In most non-pandemic years, Rachel Kozicki and her family would likely have been spending a sunny spring break at Walt Disney World, a typical Easter vacation spot.
Instead, Rachel, a sophomore at Shepard High School in Palos Heights, spent her time off immersed in a tragedy. And it was her idea.
Rachel’s school play is scheduled to be performed later this month in front of a live audience — about 75 or 80 of the auditorium’s 325 seats will be available. It’s the first big production she’s been involved with at Shepard, and she’s in the lead role, so she wanted to learn more about the character she’d be playing.
It helps that the character has a compelling story.
Catherine Wolfe Donohue had gotten a job at age 19 in her hometown, Ottawa, at the Radium Dial Co., an outfit that had set up shop in the building that once housed the town’s high school.
It was 1922, and women had only recently won the right to vote. Things were looking up.
“Women could now smoke in public; they could wear bathing suits,” said MaryEllen Fawk, the theater teacher who’s directing Rachel in Shepard’s production of “These Shining Lives,” a dramatized account of Donohue’s life and death.
And women such as Donohue could get good-paying jobs in Ottawa painting numbers on clock and watch faces. They were advised to wet the paintbrushes with their mouths to achieve a fine tip needed to precisely paint the numbers.
But the paint was radioactive and they began to get sick. The company hired a doctor who told the workers to take some aspirin and get back to work. It wasn’t long before many of them died.
There’s a monument to Donohue and other so-called Radium Girls in Ottawa, an Illinois River town on the way to Starved Rock State Park. But elsewhere, the story of a company that hired only women and then poisoned many of them to death isn’t widely known.
“I grew up in Dixon, Illinois, which is just north of Ottawa, and I never knew about this, never heard anything about it,” Fawk said. “I asked my mother who’s in her 90s and she recalled something, but not much. She was just a little girl when it happened.”
Likewise, Rachel and her family weren’t familiar with the story before reading the script for the play she’d be starring in.
“I was like, ‘What?’ This all happened, and it happened so close?” said Barb Kozicki, Rachel’s mom.
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Donohue’s condition worsened, and she eventually was fired along with several of her factory colleagues who also were showing signs of radiation sickness. Following in the footsteps of a group of employees at another plant that used radium, they filed suit against Radium Dial Co. in a case that was significant in the development of workplace safety standards, according to a compilation of contemporary news coverage compiled by the Library of Congress.
The script left an impression on Rachel, so she and her parents traveled from Crestwood to Ottawa to learn more about Donohue and her short life.
“I thought I’d visit her out of respect,” Rachel said.
When they got to the cemetery where Donohue is buried, they spent an hour and a half looking for her grave site.
“We were just about to give up, and at this point I was asking her for help, like ‘Catherine, where are you?'”
They asked another cemetery visitor, who didn’t know where the grave was either. Finally, Rachel spotted a white marker in the corner, a bit removed from the rest of the plots. It was Donohue’s grave, where she was buried in a lead-lined coffin.
“I was so relieved to have at least found her,” Rachel said. “Honestly, I apologized to her for what happened. It wasn’t her fault. She was just unlucky. … She was so brave.”
Before moving on to visit the memorial and the site of the factory where Donohue was slowly poisoned to death, Rachel took the time to tidy up the woman’s final resting spot.
“I asked her what she did over spring break, and she told me what she did,” Fawk, said. “I was amazed by her act of kindness and charity, just to clean this person’s grave and honor it. I was incredibly proud of her and am so thrilled she’s in my play.”
The Kozicki family all got involved with the story. Besides the trip to Ottawa with her parents, Rachel said her sisters have helped her research the role as well, finding websites devoted to Catherine Donohue and the Radium Girls.
And it’s a story that’s resonated with Fawk as well. Besides the Shepard production, scheduled for April 29 and 30 with socially distanced seating in the school’s theater and a streaming broadcast afterward, she’s involved with a production of “These Shining Lives” that’s streaming from The Drama Group in Chicago Heights. Several staged readings are planned from April 23 through May 2.
“It’s a beautiful play, a modern tragedy,” Fawk said. “These women walked into something thinking their lives would be better, and they didn’t turn out to be.
“Still today we have these things that go on. It’s important to be reminded of people who worked and died, and the places that harmed them.”
Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected].