CAPE SISTERS TO PERFORM HISTORY SKIT IN NATIONAL COMPETITION

When the United States passed the first workers' compensation law in 1908, it was meant to be a step in the right direction for workers' rights.

However, Gail and Jill Heuschober, two students at St. Vincent de Paul grade school, have learned the original law was a far leap from what workers' compensation is today.

On April 12, Gail and Jill won first place in the state History Day competition at the University of Missouri-Columbia for their performance entitled "The Tragedy of Industrial Disease, the Triumph of Workers' Compensation." Now they will advance to the National History Day competition at the University of Maryland at College Park between June 15 and 19.

"Jill and Gail have interpreted workman's compensation in a very dramatic fashion," said Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University. "It is an emotional presentation with the power to bring tears to your eyes."

Jill, 12, and Gail, 14, use a 10-minute skit to narrate and dramatize the shortfalls of the first workers' compensation legislation. In 1908, workers' compensation only covered on-the-job accidents. It failed to compensate for damages due to work-related illnesses and disease.

The first scene takes place around 1912. Jill, donned in a lace-trimmed black dress with pearls, portrays Dr. Alice Hamilton, a leading figure in the advancement of workers' compensation. With an authentic German and Polish accent and white shoe polish in her hair, Gail plays Mrs. Rosenberg who seeks help from Hamilton for her husband, a painter.

Her husband, Walter, has fallen extremely ill, like many of his co-workers. Although the paint company blames the illness on whiskey, it turns out the lead in the paint that Walter and his co-workers use has given them lead poisoning. Unfortunate for Walter's family, workers' compensation did not cover lead-poisoning because it was an illness not an injury.

In the second scene, Hamilton is visited 16 years later by Florence Kelley, another pioneer for justice in the workplace for women and children. Kelley is disturbed at the recent deaths of 17 to 20 women who worked as dial painters on wristwatches and clocks.

"At this time, women with delicate fingers were hired to paint radium on the watches so they would glow," Nickell said. "As they painted, they moistened the tips of their brushes with their mouths to get a point before dipping them into radium. After a while, the women's bones absorbed so much radium they began to glow and rapid death followed."

The events that followed this incident led to a court case against the U.S. Radium Co. and an eventual ruling that said the women were entitled to compensation for the toxic poisoning. By 1948, all 50 states had new workers' compensation laws that contained a List of Compensable Diseases.

Jill and Gail came up with the idea for the skit when Gail was in the same competition with their brother, Chad, two years ago.

Performances about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which resulted in the deaths of numerous women, got us interested in tragedy in the workplace, Gail said.

Last July, the two girls began a rigorous research that included trips to Kent Library, inter-library loans, Internet surfing and interviews with local historians and attorneys who specialize in workers' compensation.

The most impressive of their 49 sources is Dr. Claudia Clark, a professor at Central Michigan State University who wrote her dissertation on the radium dial painters.

"The depth of their research and attention to detail is quite unusual for a sixth and an eighth grader," Nickell said. "They are going to have professors of history judging them who are going to be surprised at the sophistication of the performance."

Jill and Gail will perform their skit for the Daughters of the American Revolution at 1:15 p.m. on Wednesday at Cafe Cape on Independence.

In addition, the sisters have been chosen as two of eight students who will represent Missouri at a reception for National History Day in the capital.