| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Rick Walters |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Long Beach Pike · California |
| Date | 1978 CE |
| Style / Technique | Long Beach Pike American traditional, heavy-outline sailor and military flash |
| Connected to | Zeke Owens, Bob Shaw, Bert Grimm |
Archive Note
Rick Walters was born September 5, 1945, in Chicago, Illinois, and came west as a boy, growing up in Hawthorne in Los Angeles County. His first contact with the trade came at fourteen. In 1959 his father took him to the Long Beach Pike to have a hand-poked marking on his leg covered. The cover-up, a black panther, was done by Zeke Owens, born Ronald Owen Mozisek, working the seaside amusement zone. That panther was Walters first professional tattoo and the start of a lifelong tie to the Pike.
In 1978 he came back to the Pike to work, joining Bert Grimm World Famous Tattoo at 22 Chestnut Place. Grimm had stepped back from the chair in 1970, and the shop was owned by Bob Shaw, who had bought it from Grimm in 1969. Walters took over as manager the same year he arrived, running daily operations and tattooing alongside a bench of traditional artists. He held that post for the next twenty-five years.
The shape of the job changed in 1983. Bob Shaw and his family moved from Long Beach to Texas. The Shaws kept legal ownership, but Walters was left on-site as the sole manager in full charge of the day to day. Some accounts compress his run to a 1983 to 2002 bracket, which is really his solo-director stretch. He had already been managing since 1978, a full span of twenty-five years. Under him the shop held its footing as the Pike amusement zone declined and was redeveloped around it.
Walters managed the shop until 2002. After the death of Wanda Shaw, the Shaw family decided to close it. Walters knew what the location was worth as the oldest continuously operating tattoo shop in the country, so he called Kari Barba, who had opened the first Outer Limits Tattoo in Anaheim in 1983, and pushed her to buy the business. Barba bought the studio and reopened it as Outer Limits Tattoo and Museum, keeping the address at 22 Chestnut Place alive. That call is the single act that saved the place from demolition or conversion.
With the Pike shop closed, Walters opened his own studio in the 2000s, Rick Walters World Famous Tattoo Parlor, in Sunset Beach, California. He kept tattooing and kept training younger artists there. He had been a central teaching figure in the Southern California traditional scene for years, handing down the technical and behavioral standards of the old Pike bench to the people who came up after him.
He was as known for his manner as for his hand. Walters was blunt, old-school, and funny about it. His slogan,"Rick Walters Hates You," ran on stickers and posters and shirts and turned up in shops around the world, a joke that carried his whole personality in four words. The line back through Zeke Owens to the Pike also tied him to the older Sutton-Owens night-shift cohort that had worked the amusement zone before him.
Rick Walters died March 4, 2019, at his shop in Sunset Beach, California, at seventy-three. His twenty-five years at 22 Chestnut Place, and the one phone call to Kari Barba, are why the oldest continuous tattoo shop in the United States is still standing.