A Kansas lady ran off to affix the circus and adjusted the tattoo world : NPR

The Old Glory Tattoo store is in Derby, Kansas, a suburb of Wichita. That’s the place Ron Dolecek plies his commerce. He says he’ll always remember the day, nearly twenty years in the past, when one in all his prospects came into his shop carrying one thing rolled up underneath his arm.

“He says, ‘I think you’re going to want to see this,'” Dolecek remembers.

The man unfurled a hand-painted sideshow banner exhibiting a lady coated in tattoos, draped in gauzy material towards a pale yellow background.

Dolecek says he was captivated. He thought he acknowledged the tattooed determine as Maud Stevens Wagner, a turn-of-the-century performer who turned an icon of American tattooing.

“I’m instantly doing the math in my head, like; Who can I call? Where can I borrow money?” Dolecek says. “Because this is not leaving my shop.”

The banner was painted years earlier than to entice carnival guests to see a sensational spectacle. For Dolecek, it was a tangible piece of historical past.

The buyer advised Dolecek he discovered it in an deserted farmhouse close to Cedar Point, Kansas, within the Flint Hills, whereas exploring with buddies.

“They went upstairs and found steamer trunks full of tattoo memorabilia,” together with instruments, pigments, flash (pre-drawn) designs and sideshow banners, Dolecek says. “So this fellow realizes that he’s found something significant,” Dolecek added.

At a time when girls could not vote and profession choices have been restricted, Wagner cast her personal path as an entertainer and artist. Born in Emporia, Kansas, she turned probably the most recognizable girls in early American tattooing.

A tattooed Mona Lisa

A striking 1907 photograph exhibits Wagner sitting elegantly along with her tattoos on full show. A girl driving a lion seems on her chest and her arms show a riot of creatures, with Kansas sunflowers peeking out on every elbow. It’s among the many most downloaded tattoo-related photos within the Library of Congress.

“For me, that photograph, it’s a Mona Lisa pose, because it’s very enigmatic,” says Alan Govenar, an writer and filmmaker who revealed three books on the Wagner family.

“She’s so beautifully tattooed,” Govenar says. “There’s something intensely evocative about this photo.”

Nora Stevens was in her early 20s when she modified her identify to Maud and hit the highway along with her older sister, Dora. The pair carried out collectively because the Stevens Sisters, singing in sideshow skits, and performing in a high-wire act with a touring circus and selection present.

Meeting a tattooed man

When Maud Stevens was 26, she met Gus Wagner, a charismatic showman who billed himself as an expert globe-trotter, world champion hand tattoo artist and tattooed man.

According to Govenar’s analysis on Wagner, he discovered his method, referred to as hand poke or stick and poke, from tattoo masters in Japan, Java and Borneo throughout 4 years as a service provider seaman. He later mentioned his tattoos advised the story of his life on his breast, a historical past of America on his again and the romance of the ocean on every arm.

Dolecek, the tattoo artist, says he heard Stevens met Wagner beneath the newly electrified lights on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

“Maud meets Gus and, according to legend, they traded a lesson in tattooing for a first date and pretty much hit it off right away,”

But specialists of tattoo historical past, like Derin Bray, who runs an public sale home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, says the story is simply legend.

“It’s a great story, exchanging a tattoo for a date,” Bray says. “But it’s not true.”

Bray discovered images of the pair dated at the very least a yr earlier than the World’s Fair. Their marriage was formally introduced Oct. 3, 1904.

And whereas the 2 could not have met in St. Louis, the spectacle of one of many largest World’s Fairs in historical past would have been troublesome for them to withstand. A reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discovered the Wagners busily tattooing prospects at a storefront the place they’d arrange store on the outskirts of the fairgrounds. Gus Wagner boasted that he made nearly as a lot as a financial institution president throughout the truthful.

“It’s a paying business all right, if you know how to go at it,” he advised the reporter. “First, you’ve got to know the business – how to handle the needles, how to apply them without going too deep, and above all, how to use pigments that are put and will not cause irritations. Then you’ve got to deliver the goods. Do it quick and have it over with.”

The touring life

The Wagners made their dwelling on the highway, touring the carnival circuit and inking prospects within the low season. Dolecek says it was frequent on the time for tattoo outlets to maneuver round.

“Tattooers would take up in the back of a barber shop, maybe a photo studio,” Dolecek says. “And as a couple, they’re credited at the turn of the century with bringing tattooing into middle America.”

After performing along with his spouse for many years, Gus Wagner was struck by lightning in 1941 and died a number of months later.

Maud Wagner died in 1961, leaving tattoo artwork and memorabilia to the couple’s solely youngster, Lotteva Davis.

Though her mother and father have been tattooed from neck to toe, Davis by no means had a tattoo.

“Although we all knew how to tattoo, Papa taught her and me, Mama wouldn’t let Papa tattoo me,” she told a reporter from The Dallas Morning News in 1993.

“I never understood why,” she mentioned, calling it a “family feud.”

Saving a trove of tattoo artwork

When Davis died that yr in Plainview, Texas, her property included an enormous assortment that author Alan Govenar needed to maintain intact.

“A lot of people were offering to buy it, but they wanted to cherry pick the collection,” he says. “My interest wasn’t as an antique dealer or a dealer in historic artifacts and artworks. I wanted to see this collection preserved.”

Govenar bought it and donated the majority of the gathering to the South Street Seaport Museum, in New York City.

Art and antiques seller Derin Bray says the gathering is necessary as a result of so little Western tattoo materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries survives.

“It is the largest body of early tattoo material to survive and stay intact,” Bray says, “and it’s really important to understanding, not just their story, but the larger story of tattooing in America.”

The Wagner’s promotional supplies touted Maud Wagner’s expertise and her husband praised her to the press.

“My wife’s a tattoo artist too,” he advised a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter in 1904. “She’s an actress and a contortionist, and I’ve got her back and arms covered with the prettiest tattoo work you ever looked at.”

Finding the Wagners within the Kansas Flint Hills

Ron Dolecek nonetheless marvels at that sideshow banner that survived all these years in an deserted farmhouse.

“Given critters and tornadoes, fires, water damage, you know, pretty remarkable that it was found and salvaged and is out in the light of day today,” he says.

His fascination with the Wagners led him to their burial web site in Homestead Cemetery in rural Chase County.

When he visited in 2008, he discovered modest concrete markers. One mentioned “M.W.” and the opposite was clean.

Dolecek was decided to make issues proper.

“I had the headstones made, and we went and placed the headstones adjacent to the existing markers so that they were recognized like everybody else in the cemetery,” he says.

Today the stones learn: “The Original Gus Wagner, Globetrotting tattooer,” and “Maud Stevens Wagner, America’s first lady tattooer.”