Radium Girls

Uh, junkyards and antique shops.

So he would take that, uh, Geiger counter into a junk shop or an antique store, and he would walk around until something lit up, uh, like radium paint, uh, if you remember our, um, I think it was pretty excellent podcast on the Radium Girls.

Mm-hmm.

And he would find, like, radium paint in an old clock.

Uh, it's a, one of the VIP perks is that you get to sub- suggest books that you want, and then I invite the authors to be on the show.

Oh, Radium Girls.

Oh, wait, no, that wasn't one, the one we had on though, was it? We did Half Lives.

Where the Radium Girls' story was in Half Lives, maybe that was it.

I think.

Yeah.

This is a story of a girl who was known as

the radium girls.

It's not funny, but that's what we're talking about.

Cause I'm gonna tell you a story of how these women became known as the radium girls.

So it's the roaring twenties in Orange, New Jersey, 1923.

This woman, her name's Grace Fryer.

We love that.

No matter what the tone of the article was, there was one thing about the case that truly took off in the news cycle.

So why don't you get us rolling?

My son is in a play this school year at his school called The Radium Girls.

And this case is not The Radium Girls case, but it makes me think about that case.

We've covered The Radium Girls once upon a time.

We have.

So I'm really excited to see that show.

so the plant was experiencing an increase in spills and contamination events.

And Karen had discovered numerous violations of health regulations.

And the thing that links all those girls is the job that Molly Maggia loved, painting glow-in-the-dark numbers onto watch faces so that you could read them in the night.

Today, the radium girls.

For years, radium was treated as not only harmless, but healthy.

How could that happen? And how did a group of women devote themselves to fighting their employers' lies and to creating a safer world that they wouldn't live to see? Art Fryer lives just up the road from the factory where Molly Maggia used to work in Orange, New Jersey.

She works as a dial painter.

So there was a little patriotism thing because a lot of this dial painting was for wartime stuff.

The Radium Girls were employed to paint watches and clocks with glow-in-the-dark radium paint.

Kate Moore is an author who's written a book all about the Radium Girls.

What was the watch company?

They called them the Radium Girls.

[laughs] The Radium Girls.

'Cause they would, they would, they were, they were all getting cancer.

Dude.

Yep.

That is pretty much the way of things, and we watched a movie, uh, a documentary-style movie called The Radium Girls.

Don't know if it's one you've seen.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I haven't seen it, but I know the story basically of, uh, of the radium girls.

girls.Horrific.

Yeah