BEHIND THE STORY: The Radium Girls

Were they blaming the symptoms on STDs when the symptoms were really the uranium poisoning? Yes. On her death certificate, it said cause of death, syphilis. Obviously, not true. She was buried in Rosedale Cemetery in Montclair, where we did go for the video. And five years after she had passed, they decided to exhume her body. And then they finally realized she did not have syphilis. She had irradiated bones. There is a field in Orange, New Jersey with a radioactive secret. Video producer Lauren Raposa took us there and told us the shocking truth. It was there in the 1920s a group of clock painters called the Radium Girls were told to lick their paintbrushes, which poisoned these women. And when they got sick, the company bashed their reputations. On this episode of NJ.com's Behind the Story, Lauren is going to walk us through her shocking discoveries, what terrible details didn't make the final cut of the video. Lauren, how did you even hear about this story? How did you learn about these women? So I first learned of the Radium Girls a few years ago. I went to this really cool store in Lafayette, New Jersey. It's called The Cupboard Shop. And it sells this beautiful vintage glass. And the owner, Tracy, was telling me about uranium glass, which I am now a proud owner. Two little tiny pieces of uranium glass. And anyone who has a piece of uranium glass knows that if you put some UV black light on it, it glows in the dark. and that's how you know that it's a little bit irradiated. so i was super fascinated by this. tracy could kind of pick up on that. and she was telling me about this group of women who in the 1910s and 20s worked at this place called the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange. and They were watch dial painters, so they used this luminescent paint, which was called Undark, and it was super irradiated. They did not know how damaging it was to their bodies at the time. So to keep the paintbrush pointed, they would actually lick the tip of the paintbrush and then paint the watch dials. They did not know they were killing themselves in the process, poisoning their bodies in the process. Were they just told, like, this is totally safe, like, you don't have to worry about anything? Maybe it wasn't even on their minds to ask at the time, different world, but they were told it was safe. Some of them were a little suspicious because there were chemists and scientists right in the room next to them wearing PPE. They had protection for this kind of stuff, and they didn't. They were told by their managers to lick the tip of the paintbrush to keep it pointed. Okay, and you said PPE. By PPE, we're talking people in like some sort of protective, maybe full body suit, gloves. They had gloves, they had masks, they had lead screens. They knew exactly what kind of chemicals they were dealing with. And they're on the other side of the door? They're like in the office next door? Yep, same building. They're working in the same exact building. And you can see the difference between the scientists and the women because the women were just expendable. If someone wanted to leave, if a radium girl wanted to quit, find a different job, they were easily replaceable. Working women at the time, I mean, really tough, really tough. So what exactly are they painting? They are suspicious to this radioactive paint, like what's going on? What's their actual job? Yeah. So they painted watch dials for mostly for soldiers in the army, but also for doctors and for pilots because, you know, glow in the dark paint was super beneficial. Imagine you're flying a plane at night. You don't have the technology to see all of the gadgets and the dials and everything you need to see. So this luminescent paint was kind of a breakthrough. And like I said before, it was called Undark. And it was kind of this breakthrough product that It was marketed as this sort of thing that gave off an energy, it gave off vitality. So it was used a lot for beauty products, it was used in toothpaste to make your teeth whiter, and it was also used as an energy drink. This was major and for doctors at the time they would actually prescribe these things to their patients. And when they would go out and buy these products, the doctors would get a cut. And so they were sort of like the influencers of their day. Okay, so you learn about this from the shop. You start researching. I mean, are you just like, is it shock and then shock and more shock as you're learning about this group of women? What a wild story. Yeah, so first of all, I just have to say everything was crazy. Everything I learned about this story was crazy. The fact that the girls basically used this paint as makeup is insane, but they obviously had no idea what they were doing to themselves at the time. So this little clip kind of goes into what illnesses they had. A lot of it was what they called radium jaw. Um... There were ulcers found in their mouths. This field in Orange, New Jersey, holds a radioactive secret from the past. It was right here in this field where a group of women were unknowingly poisoned with radiation and most died slow and painful deaths. Yeah, they're just, like, having fun with this fun glow-in-the-dark paint, which was probably such a novelty at the time, with the guys in suits and masks and, you know, rubber gloves next door, but you're being told something completely opposite. Maybe they're, are they young women, you know, who maybe are just entering the workforce? Like, who are these women? Yeah, they were young women. I mean... I believe some of them were as young as 17. They