An appeal for new workers to help the war effort was made and just four days after war had been declared, Grace Fryer answered the call. She had more reason than most to want to help; two of her brothers would be joining the several million American soldiers heading to France to fight. Lots of dial-painters were motivated by the idea of helping the troops: ‘The girls,’ wrote Katherine, ‘were but a few of the many who through their jobs were “doing their bit”.’
Grace was a particularly civic-minded young woman. ‘When Grace was just a schoolgirl,’ a childhood friend of hers wrote, ‘she planned to be a real citizen when she grew up.’ Her family was of a political bent; her father Daniel was a delegate to the carpenters’ union, and you couldn’t grow up in his house without picking up his principles. He was out of work rather a lot, as unionism was not popular at that time, but while the family may not have had much money, they did have a lot of love. Grace was one of ten children – she was number four – and she was especially close to her mother, also called Grace; perhaps because she was the eldest girl. There were six boys and four girls in total and Grace was close to her siblings, especially her sister Adelaide, who was nearest to her in age, and her little brother Art.
Grace was already working when the call-up came, in a position that earned about the same as dial-painting, but she left to join the radium company in Orange, where she lived. She was an exceptionally bright and exceptionally pretty girl, with curly chestnut hair, hazel eyes and clear-cut features. Many called her striking, but her looks weren’t of much interest to Grace. Instead, she was career-minded, someone who at the age of eighteen was already fashioning a prosperous life for herself. She was, in short, ‘a girl enthused with living’. She soon excelled at dial-painting, becoming one of the company’s fastest workers with an average production rate of 250 dials a day.
A young woman called Irene Corby also signed on that spring. The daughter of a local hatter, she was a very cheerful girl aged about seventeen. ‘She had a very humorous disposition,’ revealed her sister Mary, ‘exceptionally so.’ Irene instantly got on well with her co-workers – with Grace in particular – and they regarded her as one of the more skilled employees.
It fell to Mae Cubberley and Josephine Smith to train the new girls. The women sat side by side at long tables running the full width of the studio; there was a walkway in between them, so Miss Rooney could continue her over-the-shoulder inspections. The instructresses taught them how to dab a tiny amount of the material (the girls always called the radium ‘the material’) into their crucibles, ‘like a fine smoke in the air’, and then mix the paint carefully. Even the softest stirring, however, left most women with splashes on their bare hands.
Then, once the paint was mixed, they instructed them to lip-point. ‘She told me to watch her and imitate her,’ Katherine remembered of her training. As surely as night follows day, Grace and Katherine and Irene followed the instructions. They put the brush to their lips . . . dipped it in the radium . . . and painted the dials. It was a ‘lip, dip, paint routine’: all the girls copied each other; mirror images that lipped and dipped and painted all day long.
They soon found the radium hardened on their brushes. A second crucible was supplied, ostensibly for cleaning the bristles, but the water was changed only once a day and soon became cloudy: it didn’t so much clean as spread the bristles, which some workers found a hindrance; they simply used their mouths to dampen the brush instead. Others, however, always used the water: ‘I know I done it,’ one said, ‘because I couldn’t stand that gritty taste in my mouth.’
The taste of the paint was a source of debate. ‘It didn’t taste funny,’ Grace observed, ‘it didn’t have any taste.’ Yet some ate the paint specifically because they liked it.
Another new worker tasting the magic element that summer was sixteen-year-old Edna Bolz. ‘Here is a person,’ Popular Science later wrote of her, ‘blessed from birth with a sunny disposition.’ She was taller than many of her co-workers, though still only five foot five, and had an innate elegance about her. She was nicknamed the ‘Dresden Doll’ because of her beautiful golden hair and fair colouring; she also had perfect teeth and, perhaps as a result, a beaming smile. Over time she became close to the forelady, Miss Rooney, who described her as ‘a very nice type of girl; very clean-living type of very good family’. Edna’s passion was music and she was also devoutly religious. She joined in July, at a time when production was rocketing due to wartime demand.
That summer the plant was a ferment of activity: ‘The place was a madhouse!’ one worker exclaimed. The girls were already doing overtime to keep up with demand, working seven days a week; now, the studio started operating night and day. The dial-painters glowed even brighter from the radium against the dark windows: a workshop of shining spirits labouring through the night.
Though the pace was demanding, the set-up was in many ways fun for the women, who revelled in the drama of the long shifts painting dials for their country. The majority were teenagers – ‘merry giggling girls’ – and they found time for the odd bit of fun. One favourite game was to scratch their name and address into a watch: a message for the soldier who would wear it; sometimes, he would respond with a note. New girls were joining all the time, which made the job even more sociable. In Newark, perhaps seventy women had worked in the studio; during the war that number more than tripled. The girls now sat crammed in on both sides of the desks, only a few feet apart.
Hazel Vincent was among them. Like Katherine Schaub, she came from Newark; she had an oval face with a button nose and fair hair that she set in the latest styles. Another new worker was twenty-one-year-old Albina Maggia, the daughter of an Italian immigrant, who came from a family of seven girls; she was the third. She was a somewhat round and diminutive woman of only four foot eight, with classic Italian dark hair and eyes. She was pleased to get back into the world of work – as the eldest unmarried daughter, she’d quit her hat-trimming job to nurse her mother, who’d died the year before – but she discovered she was not the fastest dial-painter. She found the brushes ‘very clumsy’ and painted only a tray and a half a day. Nonetheless, she tried as hard as she could, later remarking, ‘I always did my best for that company.’