Bert Grimm, born Edward Cecil Reardon (1900 to 1985), was the most institutionally consequential American traditional tattooer of the twentieth century, the figure the trade calls "the Grandfather of Old School." His career bridged the carnival-tattooing era of the 1910s and the tattoo renaissance of the 1980s. His St. Louis flagship at 716 N. Broadway, established in 1928, ran for roughly twenty-six years, and his shop at 22 S. Chestnut Place on the Long Beach Pike anchored the densest postwar American tattoo district and survives today as the longest continuously operating tattoo address in the United States. His hand-painted flash is foundational to the American traditional revival, and his direct documented apprentice was Bob Shaw.

Who was Bert Grimm?

Bert Grimm was an American tattoo artist, shop owner, and mentor, born Edward Cecil Reardon on February 8, 1900, in Springfield, Missouri, and died June 15, 1985, in Seaside, Oregon. Across a working career of roughly sixty-nine years he operated in at least eight cities and built the most extensive multi-shop American traditional network of any single mid-century operator. He is the institutional anchor of mid-twentieth-century American traditional tattooing, and his shops in St. Louis, Long Beach, and Portland each survive as continuously operating tattoo businesses under successor names.

What was Bert Grimm known for?

Grimm is known for four things. First, his St. Louis flagship at 716 N. Broadway, established in 1928 and run for about twenty-six years, serving soldiers from Jefferson Barracks, Mississippi riverboat workers, and downtown bus-station traffic. Second, his Long Beach Pike shop at 22 S. Chestnut Place, the operational center of West Coast American traditional tattooing, which survives today under Kari Barba as Outer Limits Tattoo and Museum, the longest continuously operating tattoo address in the country. Third, his hand-painted flash, which circulated through the trade for sixty years and is foundational to the contemporary American traditional revival. Fourth, his direct mentorship of Bob Shaw and his hosting of a Pike-era roster that seeded much of the West Coast trade.

Biography and significance

Grimm was born Edward Cecil Reardon on February 8, 1900, in Springfield, Missouri. The Reardon family relocated to the Portland, Oregon, area early in his childhood, which underlies the "Portland-born" framing carried in some secondary accounts even though the documentary birth record is Springfield. By around age twelve, in 1912, Grimm was observing the Portland-area tattoo shops of Sailor Gus, Charlie Western, and Sailor George Fosdick. None of the three is documented as having taken him as a formal apprentice; the relationship was shop-environment observation rather than hands-on training.

At about age fifteen, around 1915, Grimm ran away from home and joined the traveling carnival circuit, where he learned to tattoo. In 1916, at sixteen, he opened his first tattoo shop in Chicago, working the South State Street tattoo row in the off-season and traveling with carnivals in summer. South State Street was the densest tattoo corridor in the upper Midwest, drawing sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and it was the working geography of Tatts Thomas. Grimm tattooed Thomas during this Chicago period; the relationship was a professional acquaintance with Grimm-on-Thomas work performed, not a teacher-student apprenticeship in either direction.

After two or three years of working in Chicago, Grimm undertook a paid apprenticeship in San Diego under Charlie Barrs around 1918 to 1919. This anchor comes from Grimm's own first-person account in a 1942 St. Louis newspaper profile, in which he explained that, having begun seeing fine tattooing coming out of San Diego, he traveled there and "paid plenty to learn the fine points of the business." Barrs, described as in his seventies in 1942, is identified as Grimm's named master, and is a figure distinct from the Portland-childhood "Charlie Western." The San Diego apprenticeship reframes Grimm's origin from purely self-taught to carnival start, a few years of self-directed Chicago work, then formal training under an established master.

A documented 1924 stint placed Grimm at a downtown Salt Lake City shop he called "Fort Bert Grimm," surfaced through a period Salt Lake Tribune article. This is the earliest dated working-shop stop outside the Chicago anchor and the Portland childhood, and it confirms the migratory carnival-into-shop pattern of his pre-1928 life.

St. Louis and the 716 N. Broadway flagship

Grimm's St. Louis chapter began around 1925, per his own 1942 first-person statement of having been "17 years in St. Louis," with the 716 N. Broadway flagship established in 1928. The most economical reconciliation is a two-step arrival: a city arrival around 1925 and the flagship opening in 1928. From that Broadway-at-Market address, on the downtown St. Louis riverfront strip, Grimm operated continuously for approximately twenty-six years. The shop sat at the convergence of three client streams: soldiers from Jefferson Barracks Army Base south of the city, Mississippi riverboat workers in port between trips, and the Greyhound bus-station traffic that filled the downtown Broadway strip.

A 1934 St. Louis Post-Dispatch profile of the Broadway shop carried Grimm's published assessment that, while he gave customers anything they asked for, his own drawings were "art with a capital A." That is the earliest published positioning of Grimm as an art-tattooer, decades before the renaissance institutionalized the same self-assessment, and the same profile records that he had created thousands of indexed designs, an early flash-catalogue anchor. The 716 N. Broadway shop is the upstream institutional ancestor of the continuous-ownership chain that survives today in St. Louis as Trader Bob's.

The Long Beach Pike, 22 S. Chestnut Place

In either 1952 or 1954, a year genuinely disputed across the surviving sources, Grimm purchased 22 S. Chestnut Place on the Long Beach Pike and renamed the storefront "Bert Grimm's World Famous Tattoo Studio." The Pike was the postwar West Coast equivalent of the Chicago South State Street strip, fueled by Long Beach's status as a major Navy town and the broader Pacific Fleet liberty traffic. For roughly fifteen years the Chestnut shop was the operational center of West Coast American traditional tattooing. There Grimm hosted, mentored, or worked alongside Lyle Tuttle, who held a Pike tenure at 16 Cedar Way in 1956 and 1957, along with Owen Jensen, Bob Shaw, Don Nolan, Phil Sims, Dave Gibson, Zeke Owens, and Bob Roberts.