were just embarking on their professional careers. And if you worked at U.S. Radium Corporation, that was kind of a status symbol because girls who worked at this plant were paid a little bit more than your average job. If you worked here, you could afford the finer things in life. You were kind of in a different social circle. So it was kind of an honor to be here. And then, you know, after your shift at the factory, you would go out and you'd be literally glowing. You would have this makeup on your face that would, you know, draw people's eyes. And it was like, hey, I work here. I'm proud of it. Again, they had no idea what this irradiated paint was doing to them. And I just want to say, you know, there were so many insane details that did not make the I'm going to take the final cut because That's kind of the game we play with social video, just to be as concise as possible. But when you talk about the scientists and how they were treated and the women and how they were treated and how it just kind of goes to show how expendable they were. Like I said, scientists use masks, tongs to handle. Why the scientists are treated as as up here and the women on a totally different platform, even though they're feeling really proud. Yes. And, you know, it just goes to show that there was sort of this underlying secret at the factory because the company fully understood the dangers of working with radium. And the co-founder, Dr. Von Sahaki, he actually, he knew, he totally knew from the very beginning. His fingers, I believe they got necrosis. They were poisoned by radiation. He actually cut his finger off when it got so bad. How long was it before they started getting visibly ill? I'm imagining that this goes on in your body for some period of time and then is visible on the exterior. Was it years? How fast was it? Do you know? So, for some of the girls, it was a couple years after they left the factory. But for... Other women, it took decades for some sort of cancer to show up or ailments to start appearing or them to just start feeling a little bit off. And one of the girls who advocated for herself and was one of the five women known as the Radium Girls to band together and sue the company, I believe after they settled, she She passed away maybe. A few months after it was all said and done, which is really, really upsetting if you think about it, because the settlement, there was a certain payout that was supposed to happen for each of the women. Did she ever get paid? Yep. For every year that they lived. Well, many of them didn't live long. And I think obviously the company knew that and they knew they didn't have to pay out much money because these girls, they weren't going to be around for much longer. When it comes to the lawsuit and that part about their jaws falling, First off, I can't even imagine. I can't even imagine this happening. But they're fighting the lawsuit. They're fighting, you know, the company, the owners, and these poor women are just falling, literally falling apart. As any lawsuit, sometimes they can just drag on. forever. How long did this go on for? It went on for a while. And even before the lawsuit started, it took two years for the women to find a lawyer who would work with them. Nobody wanted to work with the radium girls. They already had a bad reputation. The company had this whole smear campaign against them saying that, yep, saying that they had STDs, syphilis. specifically. So wait, were they blaming the symptoms on STDs when the symptoms were really the uranium poisoning? Yes. So it was either, it was syphilis, it was phossy jaw, which is phosphorus poisoning, which was not the case. It was a toothache. It was this, it was that, it was the other thing. It was anything but radium poisoning. And the reason for that is because most of the doctors that these women saw were hired by the company. Yeah. So it not only was the company ruining their reputation, they were actually literally killing these poor girls. So the whole lawsuit, it took a while for the girls to find a lawyer. Then they found a young lawyer who was willing to take on the case. But then the company was arguing that they had already exceeded the statute of limitations, the two year statute of limitations. Literally any anything they can pull. Yep, exactly. And then, well, they were going back and forth because then the radium girls lawyer was saying, well, they didn't get diagnosed until some of them years after. So how would they even know? And now that they do know, they want to take action. So it was a whole back and forth between them about that. And the company kept trying to push back the case, literally waiting until these girls were dead. So they didn't worry about it anymore. Um, It's honestly insane. And the craziest thing about the lawsuit is that the woman asked for a quarter of a million dollars each. They got far less than that. They got, I think, they settled for $10,000 each and then $600 payout every year. But only a few of those payments were ever collected because the women died. The lawyer that they hired, when you said, like, young lawyer, that didn't surprise me. Like, you needed a lawyer who was going to take on probably a really risky, risky job and might suffer their reputation. Exactly. And it's, again, infuriating. Finally, they found a lawyer. That was a small win for them. But then they realized that they settled, you know, and the company would never admit to fault. I guess the silver lining in all of this is that it changed the way that worker injury cases were seen, it established new safety rules, and then I believe it was 10 years later, a radium girl who worked in a An Illinois factory sued that company, and she won. Oh, Wow. Years and years, though. And you found, tell me about the field. my So we see you in a field at the beginning of the video. Where are you? What are you doing there? Yeah, so that is the site of U.S. Radium Corporation. God. As you can see in the video, and we have a video to play that can show you that, There's no remnants of that anymore. It was a super fun site, obviously. It's been cleaned up since then. And now it's this... soccer field and soccer field. Yeah. It's, it was honestly a surreal experience to walk there. Our colleague Andre and I were there before the city of Orange put up some really lovely signage memorializing the women. Um, so when we pulled up, it was just an empty soccer field with a playground next to it. You know, you would have never known it was a super fun site. You would You would have never known it was the site of the U.S. Radium Corporation. And after... Studying all of the historical photos of the factory and the surrounding areas, it was crazy to look at the site in real life and know exactly where the factory was because, you know, the streets are all the same. They all have the same names, of course. The brook is still there that I saw in the pictures from the 1910s and the 1920s, Thank you. but the dark history of it all has just been completely wiped from existence. Until the City of Orange installed those really lovely signs that I myself have not seen yet, but I am very much looking forward to going at one point. Can you tell us, do you know where the signs are? If someone wanted to look and see them, where would they go? Yes, so it's at the soccer field. It's right next door to it. And I believe the soccer field is called College Park, right on Alden Street or Alden Road in Orange. by Star Tavern for any foodies, if you know where the tavern is. You know where this is, and the signs are kind of scattered throughout the park, showing their photos, their stories, there's QR codes that you can scan with your phone, and it takes you to a webpage that will tell you more about the women. Nice job, Orange. Really well done. Hey, Orange. Do you think your video had anything to do with the decision to... You kind of hope so. I'd like to think so. I'd like to think so. I know that it kind of all sparked from a book talk. I don't know if it was like a local group or a library or something like that, but it's from, you know, this book called The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. And she did a beautiful job telling the women's stories. And it was because of this book, local people in the community decided to get involved. Thank draw attention and share the story of the girls because like I said before they had put those signs in the park there was nothing there. Who did um who did the author speak to for the book? I think it was a lot of family and friends to be honest and I know that some of those people were at the memorialization ceremony for the signage installation in Orange you. which is crazy to think about but yeah she interviewed a lot of people for this book um really well done I highly recommend I mean, you got to leave like this research with kind of a case of the icks, because in my mind, I'm drawing some parallels between, you know, the kind of case that you're describing here, where a company knows that something's going to harm people and keep it under wraps. Was some of this just very disheartening to learn about? I mean, you're really seeing a very, very ugly story play out over decades here with a lot of loss. Yeah, it was super disheartening. Thank You know, like I said, the whole story was shocking and really sad. And, you know, you try to put yourself in their shoes. You're a young woman. You're trying to earn a living. You're trying to maybe start a family. You can't get pregnant because... you. There's something else going on with your body. You cannot start a family. And that's the one thing that a lot of these girls, as Kate Moore writes about in her book, said that they really, really wanted. You know, in your early 20s, you have all this energy and ambition and excitement about the world. You think that you're working at this factory that's going to take care of you, that's going to pay you well, that's going to be stable. And you're really positive about the whole thing. You're so positive going into it. And to realize that you're nothing to the company and it's really sad, but you know, you see that everywhere today. And even though the girls in this case only got a settlement, they knew they were fighting for the woman of today. And I'd like to think that they helped the woman of today because like I said, OSHA standards were developed. From this case, workplace standards are much stricter now. Like I said, the radium girl in Illinois, she won her case. So they were advocating for the women of the future. And I think that's very admirable and brave. What, I don't know if you can speak to this, but like, what is it about radium that like their bodies were so deeply affected by it? Can you? Help me to understand that. Yeah, so our bodies mistake radium for calcium, and calcium is in our bones. I'm going to read a couple of questions. And obviously there's so much science to explain and you can't really do that in a TikTok. So I'm happy we're doing this so I can kind of dive into it. But, you know, like I said, radiation chemically behaves like calcium. So the body just builds it into your bones. Thank Obviously not good. And then to make matters worse, it stays there for a very, very long