Radium buttons glowed light green and featured a clip on the back they were designed for GIs to wear at night to identify each other. Encouraged by public sentiment and the promise of health, Marion filled her pockets with ‘the rejects’ (dials with mistakes) and ‘radium buttons’ at the ends of the day. At the end of the day, the girls went home from work fairly glowing from the radium dust that settled on their hair, skin, and clothing. Moore argues the dial painters “were ranked in the top 5 percent 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 $2080 (almost $40,000).” For a woman with several young children at home, Marion was likely grateful for the high wages and relative financial stability. Her daughter, Marion, worked briefly in the radium studios but hated it and quit.ĭial painting was a coveted job-the girls were paid piecework by the number of dials they painted. According to her son, she worked primarily as a ‘baker’-she baked the dials after they were painted. Marion worked in the dial painting business for some time. Radium companies boasted that, because radium was a wonder drug, the girls should benefit from their exposure to minute amounts on a daily basis. The young women were trained to ‘lip point’-shape their camel hair brushes to a point by placing the brush in their mouths-and assured by the company that the radium they ingested was not harmful to their health. Dial painters worked without any protective equipment, unlike the male lab workers who extracted the radium. In Newark, Long Island City, Connecticut, and Illinois, these girls were often employed as young as fourteen years old. In these dial painting studios, the young women “sat in rows, dressed in their ordinary clothes and painting dials at top speed… their hands almost a blur… each had a flat wooden tray of dials beside her-the paper dials were preprinted on a black background, leaving the numbers white, ready for printing.” At the Orange plant, dial painters mixed their own luminous paint, called Undark, by mixing radium powder, gum arabic, and water. From 1917 to 1924, approximately 800 girls worked in the New Jersey studio alone. Marion worked at US Radium Corporation in Manhattan-she may have begun her career as a dial painter. In the same year, Radium Luminous Materials Corporation opened its doors in Orange, New Jersey. The Radium Dial Company opened its first dial painting studio in Long Island City in 1917. That is the magic behind Radior Beauty Aids.” But it does what no ordinary cream can do- it energizes, invigorates, rejuvenates, because it contains Actual Radium. It not only imparts a soft delicate bloom to the surface.
#American radium orange nj skin#
It not only softens and adds resiliency to skin and facial muscles. One advertisement for Radior Peau de Velour charged, “The big difference, however, lies in what this cream does for your skin and complexion. It was added to drinks, cosmetics, clothing, accessories, and more. Specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones and that it caused changes in the blood-this was viewed as a positive effect. Wealthy men and women living along the East Coast of the United States sought out radium clinics and spas, hoping to rejuvenate their bodies and stimulate their blood. It was “a wonder element.” Radium was a miracle cure for those who could afford it it was used to treat cancer, hay fever, gout, anxiety, and more.
Radium, discovered by Polish chemist Marie Curie in 1898, swept through the news-and the market-like a firestorm. While the Atomic Age is usually assigned as a moniker to the era following the detonation of the first nuclear weapon at the Trinity Test in 1945, one could argue Marion came of age during an earlier radioactive craze. They lived in Mt Vernon, New York for a time, but by 1925, they had settled in the Bronx. “ Great Grandma Barrett was a dancer in New York City,” family stories go, “and- before he met her- Great Grandpa Barrett was studying to be a Catholic priest!” The couple would go on to have nine children together- Rosemary, Marion, Florence, George, William, John, Patricia, Robert, and Alice. Barrett, a twenty-three-year-old immigrant from Newfoundland in Rutherford, New Jersey. Growing up in New York City, the younger Marion lived with her parents and two sisters. Her mother, Marion Dunlop, was a housewife from Scotland. O’Hara, had immigrated to the United States from Liverpool and found work in New York City as a janitor. On February 27, 1905, Marion Murdoch O’Hara was born in New York City, the daughter of two immigrants.
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