Newspaper Clipping, June 1, 1929

THE PHILADELPHIA RECORD, SATURDAY, JUNE 1, 1929 5 Doomed 'Radium Victims' May Live to Die of Old Age Girls Are Much Alive After a Year and Scientists Now Think They Absorbed Nesothorium and Not Clock Dial Illuminator. ORANGE, N. J., May 31 (UP) -Medi- But if it was mesothorium, they have cal experts doomed them all to be in a fair chance of living to old age. When their claims were finally set- their graves by tomorrow, but five tled out of Court the corporation gave young women who attracted national them each $10,000 and a pension of attention a year ago are still very much $50 a month as long as they should alive. live, having accepted, at the time, the testimony of medical experts that their They will be remembered as the "ra- cases were incurable. dium victims," factory workers who How they spent what they believed painted tiny luminous numerals on the was their last year of life, and what dials of watches. use they made of their money, is inter- They claimed, and scientists agreed, esting. that in their work they had contracted To Mrs. Quinta McDonald, who is a poisoning for which no cure was now the most seriously ill of the five, known. Doctors shook their heads and came only unhappiness. Her husband gave them a year to live. But today quit his job. They quarreled and finds them nourishing hope that they separated. Mrs. McDonald's money is will live many years more. invested in a trust fund to educate two Since that day a year ago when they children. were pronounced doomed, science has Miss Katherine Schaub bought an made a second guess, namely, that it automobile with her settlement and may not have been radium which spends long afternoons driving in the poisoned them, but a substance known country, a pleasure that always had as mesothorium. This substance is not been denied her before. necessarily fatal, and may, in time, be The money allowed Mrs. Albina Larice eliminated from their bodies. some small extravagances for which The five young women first attracted she and her husband hal always longed. interest when they sued the United They travel a bit now. States Radium Corporation, their em- Mrs. Edna Hussman bought a fine ployees, for $250,000 each. player piano and a radion and says In painting watch numerals they had she enjoys them as much as anything "pointed" their brushes with their lips. she could have. Over a considerable period of time the But the fifth of the "doomed" young substance they used in the work had women, Miss Grace Fryer, invested all seeped into their systems. If it was of her $10,000 and went to work again; radium they absorbed, it will keep not at the factory. of course, but in a breaking down the red and white cor- Newark bank. She believes she will puscles of their blood until, in a com- somehow reach old age-and believes paratively short time, they must die, in being financially fixed for it.