Family Documents
Margaret "Peg" Looney
Darlene Halm, Ottawa, Illinois, is the niece of dialpainter, Peg Looney. She is heavily involved in the memory of The Radium Girls and graciously shared some documents her family had collected with me during a visit at the Reddick Mansion.
These include authorizations to exhume Peg Looney's body, flyer information for the screening of Radium City, aerial maps of hotspots in Ottawa, yearbook entries featuring Looney, information packets from the EPA, and more.
Death Notice for Margaret "Peg" Looney that falsely attributes her death and quarantine to diptheria, rather than radium poisoning.
Family photograph, with members' names listed on the subsequent photograph. Margaret "Peg" Looney is standing.
Yearbook entry. M. Looney's ambition is to be a schoolteacher.
EPA Superfund Site Map
EPA Superfund Fact Sheet 1988
Argonne National Laboratory Communications
This document is authorization from Looney's family for Argonne National Laboratory to exhume her body and collect tissue specimens for examination.
Radium City Flyer
Reader: Chicago's Free Weekly | Friday, June 22, 1984
RADIUM CITY
On Cancer, Clock Dials, and Ottawa, Illinois, a Town That Failed to See The Light
By John Conroy
On Wednesday, March 28, reporters descended on Ottawa, Illinois, in numbers that rivaled the horde that covered the Starved Rock murders in 1960. All three Peoria television stations dispatched crews. From Chicagao, WBBM TV sent their science reporter, and Channel Seven flew in by helicopter. Three men from newspapers and a fourth from a wire service also stopped in. All had come to record the dismantling of a factory of ill fame, the now defunct Luminous Processes, Inc.
If the law permitted the building to be sold, it is unlikely that it would bring $100,000. As it is, Illinois taxpayers are paying $2 million to have an as yet undetermined portion of the structure shipped to Hanford, Washington. In Handford, the factory and its contents will be buried. March 28 was the scheduled date of departure for the first truckload, which was going to be chosen from 44 55-gallon drums and 12 metal boxes containing a silk screen machine, a refrigerator, two safes, a furnace, miscellaneous machine parts, debris, duct ork, and dirt. All of the contents - even the soil, which has formerly supported the factory's lawn - were radioactive.
Over the course of its natural life, the factory employed hundreds of women who painted clock dials with radium - or tritium-based paint, a mixture that glowed in the dark. Everyone in the city seems to know someone whowas on the payroll at one time or