time. I think the half-life of radium is... 1,600 years or something like that. Yeah. And another scary part about the whole thing. Oh, gosh. So you mean like they're buried poisoned. you. They're buried and their bones are still being impacted by this. Yes. In fact, one of the women, Molly Maggia, I think is how you pronounce her name, she died, obviously, from radiation poisoning. On her death certificate, it said cause of death, syphilis. Obviously, not true. She was buried in Rosedale Cemetery in Montclair, where we did go for the video. I'm going And five years after she had passed, they decided to exhume her body. to go And then they finally realized she did not have syphilis. ahead She had irradiated bones. Wait, wait, wait. Okay, wait, wait. and So this poor woman dies. start The company or whoever signs her death certificate says syphilis. the Why did they dig up her remains? video. For validation, for testing. Yes, because after they had won the lawsuit, things started to change a little bit. They wanted to see if Molly had syphilis or if she had irradiation in her body. And the latter was the case, which was very it was so redeeming for her family, especially because, as you can imagine, it ruined the reputation of not just Molly when she was alive, but her family. She had sisters that worked at the factory. And so to get that confirmation that, no, she was being actively poisoned by her work environment, you know, that was, I guess you could say like a small silver lining. It was some justice brought to Molly. Oh, my gosh. So how hard a decision, first off, you're literally digging up all this pain, you know, bringing her body back up. And what a decision that must have been to make that call and how difficult. But then to do testing, which at the time had to be so expensive. Now you're, where are you getting the money for that? You know? Yeah. It's just on and on. And it's interesting too, because the testing hasn't stopped. There is a, I believe it's Washington State University, that has tested the remains of the Radium Girls and other people who have been affected by radiation poisoning, because we're still learning about the effects of radiation over your lifetime. Yeah. So we're never done learning about this. So the uranium glass that you showed, I mean, it's super cool, but is that dangerous? So I've been told different things. Tracy, the owner of the cover shop, she says, do not eat or drink out of it. And I said, okay, I will not, just to be on the safe side. And then I have, I have other people who say it's totally fine. There are only trace amounts of it, you know? So it's, I just like to be cautious. I would rather just put it on a shelf and look at it because it's pretty. I would not eat out of it. That's just me though. So you go to the field where the warehouse was, where these women were working. How do you find out about the cemetery? Tell me about the decision to actually go to the cemetery. Yeah, so, you know, when you film a video, you want to show the historically significant landmarks of whatever story you're telling. For Radium Girls, it was difficult, right? Because U.S. Radium Corporation is no longer existing. Even though we went to the field to tell their story, I wanted to find something tangible. And thankfully, three of the radium girls are buried in Rosedale Cemetery in Montclair, very close to where the factory once stood in Orange. So it was... It was good to be there, to see the actual graves, to spend some time there. There I'm really glad that we got to pay our respects. Um, What kind of feeling did you get just approaching these grave sites? First, I felt really sad, honestly. It made everything feel more real. we And then you know it felt also it felt just good to tell their stories and I felt you know like I was go. helping to advocate for them so it was nice to connect with their graves in that sense. And I do have to say if anybody wants to visit the cemetery you absolutely should be respectful but Staff who work there were so lovely to us and they helped us find all three of the graves. They told stories about people who had come before us to visit the graves. They were just wonderful. The grounds are so well kept. They're so peaceful and serene. Is there any indication of radium girls and their story in the cemetery? Like, is there any reference to the backstory or are they very simple? They're very simple headstones. You would not know they were radium girls unless you knew their names. Because I'm a nerd and I have a Geiger counter, I brought the Geiger counter and I measured for radiation around the graves and there's really nothing higher than the normal background radiation that would be anywhere. But it was, yeah, you really do need to know their names or just go, you know, to the staff and ask them for help because you can get turned around in there. It's quite big. But the staff, you're standing in a cemetery with like a device in your hand measuring radiation, like people looking at you like what? What are you doing over there? You know, but anytime I take the Geiger counter out, people are going to look. So first of all, I've never said Geiger counter in my life to hear it a couple of times. Was there anyone else around, though? No, we and it was so quiet. We didn't we didn't run into anybody else. And the guy so funny that the groundskeeper who was helping us, he didn't even take a second look at me. He thought it was totally normal. So, OK. Are you guys in there with cameras and tripods and stuff? Like we work with all sorts of gear or did you go small? Is it just like phone and we went