Radium Halos by Shelley Stout
Radium Halos is historical fiction based on the true events of the Radium Dial Painters, a group of female factory workers who, in the early 1920s, contracted radiation poisoning from painting luminous watch dials with radium paint. Our narrator is Helen Waterman, a 65-year-old mental patient who worked at the factory when she was 16. She tells us her story through flashbacks, slowly revealing her past, the loved ones she’s lost, and the dangerous secrets she’s kept all these years. Includes a Foreword by Leonard Grossman, son of the attorney for the Radium Dial painters. Read an excerpt.
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Blog Posts about Radium Halos
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Reposted from amazon.com – good luck with all the sales, Shelley. – E
Radium Halos is a very lightly written, full of humor and sadness and other aspects of life novel that has the potential to be a made-for-TV movie. The characters are really brought to life by Ms. Stout’s descriptions and often humorous flashbacks of all the people who had passed through her main character’s, Helen Waterman, life over the span of fifty years.
Helen worked at the Radium Dial Factory in Illinois one brief summer and only did that through her older sister’s urging. The journey takes us from the early 1920s to the mid 1970s (although the latter date is not really known, it is elluded to through a description of Helen’s niece’s hairdo and that she is out of the times). The flashbacks are woven in quite nicely and don’t really take away from the story at all. I felt like I was listening to my grandmother (in a sense) recollecting her time during certain periods of her life. I found myself cheering for Helen, crying with her, crying for her and hoping that just once she would stand up for herself and let it be known.
I really hope this novel does get made into a movie as it would be very eye opening to folks who know nothing of this time period. I had never heard of the radium dial factory info until I met the author at a writer’s conference a couple of years ago. I’m sure in its heyday, the factories did get a lot of attention but there are folks who are still around today that possibly have some connection or other to these terrible conditions and should definitely be shown the dangers of radium and how it has affected or impacted the lives of those exposed to the harsh working conditions.
I have already recommended this book to several folks and will continue recommending and will keep my eyes open for the movie to come out – E
Elysabeth Eldering,
Author of the Junior Geography Detective Squad series
Helen Waterman, the plain-spoken narrator of this novel, is sixteen when her older sister, Violet, talks her into spending a summer working with their friend Clara for the Radium Dial Company. Of all three girls, it is the simple-minded Helen who is awarded the “Excellence in Training plaque,” but it’s her fearful stubbornness that saves her from the deadly effect of radium–she refuses to “tip” her paint brush with her lips into a fine point before painting the glowing numbers on the clock face as instructed because she didn’t like the gritty taste. Years later, Violet falls ill from poisoning, as do the other women who worked there, and Helen witnesses her sister’s teeth fall out, “one by one, like corn from a cob.”
The chilling part of this novel is its truth–many young women who painted clock and watch faces at the Radium Dial Company in Illinois and New Jersey from 1917-1926 suffered from anemia, tooth loss and necrosis of the lower and upper jaw, which causes constant bleeding of the gums, debilitating bone tumors and porosity. For years, the company denied any wrongdoing, until they were sued by a former employee. Five other plant workers joined the suit, which was settled in 1928, and a precedent governing labor safety standards was set. In the sixties, the Argonne National Laboratory did radiology research by giving medical examinations on any remaining, living “Radium Girls.”
In the novel, Helen navigates her life after working at the Radium Dial Company, dealing with mental illness, fears, memory of a tragic accident at the plant, marriage and infertility, the untimely death of her sister, Violet, and the loss of her husband in WWII. At sixty-five, Helen is an unlikely heroine. She’s naïve and childlike, yet she is amusingly cheeky. When she goes to live with her controlling niece, Pearl, she is told she can watch television all day as long as she is out of her robe and dressed, but instead, she finds delight in rifling through Pearl’s things: “I touched all her dishes and the trinkets on her shelves and over the fireplace. If she was home, she wouldn’t never let me do it, so I knowed I had a few hours to touch whatever I pleased. Then, I went in her closet. She had her a closet full of dresses and two nice coats in plastic wrappers…” Helen’s glee in counting all those shoes shines through, along with her shrewdness, as she makes sure to shut the closet door when she’s done snooping. When her niece’s son accidentally backs his car into her and breaks her leg, she tells him the real tragedy: “I never broke a bone before. I got to be sixty-five years old before I broke a bone.” At the hospital, impatient with the doctors, she thinks: “I reckoned they was going to x-ray my leg. I already knowed it was broke without no x-ray.”
Helen faces a dilemma when her niece insists she go to the Argonne Lab for testing. Even though it’s been nearly fifty years since she lied to her father about what she did that summer, she is still haunted with guilt, and she doesn’t really want to know if she’s in danger from radium exposure. She says, “I don’t want no doctors poking around me, asking questions about things I want to forget.”
Her voice and her personal story, along with the true horror story of the Radium Girls, stayed with me long after I put the book down.
The previous responses give a summary of the story so I won’t include one here. I will relate how impressed I am at the character development and the realistic speech patterns.
Helen isn’t stupid but she is relatively uneducated and her speech patterns show it with each sentence. Even when she is on her best behavior and using her best manners, her speech betrays her. Helen’s sentences are peppered with double negatives and improper word tenses. These same patterns are heard daily from persons who are learning English as their second language.
Helen is a kind but timid soul. She is big hearted though easily manipulated unless someone gets her “riled”. I was often feeling sorry or angry for her for the treatment from her domineering sister or selfish, pushy niece. All the main characters are developed so fully that I had dreams about them!
In addition, I am fascinated with the way the attitudes of the times come through the story. Women were only permitted to work in specific vocations and weren’t considered worthy enough to have ‘much schooling’. This was evident on every page from character interactions and the dividing of life’s chores and duties. A hard core feminist would really get distressed over the lives of the women presented here.
I am not a writer by any means. I read for entertainment and to experience other’s thoughts and worlds. I most certainly experienced another world when reading “Radium Halos”. Come and experience that world!
I loved this book. I was expecting more “lawsuit” stuff, and was actually glad to see that wasn’t the case–a thin veneer over a political statement, however gut-wrenching and important, never makes a truly good novel. Instead, this was all about a depth of character, and the dark circumstances that united the main character in a conspiracy of silence. Yet the lawsuits and the medical situations recurred as a plotline that captivated interest.
I loved the myriad of tiny details that came across as SO unique and true that it felt like the author had just interviewed this woman named Helen. The voice and the moments were all so genuine. I loved how I could really feel that this was an old, semi-crazy woman who believed inside of herself that she hadn’t changed much from a young, normal factory worker. That’s a hard tightrope for a writer to walk, and Stout did it expertly. Her tale is touching and deep, as well as very complex as it weaves back and forth between timelines. An excellent book, not just for people interested in the radium trials!
Radium Halos is not only a fascinating read but also a beautifully written narrative based on young women employed by The Radium Dial Company in the 1920’s, to paint dials on watches and clocks with luminescent radium paint. Neither aware nor informed they willingly sought to attain perfection in the precise art of such labor, which involved swallowing a smidgen of deadly radium whenever a brush was “tipped” to a perfect point.
The unlikely narrator Helen weaves her commemoration tapestry with sparse but effective words in the powerful telling of her participation in leaving her rural home to become a “city” girl with money in her pocket, and numerous adventures not only to savor but also a few to harbor within the deepest recesses of her mind.
Shelley Stout’s seamlessly taut prose discards sentimentality for truth, and presents a compelling account of yet another manifestation which demonstrates how women were sacrificed at the industrial altar as dispensable commodities.