Mae Keane did not care much for the job she had during the summer of 1924, painting radioactive radium onto watch dials to make them glow in the dark.
The pay was 8 cents a dial and Keane, then 18, was not as fast as her supervisor wanted her to be.
Keane and her co-workers at Waterbury Clock Co., all young women, were told they could paint faster if they dipped their brushes into the radium-laden paint and then sharpened the bristles with their lips.
But the paint was bitter and Keane would not "lip-point," as the practice was known.
"I made 62 cents one day," Keane told The Courant 10 years ago. "That's when my boss came to me and said I better find another job."
The foreman probably saved Keane's life. She worked in the dial painting room for eight to nine weeks, then transferred to another job at the company.
"The boss actually said, 'You don't like this, do you?' " recalled Keane's niece, Patricia Cohn of Middlebury, with whom Keane lived for the final 13 years of her life.
Keane, 107, died Saturday at her home in Middlebury. Keane's family believes she was the last of the so-called radium girls from Waterbury.
Last Of Waterbury's Radium Girls Dies - Courant.com
See also: Film Festival; A View of the Radium Dial Horror
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