In 1969 Grimm sold the Pike shop to Bob Shaw and began his retirement to Seaside, Oregon. The shop passed through Bob Shaw, then his widow Wanda Shaw, and then Kari Barba, and survives today as Outer Limits Tattoo and Museum, the last surviving business from the demolished Pike entertainment district and the longest continuously operating tattoo address in the United States, with continuous tattoo-studio occupancy of the same storefront since 1927.

Portland, the Sea Tramp transition, and death

Per the Tattoo Archive practitioner file, Grimm grew bored with retirement and opened a shop in Portland around 1970, working it for several years. After he fell ill in 1977, two of his Pike protégés, Don Deaton and Dave Orlowski, came up from Long Beach in January 1978 to help run the Portland operation. In 1978 Bob Shaw and Colonel Bill Todd purchased the Portland shop, and in 1980 they sold it to Deaton and Orlowski. The original handshake was that the buyers could keep the "Bert Grimm" name, but at the moment of sale Grimm reversed himself, forcing Deaton and Orlowski to coin a new name on the spot. Deaton named the shop Sea Tramp, after his hand-painted seafaring-temptress flash, and it has carried that name continuously since, surviving as Oregon's oldest continuously operating tattoo shop.

Grimm died on June 15, 1985, in Seaside, Oregon, at age 85, per the Daily Astorian obituary primary-press anchor, which identifies him as a nationally known Seaside tattoo artist and corrects the older "Warrenton" framing carried in some derivative summaries. The most defensible reading of his late chronology is a gradual disengagement from Long Beach through the late 1960s, the formal Pike sale in 1969, the Portland shop "out of boredom" around 1970, the 1977 illness, the 1978 sale, and the 1985 death, in which "retirement" describes a gradual transition rather than a single year.

Lineage and influence

Grimm's documented direct apprentice was Bob Shaw, who arrived at 716 N. Broadway in 1941 at age fifteen and did his first tattoo under Grimm that September. The Bob Shaw line is the principal late-twentieth-century afterlife of Grimm's teaching, running through Shaw's later training shops and the Texas Shaw family. His Pike-era roster, with Tuttle, Jensen, Nolan, Sims, Gibson, Owens, and Roberts, seeded much of the West Coast trade. His hand-painted flash, the standardized imagery sheets the studio tattooists of the day worked from, circulated through the trade for sixty years and survives in the Tattoo Archive holdings, on the walls at Outer Limits and Sea Tramp, and in the serialized Vintage Tattoo Flash volumes. The bold-line, saturated-primary, sailor-and-military American traditional vocabulary that defines the contemporary revival is, in significant part, Grimm's vocabulary.

Cross-references

  • Cap Coleman. Contemporary East Coast American traditional master in the same mid-century trade
  • Paul Rogers. Contemporary machine-builder and supply distributor; period networks such as Spaulding and Rogers carried trade flash
  • Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins. Contemporary whose parallel Honolulu shop consolidated the same sailor-tattoo economy Grimm worked in Hawaii and on the Pike
  • Bob Shaw. Grimm's confirmed apprentice and the 1969 purchaser of the 22 S. Chestnut Place shop
  • Zeke Owens. Pike night-shift figure in the same West Coast working-shop environment
  • Outer Limits Tattoo. The current institution preserving the 22 S. Chestnut Place address continuity
  • American Traditional. The tradition Grimm standardized and carried from carnival to renaissance

Sources

  • Eldridge, C.W. (Chuck). "Bert Grimm." Tattoo Archive, tattooarchive.com. Practitioner-page anchor for the 716 N. Broadway tenure, the Bob Shaw apprenticeship, the Portland return, and the institutional successions.
  • St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 29, 1942, p. 21. First-person Grimm profile anchoring the Charlie Barrs San Diego apprenticeship and the "17 years in St. Louis" arrival calibration.
  • St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 22, 1934, p. 29. The "art with a capital A" profile of the 716 N. Broadway shop and the indexed flash catalogue.
  • Daily Astorian (Astoria, Oregon), June 18, 1985, p. 2. Obituary primary-press anchor for the June 15, 1985, Seaside death and the parentage.
  • Bert Grimm (Wikipedia) and Outer Limits Tattoo institutional history. Corroboration for the multi-shop network, the Pike purchase, and the 1969 sale to Bob Shaw.
  • OC Weekly long-form profile of 22 S. Chestnut Place. Documents the 1952-or-1954 Pike-purchase-year dispute.

Editorial

Researched and written by John J. Mayo III, Editor, Tattoo History Atlas. Confidence is held at MIXED tier. The birth and death dates, the 1928 St. Louis founding at 716 N. Broadway, the Bob Shaw 1941 apprenticeship, the 1969 Pike sale, and the documented mentee roster are corroborated across many independent sources. The tier is MIXED rather than VERIFIED because several subordinate points carry genuine uncertainty in the surviving record. The Long Beach Pike purchase year is genuinely disputed between 1952 and 1954, and is presented as such rather than resolved; the framing "1954 to 1970" is avoided in favor of the documented 1952-or-1954 to 1969 window. The "Coney Island, New York origins" framing carried in some older summaries is refuted; Grimm's documented geography is the Midwest and West Coast. The Bob Shaw "nephew" framing, the Bonnie-and-Clyde tattooing claim, and the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show season are treated as disputed, folkloric, or single-source respectively. The refuted "Lyle Tuttle 1949 Grimm apprentice" claim is not used; Tuttle's documented Pike tenure was 1956 to 1957.

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