| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Captain Jim Malonson |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Long Beach Pike · California |
| Date | 1974 CE |
| Style / Technique | Long Beach Pike American traditional, walk-in flash-shop register |
| Connected to | Bert Grimm, Bob Shaw, Zeke Owens |
Archive Note
By one account Captain Jim Malonson started in Chicago. Outer Limits Tattoo's "Past Pike Artists II" page, run by Kari Barba from the surviving Bert Grimm shop at 22 Chestnut Place, calls him a "Chicago tattooist," but names no shop, no teacher, and no years. That Chicago origin rests on a single source. His "Captain" reads as a trade nickname in the postwar manner of Colonel Bill Todd and Captain Don Deaton, not a verified military rank. No service record surfaced.
By 1974 he had moved to Southern California and co-owned the shop at 362 West Pike on the Long Beach Pike with Al Orsini and Fred Thornton. Its signage read "Expert Tattoo, Long Beach Tattoo Studio, The World's Largest, 7 Master Tattoo Artists to Serve You." The roster on that sign is only partly recovered. Outer Limits, Sea Tramp Tattoo's Don Deaton page, OC Weekly, and the existing Long Beach Pike vault entry all agree on the address and the three co-owners.
The shop's place on the Pike is the clearest thing about Malonson. Bert Grimm had sold the 22 Chestnut Place studio to his nephew Bob Shaw in 1969, and from 1973 Shaw and Colonel Bill Todd ran it. A short walk away, Malonson held 362 West Pike. The trade press names his shop as the principal rival to the Grimm chair through the 1970s. The binary framing oversimplifies a Pike that held about a dozen storefronts at its peak, but Malonson's was the rival house that mattered.
His best-documented working tie is Don Deaton, who tattooed at 362 West Pike from 1974 to 1978. Sea Tramp Tattoo's own page on Deaton supplies the dates and the framing, that Deaton tattooed "for Bert Grimm's rival Captain Jim Maloneson." Deaton had come up inside the Grimm shop, hired as a gofer in 1970 and apprenticed under Rio Lewis in 1973, before crossing to Malonson's chair. In January 1978 Colonel Bill Todd phoned Deaton out of that chair to help run Grimm's Portland shop, which Deaton and Dave Orlowski bought and renamed Sea Tramp Tattoo Company in 1980. Malonson's four-year chair is the bridge between the Grimm Pike formation and the Portland house that descends from it.
Malonson ran a second shop at the same time. West Coast Tattoo sat in downtown Los Angeles, at or near 5th and Main Street. The Reading Public Museum holds a 1974 photograph captioned "Captain Jim, West Coast Tattoo, Los Angeles, California," and Daniel D. Teoli Jr.'s photographic archive carries a series titled "'Captain Jim' had a tattoo parlor in downtown L.A." California Ralph and Tennessee Dave James worked that bench, and Sailor West, a Charlie Wagner apprentice, tattooed there during his off-season from the carnival circuit. It is one of the better-documented downtown Los Angeles benches of the decade.
The Pike trade press records one more measure of his standing. In the late 1970s, Bob Shaw and Colonel Bill Todd backed a Long Beach Hollywood Tattoo Studio that came up, by the Pirate Invasion Long Beach account,"as a direct challenge to Captain Jim Malonson's spot." The Grimm axis planted a competitor on his ground. Outer Limits also lists Malonson among the tutors of Zeke Owens, the Los Angeles and Long Beach traditional figure, alongside Ernie Sutton, Don Nolan, and others.
The Pike did not survive him. The Long Beach City Council declined to renew the Pike land leases in 1979, and every tattoo storefront except 22 Chestnut Place was torn down in the staged demolition. The 362 West Pike shop closed with it. Malonson's full given name, his birth and death years, and his life after 1979 are all undocumented in the sources that have surfaced.