This story is adapted from an episode of the KCUR podcast A People's History of Kansas City about the everyday heroes, renegades and visionaries who shaped Kansas City and the region.
The Old Glory Tattoo shop is in Derby, Kansas, a suburb of Wichita. That's where Ron Dolecek plies his trade. He says he'll never forget the day, almost two decades ago, when one of his customers came into his shop carrying something rolled up under his arm.
"He says, 'I think you're going to want to see this,'" Dolecek remembers.
The man unfurled a hand-painted sideshow banner showing a woman covered in tattoos, draped in gauzy fabric against a faded yellow background.
Dolecek says he was captivated. He thought he recognized the tattooed figure as Maud Stevens Wagner, a turn-of-the-century performer who became 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 before to entice carnival visitors to see a sensational spectacle. For Dolecek, it was a tangible piece of history.
The customer told Dolecek he found it in an abandoned farmhouse near Cedar Point, Kansas, in the Flint Hills, while exploring with friends.
"They went upstairs and found steamer trunks full of tattoo memorabilia," including tools, 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 women couldn't vote and career options were limited, Wagner forged her own path as an entertainer and artist. Born in Emporia, Kansas, she became one of the most recognizable women in early American tattooing.
A tattooed Mona Lisa
A striking 1907 photograph shows Wagner sitting elegantly with her tattoos on full display. A woman riding a lion appears on her chest and her arms display a riot of creatures, with Kansas sunflowers peeking out on each elbow. It's among the most downloaded tattoo-related images in the Library of Congress.
"For me, that photograph, it's a Mona Lisa pose, because it's very enigmatic," says Alan Govenar, an author and filmmaker who published 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 changed her name to Maud and hit the road with her older sister, Dora. The pair performed together as the Stevens Sisters, singing in sideshow skits, and performing in a high-wire act with a traveling circus and variety show.
Meeting a tattooed man
When Maud Stevens was 26, she met Gus Wagner, a charismatic showman who billed himself as a professional globe-trotter, world champion hand tattoo artist and tattooed man.
According to Govenar's research on Wagner, he learned his technique, called hand poke or stick and poke, from tattoo masters in Japan, Java and Borneo during four years as a merchant seaman. He later said his tattoos told the story of his life on his breast, a history of America on his back and the romance of the sea on each arm.
Dolecek, the tattoo artist, says he heard Stevens met Wagner beneath the newly electrified lights at 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 experts of tattoo history, like Derin Bray, who runs an auction house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, says the story is just legend.
"It's a great story, exchanging a tattoo for a date," Bray says. "But it's not true."
Bray found photographs of the pair dated at least a year before the World's Fair. Their marriage was officially announced Oct. 3, 1904.
And while the two may not have met in St. Louis, the spectacle of one of the largest World's Fairs in history would have been difficult for them to resist. A reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found the Wagners busily tattooing customers at a storefront where they'd set up shop on the outskirts of the fairgrounds. Gus Wagner boasted that he made almost as much as a bank president during the fair.
"It's a paying business all right, if you know how to go at it," he told 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 traveling life
The Wagners made their home on the road, traveling the carnival circuit and inking customers in the off-season. Dolecek says it was common at the time for tattoo shops to move around.
"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 with his wife for decades, Gus Wagner was struck by lightning in 1941 and died several months later.
Maud Wagner died in 1961, leaving tattoo art and memorabilia to the couple's only child, Lotteva Davis.
Though her parents were tattooed from neck to toe, Davis never 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 said, calling it a "family feud."
Saving a trove of tattoo art
When Davis died that year in Plainview, Texas, her estate included a vast collection that writer Alan Govenar wanted to keep 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 purchased it and donated the bulk of the collection to the South Street Seaport Museum, in New York City.
Art and antiques dealer Derin Bray says the collection is important because so little Western tattoo material from the 19th and early 20th 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 materials touted Maud Wagner's skills and her husband praised her to the press.
"My wife's a tattoo artist too," he told 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 in the Kansas Flint Hills
Ron Dolecek still marvels at that sideshow banner that survived all those years in an abandoned 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 site in Homestead Cemetery in rural Chase County.
When he visited in 2008, he found modest concrete markers. One said "M.W." and the other was blank.
Dolecek was determined to make things right.
"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 read: "The Original Gus Wagner, Globetrotting tattooer," and "Maud Stevens Wagner, America's first lady tattooer."
This story is adapted from an episode of the KCUR podcast A People's History of Kansas City about the everyday heroes, renegades and visionaries who shaped Kansas City and the region.
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