers were like the

most important media organizations in the world, and the New York World was like one of the bigger ones. So it was like, you know, it was having like all of the twenty four hour networks on your side, drumming up public support for your cause, and that really helped them. But even in the end they didn't get anything even remotely close to that quarter of a million they were

asking for. So what the Radium Corporation did at first was they said, you know, in New Jersey, the law says that we only have to pay you anything if it's within the first two years of your exposure. And because it took so long for them to raise this money, it was beyond that point, which is just a pretty vile thing to do obviously. Um. Eventually they settled for ten thousand dollars each plus five i'm sorry, six hundred dollars a year for when they were alive, which was

only a few years for each of them. I think within five years all of them had passed away. Um. It was later exposed that the judge in the case was a stakeholder in U S r C. Which is really pretty dirty obviously. Uh. And then I think by fifty one UM, thirty years later, forty one of those original painters had died from different cancers. Yeah, not a single one of the original five litigants UM from the

lawsuit UM made it past age thirty eight. And that's like you have, by the way, a point one percent lifetime risk of developing bone cancer. Bone cancer is really rare, rare, Like you can get cancer in your bones if you have a different cancer that spreads to your bones. But to start out with bone cancer like many of these women did, it's incredibly rare. UM. So the idea of a cluster of them all happening in this one factory and the company having nothing to do with it was preposterous.

So the fact that they just got to settle for ten thousand UM per woman was actually kind of a coup. But one of the things that the UM five initial five Radium girls were fighting for was to UM to to create awareness that like, this is dangerous and there's other other women out there in the country and in the world who were doing the same thing. Eating radium

paint every day and we want this to stop. And it actually did have that effect, that knock on effect, and not one but chuck as you told me before, to my estelment to other cases um where companies were basically forced to to um to settle and eventually radium paint was driven out of use. Yeah. The other one, or one of the other two, was the radium Dial

factory that we mentioned earlier in Ottawa, Illinois. And you know, I don't know if you can rank like which ones were more gross and dirty and awful, but Radium Dial they actually did know what was going on the whole time. For years. They had been uh testing their employees. They had doctors coming in and they were giving them annual physicals and they were recording radiation levels and they just never told them. Basically, I think before they went and

filed that lawsuit, they were just suppressing information. Bearing everything they could. They did, they'd even did autopsies and then tampered with those autopsies. I think that's what you were mentioning earlier, was that the other company did that too, And they also lucked out by having an amazing lawyer too.

They were led by two women Katherine Wolf Donahue and Charlotte Nevans Purcel kind of took the lead for the lawsuit against Um Radium dial And this is you know, years after this had made like the national press, the US radium lawsuit like it was, everybody was talking about it, and for years some companies managed to avoid any kind of culpability, and finally Donahue and UM and Purcell Um, with the help of their lawyer, Leonard Grossman, filed lawsuit

against Radium dial Um. They tried some underhanded stuff themselves in addition to the whole autopsy thing, but once they were found out, they decided to shut down and then reopen in New York as a different company. And they said, oh, yeah, that other company is terrible, but it doesn't exist anymore. We're a new company now, so forget that lawsuit. And

they were they were ruled against and were held accountable. Still. Yeah, and obviously, like you mentioned, because of all of this, it was a very big deal for this country as far as work workers rights, safety in the workplace. UM. It kind of directly led. It took a long time, but it kind of directly led to the UM to the forming of OSHA which was a big deal. I think it directly led in to the food, drug and

cosmetic act um. And of course this was for the public at large, so we weren't ingesting stuff like that in our cosmetics. But it also protected workers who are putting that stuff in the cosmetics years years after the public was protected, for sure. But yeah, it definitely had like a real, real impact and a real effect on on the world. Um. One of the things I saw

though about Radium Dial Corporation its headquarters. It was finally demolished in nineteen sixty eight in Ottawa, Illinois, and the the town used the like rubble as backfill and landfill around the town. So now there's sixteen radioactive super fun sites around poor little Ottawa, Illinois. Um that the e p A Is dealing with cleaning up and it's causing all sorts of problems for them for the residents of

the town. So it was like this one big problem and then they spread it out all over town when they used the rubble, You're not super fun super fun is that there's a really important D on the end of that, and it really overpronounced that d agreed. Do you got anything else about the Radium girls. I don't. I mean the movies on Netflix. You can check it out. It's uh, it's a little late to endorse it now. Well,

I mean it's not terrible. I think on Rotten Tomatoes that have like a seventy something, but it just critically wasn't what review in um also not by me? Nice see, I guess you. Um. Well, since Chuck said also not by me, of course everyone, that means it's time for listener mayo. I'm gonna call this a Nashvillian's response to the Grand ol Opry Show. Hey, guys, just want to give you a shout out about how much this native

Nashvillian enjoyed your episode about the Grand ole Opry. I grew up hearing about the rieman's perfect acoustics and stories of country stars drinking at Tutsie's bar behind the opera until it was time to go on stage, and running through the aligning back doors. My first job was actually at opery Land Theme Park. Oh wow, I wonder if we met. It was at the water ride in the flume Zoom. I think I do remember you, Camille. Immediately across us was the Porter Wagner stage that Mr Wagner

himself performed every Friday and now live in Chicago. And honestly, it's a little hard to visit Nashville since it's become a destination hotspot for bachelor and bachelorette parties. I didn't know that, did you know? Didn't either? No, it makes sense though, I mean, I know that's where you had your bachelor party. I'll never forget that night. Sure, Nashville, it's crazy. Uh. Plus, skyrocketing rents and new developments have pushed out a lot of locals and mom and pop businesses.

Future episode recommendation repercussions of being an it city, but listening to your episode reminded me of the quirky little city I grew up in. Plus I learned some cool facts about the opera I didn't know a longtime fan, that is Camille McCarthy as high praise coming from a o G nashvilleon you know Yeah. And Camille also responded when I told her it was gonna be a listener mail with a big woohoo. You guys are awesome. I

just snucked out your Venus episode while grocery shopping. Fantastic. Um, Well, thanks a lot, Camille, appreciate that. I hope you've got some good groceries. I hope you wore a mask while you want grocery shopping. And I hope you're vaccinated. Nice full circle there. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with me, Chuck, Jerry, Chuck's COVID whatever, you can write us all an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production

of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.