We hear Ottawa’s ample-bellied mayor boom out evasive platitudes and windy rhetoric in what nearly seems unconscious mimicry of the pompous blowhards Edward Arnold played in 1930s comedies.įinally, in 1977, Luminous Processes closed down and left the city. Yet, back in Ottawa, no one would acknowledge what was so obviously happening-not the city fathers, not the plant bosses, not the Atomic Energy Commission, which began testing the clock painters at nearby Argonne in the early ‘50s, yet never told them why. Then, several months later, a new company, Luminous Processes, opened in Ottawa, winning over the old Westclox accounts: a company also owned by Kelly-who was, by then, following radium into higher spheres, supplying fissionable material for nuclear bombs.
By the ‘30s, Ottawa had gained a national nickname: “Death City.” Despite denials and defenses by its management, the Radium Dial plant was closed down in the mid-'40s. It’s a chronicle of horror that never ends, spreading like endless ripples in a pool of blood. The living became sick, the dying gave birth to children who died as well-or suffered deformities: Down’s syndrome, cancers, tumors the size of beach balls. Like the clock faces, they glowed in the dark.Īnd then they began to die. It was the Roaring ‘20s, and Radium Dial’s then-munificent salaries-$17.50 a week-allowed them to buy fancy clothes, furs, radios. They listened carefully to their bosses-who told them to dip their brushes in the radium paint, and lick the tips with their tongues to keep them moist.
They were dutiful, grateful girls, many from poor households. in Ottawa, hiring mostly local girls-ages 14 to 17-to paint radium clock faces for Westclox Corp. What happened here? In 1922, an entrepreneur from the East, Joseph Kelly, opened the Radium Dial Co.
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