Harold Jewett was a tinner -- a sheet metal worker -- at a stove foundry in Bloomington, Illinois. Before he was married, he lived on South Bunn street with his father and mother, brother and sister. His father was also a sheet metal worker at the stove foundry. Perhaps they worked at the stove foundry near their home, at Washington and Bunn Street, or they worked at the employee owned Hayes Custer Stove Company at Empire and Linden.
In 1937 he was married and had a young son. His wife, Lorraine, and he were featured in a human interest story in the Pantagraph in November of 1937. They had taken up the hobby of tattooing and used their own bodies for their practice. Harold's stated ambition was to have his entire body covered by tattoos within a year. He had heard that one tattooed man with the circus was able to demand $1000 a month for his appearances. Harold's arms, back and legs were tattooed extensively, as were his wife's. Even their young son, Walter aka Little Snookey, enjoyed playing with the tattoo tools. He estimated that it usually took people about three years to have their entire body tattooed, because of the pain. He planned to hire three men to complete his tattooing in a sort of marathon tattooing experience.
Harold had over 2000 designs that he would place on a customer's skin, and he had many customers for his tattoo skills. Many men wanted him to tattoo their social security numbers on their bodies so they could not forget them.
Lorraine was just seventeen years old when the story ran in the Pantagraph, and Harold was twenty seven. By 1940, the couple had three children and had moved to Champaign, Illinois.
After viewing these fascinating photos I had to know the rest of the story.
Harold's life had not been all tinning and tattooing. At age 19 he was arrested for stealing milk from a milk wagon outside the Lafayette Apartments. The janitor trapped him, along with his brother and the other milk thieves, in the basement of the apartment building where they were found drinking the milk. A year later he was sentenced to the state reformatory (he was 20 years old) for armed robbery of the Piggly Wiggly and an adjoining "establishment" called The Oasis at Mulberry and Evans (sidenote: I lived at the opposite end of the block fifty years later!) His sentence was indeterminate, but he could have been kept for as long as twenty years. Another clipping saved in a family tree notes the arrest of Harold and his brother, Klimith, for stealing shotguns out of automobiles during the time they were living with their parents on Bunn Street.
At some point Lorraine and Harold moved to Champaign and later divorced. He remarried, to a woman from Champaign, and ran a "swap shop" in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Harold died July 28, 1971 as the result of "perforation (L) lung and (R) lung by bullet." According to the family tree, Harold was shot by his second wife, Lois, in the kitchen of the trailer home in self defense.
Little Snookey followed in his grandfather's and father's footsteps and worked as a sheet metal worker and died at the age of 61 of lung cancer and asbestosis.
Lorraine Jewett died in 1992 in Champaign, Illinois, where she had been a nurse's aide at Carle Hospital. She had never remarried.