Tattoos, Weirdos, and Sign Painting – the Beginnings of a Graphic Arts Career

My father, Raymond Miller Thorpe, had beautiful handwriting. I first noticed it when I was in junior high. He was also very good at writing in Old English script. That interested me and I asked him to show me how he did it. He dug out an old drafting textbook from his college days that had the Old English alphabet laid out. It also had some tips about directions to do brushstrokes or penstrokes as it were, and the like. I practiced and practiced and eventually got fairly good at writing in Old English myself. In those days junior high students often wrote on the covers of their notebooks and I did the same. Many things that I wrote were done in Old English of course. At the same time many teachers required that the papers we handed in were written in ink. The Schaefer pen company had a line of inexpensive fountain pens. Instead of having to lug around a glass bottle of ink, they had devised a plastic cartridge that you could put into the barrel of the pen and when you screwed in the nib, a projection pierced the cartridge and allowed the ink to flow. Usually these pens included a couple of spare cartridges when you bought them, blue or black ink were the normal choices. But I discovered that if you went to the stationery store, Sandford’s in my case, they had any number of other colors of ink available in the cartridges. My two favorites were red and peacock blue. Interestingly, the peacock blue looked just like the ink of a tattoo when you drew on the back of your hand.

So with four colors of ink available to me I was able to start a budding career as a tattoo artist. I used to charge a penny a letter for Old English names that I drew on the backs of people’s hands. One customer, Marion Himes, used to have me letter his girlfriend’s name on his hand every lunch hour. These tattoos gave me enough spending money to buy a couple of treats afterschool. I’ll say more about that in a future blog.

Many junior high boys built models. Sometimes it was a boat or something, but usually it was a model car. It was around this time that Ed “Big Daddy” Roth came up with his first custom hot rods. We had never seen anything like them before. He was also selling T-shirts and sweatshirts that had outrageous illustrations on the front or back. Usually they were some kind of hot rod with the monster driving it. They had huge slicks, a 4 foot gearshift, and the front end was several feet off the ground.

I immediately started to imitate them, creating individualized pictures for the people I drew them for. A completed sweatshirt might bring in four or five dollars, a respectable amount in those days. Especially for teenager. I also did any number of sweatshirts that had British motifs. A favourite was the lion and unicorn crest, but I also did the RAF badge for Ray Scuffham and later, the logo for Watney’s Brown Ale. I wish I had some copies of those drawings now. If any of you readers have one tucked away somewhere, please let me know.

One summer, probably around 1965, my grandparents visited from England. Mom and Dad wanted to take them around and show them some of the local sites so they had me stay with my friend Bob Lohr in Des Moines for a week or so. Bob worked at a car wash along with another very good friend of mine, George Vignovich. I just hung around while they were working. At the time George had a fairly hot car. I drew pictures of it and the manager of the carwash saw me. He asked if I could paint signs. I told them I had never done it but that I was good at lettering. He bought me a bunch of brushes and paint and the rest of that week I painted signs for him. I asked George and Kay to send me a copy of a Christmas card I sent to them many years ago hoping it was one of the wierdos I used to do. But it was a side view of George’s car, and not the front on view I was hoping for.