Gatsy Tuttle's great-great-great-grandson passes

I ran into Pam Marvin at Sunday's showing of "Saving Brinton" and it was she who informed me that I'd overlooked --- despite a digital subscription --- the full New York Times obituary treatment accorded on April 3 to a Lucas County native son. 

The Times characterized Gatsy (Fox) Tuttle's great-great-great-grandson, Lyle, as "a tattoo artist who found his own kind of international fame by catering to celebrities while helping to move tattooing, as he put it, from the 'back alley' into mainstream acceptability."

Lyle Tuttle, born in Lucas County during 1931, died at the age of  87 on March  26 in Ukiah, California, where he moved with his parents --- Howard H. and Emma Opal (Kaster) Tuttle --- as a child during the Great Depression. Survivors include his wife, Judy, and daughter, Suzanne.

The photo, top, dates from ca. 1970 and was taken from Mr. Tuttle's website, Lyle Tuttle.com. You can access his Times obituary by following this link. The other photograph, taken from his Wikipedia entry, dates from much later. 

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The Tuttles are one of Lucas County's oldest and most prolific families. This is Gatsy's tombstone in the Freedom Cemetery, southwest of Chariton in Warren Township. Born during 1791 in North Carolina, she arrived in Lucas County with some of her children as the widow of Benjamin Tuttle and died at Freedom on March 28, 1866, age 75.

To give you some idea of this family's scale, her son --- and Lyle's great-great-grandfather --- William Stanley Tuttle (1821-1902), also buried at Freedom and the fourth of Gatsy's eight children, had 19 children of his own by four marriages.

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According to his Time obituary, Lyle paid $3.50 for his first tattoo --- a heart emblazoned with the word "Mother" --- at the age of 14 in San Francisco. The rest is history. Various designs were added to the remainder of his body, other than hands, feet and face, as the years passed. 

He began working with a San Francisco tattoo artist during the late 1940s, served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War, then worked in Long Beach and Alaska before opening his own studio in San Francisco during 1960. He retired officially in 1990, but continued to work occasionally.

His clients included such luminaries as Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, the Allman Brothers, Peter Fonda and Cher. By October of 1970, he was well known enough to be featured on the Cover of Rolling Stone and later in life, to be the subject of an Annie Leibovitz set.

It's impossible to say, of course, how Gatsy would react to her grandson's celebrity. But I kind of think she'd be OK with it. The Tuttles always were pioneers, after all.