A Fictional Interview with Frances Splettstocher at the Waterbury Clock Company
TRAVEL IN TIME WITH DAN | Waterbury, Connecticut — 1923
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a fictional historical interview. Frances Splettstocher (c. 1903–1925) began working as a dial painter at the Waterbury Clock Company in 1921 at age seventeen, using the “lip-point” technique… shaping her paintbrush to a fine tip between her lips before dipping it back into radium paint. In January 1925, she developed anemia and severe jaw pain; when a dentist attempted to pull an aching tooth, part of her jawbone came away with it. She died within weeks, the first of more than thirty workers to die from radium poisoning at the Waterbury Clock Company. Her father, who also worked at the company, later told a visiting official that he was certain radium had killed his daughter, but… in his own recorded words… “he dare not make any kick about it,” for fear of losing his job. This piece is set in 1923, roughly two years before any of that happened, while radium was still marketed as a miracle substance and lip-dipping was still simply how the job was done. Frances has no way of knowing what is coming, and nothing in this conversation is meant to suggest otherwise… the tragedy of this piece is entirely in what the reader knows that she does not.
SETTING: A long workbench inside the Waterbury Clock Company, dial faces and small paint pots lined up in rows. Frances works with quick, practiced hands, a faint greenish glow clinging to her fingertips even in daylight.
Dan: You make that look easy… how many of these do you paint in a day?
Frances: Enough to keep my hands sore by supper, but I’m not complaining. Five cents a dial adds up quicker than you’d think if your fingers are fast, and mine are about the fastest on this floor. My mother says I could paint a pinhead if you asked me to.
Dan: What’s the trick to getting the brush that fine a point?
Frances: This. Right between the lips, twist it just so, and it comes out sharp as a needle. The foreman showed us the first week… lip, dip, paint, they call it. It sounds strange when you say it plain like that, but it’s just how the work gets done. You stop thinking about it after the first few hundred dials.
Dan: Doesn’t it worry you at all, working with radium every day?
Frances: Worry over radium? Goodness, no… it’s supposed to be good for you, if anything. My mother rubs it on her knuckles when they ache. There’s a doctor who says it’s practically a cure for whatever ails a person. I like to paint a bit on my nails before a dance, if I’m honest with you… makes them glow right up when the lights go down. The other girls do their teeth, even. It’s the most fun part of the job most days.
Dan: Your father works here too, doesn’t he?
Frances: He does, on the other side of the building. It means a good deal to both of us, if I’m honest… steady work, and under the same roof besides. He’s proud of this company. Proud of me for landing the job, too, being as young as I was when I started. It isn’t every seventeen-year-old girl who gets nimble-finger work that pays like this does.
Dan: What do you picture for yourself a few years from now?
Frances: Oh, nothing so grand… a bit more saved up, maybe a fellow worth marrying, Sunday afternoons that aren’t spent hunched over a workbench. Ordinary things. I don’t spend much time picturing further than that. There’s always another tray of dials in front of me, and this one isn’t going to paint itself.
Dan: Thank you for your time today, Frances… and for showing me how it’s done.
Frances: Any time. Mind the paint… it gets on everything, and it doesn’t come off easy.
Frances Splettstocher died in February 1925, roughly two years after this conversation is set, having worked at the Waterbury Clock Company for less than four years. Her father continued working there after her death, afraid that speaking openly about what had happened to his daughter would cost him the very job that had once made him proud. He was not alone… for years afterward, other families at other companies made the same calculation, and the true scale of the harm stayed hidden far longer than it should have. The leadership lesson from this workbench is not about Frances’s courage, since she never got the chance to fight back the way the later Radium Girls did. It is about the silence that surrounded her… a father who thought he knew the truth and couldn’t afford to say it, and a company that understood exactly what that fear was worth to its bottom line. An organization that depends on its own people staying quiet out of fear is not simply failing to listen; it is actively counting on the silence to survive. Real leadership means building something safe enough that no one who works for you ever has to choose between telling the truth and keeping their job.
Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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