small? Yeah, we went small. We had the iPhones. We had a tripod. I had my mic very tiny, but it was very more respectful. Yeah. People were looking at you. I mean, it's one thing you're at someone's grave site to see a tripod with a camera on top. Another thing to see someone with a phone out. Normal. Good call. Good call on that. What was it like? So you're going through a lot of this research and I know we had discussions about the images to show that you were really worried about how extensive to go with these images. It's more than injuries. What was that decision-making process like? Because you really want to show the truth of the matter, but also You're a pretty sensitive person. You have a lot of sensitivity towards these families. What was that like? Yeah, it was a struggle for sure, because on one hand, I wanted to show the extent of their radiation poisoning. But on the other hand, if you look at the pictures, it's really unsettling. It's really scary and disturbing. And again, I'm going to plug Kate Moore's book, Radium Girls, because she has pictures in the book. And if you want to see, you know, take a look because it's just. It's horrifying. It's horrifying. The size of the ulcers, the picture of a jaw, a jaw outside of someone's body, you know, teeth still in it. There's a really scary chapter in her book where she talks about how one of the dentists could just reach into one of the girl's mouths and pull out her jaw with his hands. Her jaw? Her jaw? Not a tooth? It was that decayed. Did it just? Yeah. That's, you know, your reaction is horrific. That's why I decided to keep those. pictures out and also just respect them and their families. There were so many other wonderful pictures that I did use of historical things like what the factory looked like, what the streets around it looked like, what the women looked like before they were introduced to these workplace horrors. So we had an endless amount of photos, which I'm so grateful about, from the governmental ...archives from our own internal archives. Like I said, Andre and I went, we took our own photos, so we had a lot of visual stuff working for us. Yeah, like the striking the balance. I remember having discussions about, we got to show something, we got to show the truth of the matter. But I remember specifically thinking to myself, I don't think this is going to take a ton of images. You don't need to see multiple images of this. There were one or two that really kind of captured. How terrible this was without showing what you just described from the book about the jaw. But did you ever have to like take a minute to kind of like debrief, step away from the images, step away from the research? You know, sometimes something can get. so intense while you're researching because you're going down this rabbit hole. You're fully invested. You're fully intrigued by what you're learning. Did you ever just like have to have a debrief with a family member or just step away and go for a drive in the Miata? Yada. There were a couple of times there, you know, there were instances where I would read something about the girls and I'd be like, oh, I'm mad. I'm pissed off. What was that? What was one of them? So one of them was, When they I think the biggest upset for me was finding out how when they were suing the company, they some of them had no teeth in their mouths. Some of them had back braces on in court. Some of them were bedridden in. I don't know if it was court, but they had to go somewhere and they had to lay in a bed. They were they were that close to death and still they were fighting for the next generation of women, for the next generation of workers. And it may be you can also see how the company would be like, oh, you know, people don't want to look at that. People don't want to look at stuff that makes them uncomfortable. They don't want to look at stuff that makes them sad. You know, probably at that time, too. And, you know, to just like, don't look at this. So, you know, it's too much to use that almost against them. Based on what you're sharing here, I can totally see that happening. Yeah. It was a sad story. And, you know, I hope that, you know, the Radium Girls would be happy with how their story has been told through videos like ours, through stories, through, you know, memorials, through, you know, people who are still actively trying to seek out their story. Because really, when you think about it, the reason why we have workplace safety, we can thank them for that. Yeah. People went through hell for us to have workplace safety, for sure. I'm so glad it's on TikTok. I mean, I learned a lot. I had never heard of the Radium Girls before. You were like, have you ever heard of this group of work? No. What are you talking about? The fact that it's on TikTok, it reaches a whole different audience, but generational. We hit ages all across the board and from everywhere. People from all over are learning about this for the first time. I mean, that's got to feel good, like teaching people about something so important. I'm so glad you did this video. It's, you know, been up for awards and been honored by different contests and worthy of such because it really is very eye-opening and a well-done piece. Thank you so much for... For teaching us about the radium girls. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, thanks for chatting with me about this. I could talk about this and nerd out about this all day. And I'm happy to talk about the women. Lauren's like, when can I do the next video? There we go. Just let me know when. I'll be there. Oh, my gosh. Thanks, Lauren. Thank you so much.