Unbeknown to the girls, it wasn’t the way things were done in Europe, where dial-painting had been in operation for over a decade. Different countries had different techniques, but in none was lip-pointing used. Very likely this was because brushes weren’t used either: in Switzerland there were solid glass rods; in France, small sticks with cotton wadding on the ends; other European studios employed a sharpened wooden stylus or metal needles.
However, American girls did not take up the lip-pointing technique with blind faith. Mae said that when she first started, not long after the studio had opened in 1916, she and her colleagues had questioned it, being ‘a little bit leery’ about swallowing the radium. ‘The first thing we asked,’ she remembered, ‘[was] “Does this stuff hurt you?” And they said, “No.” Mr Savoy said that it wasn’t dangerous, that we didn’t need to be afraid.’ After all, radium was the wonder drug; the girls, if anything, should benefit from their exposure. They soon grew so used to the brushes in their mouths that they stopped even thinking about it.
But for Katherine it felt peculiar, that first day, as she lip-pointed over and over, correcting defective dials. Yet it was worth persevering: she was constantly reminded why she wanted to work there. Her job involved two types of inspection, daylight and darkroom, and it was in the darkroom that the magic really happened. She would call the girls in to discuss their work and observed, ‘Here in the room – daylight barred – one could see evidences of the luminous paint everywhere on the worker. There was a dab here and there on her clothes, on the face and lips, on her hands. As some of them stood there, they fairly shone in the dark.’ They looked glorious, like otherworldly angels.
As time went on, she got to know her colleagues better. One was Josephine Smith, a sixteen-year-old girl with a round face, brown bobbed hair and a snub nose. She had used to work at Bamberger’s too, as a saleslady, but left to earn the much higher wage of a dial-painter. Although the girls weren’t salaried – they were paid piecework, for the number of dials they painted, at an average rate of 1.5 cents a watch – the most talented workers could walk away with an astonishing pay packet. Some earned more than three times the average factory-floor worker; some even earned more than their fathers. They were ranked in the top 5 per cent of female wage-earners and on average took home $20 ($370) a week, though the fastest painters could easily earn more, sometimes as much as double; giving the top earners an annual salary of $2,080 (almost $40,000). The girls lucky enough to gain a position felt blessed.
Josephine, Katherine learned as they talked, was of German heritage, just like Katherine herself. In fact, most dial-painters were the daughters or granddaughters of immigrants. Newark was full of migrants, hailing from Germany, Italy, Ireland and elsewhere; it was one of the reasons the company had opened the studio in the city in the first place, for the large immigrant communities provided a workforce for all sorts of factories. New Jersey was nicknamed the Garden State for its high agricultural production, but in truth it was just as productive industrially. At the turn of the century, the business leadership of Newark had labelled it the City of Opportunity and – as the girls themselves were finding out – it lived up to its name.
It all made for a thriving metropolis. The nightlife after the factories closed was vibrant; Newark was a beer town, with more saloons per capita than any other American city, and the workers made their downtime count. The dial-painters embraced the social bonhomie: they sat together to eat lunch in the workroom at the Newark plant, sharing sandwiches and gossip over the dusty tables.
As the weeks passed, Katherine observed the challenges as well as the attractions of dial-painting: Miss Rooney’s constant observation as she walked up and down the studio, and the ever-present dread of being called into the darkroom to be reprimanded for poor work. Above all else, the girls feared being accused of wasting the expensive paint, which could ultimately be a dismissible offence. But although Katherine could see that there were downsides, she still longed to join the women in the main room. She wanted to be one of the shining girls.
A quick learner, Katherine soon excelled at her inspecting, not only perfecting the art of correcting defective dials with her lip-pointed brush, but also becoming adept at brushing off the dust with her bare hand or removing excess paint with her fingernail, as was the technique taught her. She worked as hard as she could, longing for promotion.
Finally, towards the end of March, her perseverance paid off. ‘I was asked to paint dials,’ she wrote excitedly; ‘I said I would like to try it.’
Katherine had achieved her ambition through merit – but there were also wider forces at work in that spring of 1917. Dial-painters were about to be in demand like never before: the company now needed all the women it could get.
2
For the past two-and-a-half years, the war in Europe had left America mostly untouched, except for the economic boom it brought. The majority of Americans were happy to stay out of the horrific trench warfare happening across the Atlantic; stories of which had reached them undiluted by distance. But in 1917, the neutral position became untenable. On 6 April, just a week or so after Katherine’s promotion, Congress voted America into the conflict. It would be, President Wilson declared, ‘The war to end all wars.’
In the dial-painting studio on 3rd Street, the impact of the decision was immediate. Demand rocketed. The studio in Newark was far too small to produce the numbers required so Katherine’s bosses opened a purpose-built plant just down the road from Newark in Orange, New Jersey, closing the 3rd Street factory. This time there wouldn’t only be dial-painters on site; the company had grown so much it was to do its own radium extraction, requiring labs and processing plants. The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation was expanding massively, and the new site comprised several buildings, all located in the middle of a residential neighbourhood.
Katherine was among the first workers through the door of the two-storey brick building that would house the application department. She and the other dial-painters were delighted by what they found. Not only was Orange an attractive, prosperous town, but the second-floor studio was charming, with huge windows on all sides and skylights in the roof. The spring sunshine streamed in, giving excellent light for dial-painting.