* The tragic, true story of the "Radium girls," female factory employees for the
Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, during the 1920s and 1930s inspired Melanie Marnich's play "These Shining Lives." It tells of the women who suffered the debilitating and fatal effects of radium poisoning from their jobs painting the faces of watches and clocks with luminous, radium-laced paint.