Chronicles of Dogged Dreams Erstwhile San Dimas mayor Terry Dipple shed one skin to ink another By: Phil Fuller

Leo Tolstoy had a radical transformation toward the end of his life. He saw a growing disconnect between his Christian brand of anarcho-communist beliefs and the posh life of privilege he had been living. So he gave it up and became a vagabond. The great Tolstoy can stand as a metaphor for the rest of us: That the life we’re living may not necessarily be the one we were meant to lead.

The owner of Pomona’s Ink’d Chronicles Tattoo Studio, Terry Dipple, may have given that thought extra reflection last November when he effectively put more than two decades of city politics behind him so he could open up a tattoo shop. That’s when he stood amidst the thronging crowd at the grand opening of his studio, after months of planning, hard work and wrangling with city officials, he managed to completely change his life from politics to skin-art patron.

But Dipple hasn’t always been an owner of a less than conventional business; in fact, he was once part of the same kind of establishment that he fought to open Ink’d Chronicles doors. He sat on the San Dimas city council for 12 years, and was the city’s mayor for another eight. His climb up the rungs of his childhood municipality started almost immediately with his adulthood.

Dipple, who now runs the shop alongside his 18 year-old daughter Tess, paints a picture of his high school days that doesn’t have much to do with school. He wasn’t interested in student government, and didn’t want much to do with the school’s football team. He was fascinated with art and had thoughts about going to college to study it, hoping that it might lead to a career as a commercial artist. So he enrolled himself into Mt. San Antonio College with his mind set on an art degree. But, much a product of his time, Dipple also had a why-not-me interest in politics.

“I was sitting there reading the paper with my dad,” Dipple said, “and there was a story about these two council members running for city council. The story talked about how, if no one else joined the race, they wouldn’t have to have an election. So here I am, this politically active guy, I said, ‘That doesn’t seem right. I think I’ll run.’”

He was only half serious. But his father, whom Dipple describes as a “blue collar guy” with nary an interest in local politics like the idea, and was suddenly intent on him following through. After a few back and forth rounds of “I was kidding” and “no, really, you should do it” between him and his father, Dipple decided that he would run for the open city council seat. He didn’t harbor any illusionary hopes of getting elected, but he wanted to affect the political process.

“I just floored everyone down at City Hall,” Dipple says of his first bid for political office, “I had long hair and a moustache and I went down to City Hall and said, ‘I want to take out papers to run for city council.’ It was a big deal. I was just turning 19. I had a few friends helping me and a few parents who, you know, were being kind and helping me with everything. I came in last place—but I got bit by the political bug. After that, I changed my major to political science.”

He also started hanging around City Hall and managed to get himself appointed to a city commission. The appointment helped Dipple get to know the local network of civil servants, which he felt would provide an edge come the next election cycle, although the city council still treated him as a naïve upstart. No matter to Dipple—he used the time to build his political base and get a conditional feel for the community. By the time he ran two years later, in 1974, he lost by only a few hundred votes.
Dipple recognized a lot of changes in San Dimas during the mid-70s. For instance, the council’s attitude of allowing community growth for the sake of community growth had become glaringly outdated. It was evident that the city had begun courting a different kind of council, and, for once, welcomed youthful ideas. Having a fresh political perspective, young Dipple considered himself ideally suited to the task, and he spent time consolidating his support in the community and pushing his responsible growth. Dipple himself makes a marked distinction between his rational growth ideas and an anti-development campaign. For the next two years Dipple was especially active, and he popped up everywhere he could in city politics. He received an appointment to another city commission and, come the citywide election of 1976, finally managed to win a seat on the city council behind his controlled-growth politics.
Dipple refers to it as a “landslide.”

But by 1988, after a dozen years on the city council, Dipple felt he was at a turning point in his political career. “I made a decision,” he says, “to either become the mayor or I was just going to go off the council. I had pretty much done everything I could do as a member at that point.”

So, following the same sense of ambition that lead him initially to the city council, Dipple ran for mayor of Diamond Bar—and won.

On to Pomona
As time went on, the drag of mayoral responsibilities began to weigh on Dipple. “I spent a lot of years doing it and got really involved in San Gabriel Valley stuff, but I have five children, and the wear of being a mayor for eight years and being on the council a lot longer than that—I was having some problems, so I thought, okay, this is it. I’m done.”

At the same time he was pondering his fate in San Dimas city politics, Dipple was developing an industrial property in Pomona. He was spending most of his days running back and forth between the jobsite and Pomona City Hall. Thinking about moving his office closer to his jobsite, Dipple began looking around the city for a loft space. His scouring quickly lead him to the discovery that Pomona was significantly cheaper than his former digs?by about half, according to his estimate?and, as he began to work in the Arts Colony, it seemed that living in his loft space would be an expedient way to simplify his life.
He liked the artsy downtown scene in Pomona and the tight-knit community of the arts colony. Still fostering dreams of running some sort of arts or entertainment-style business in the Arts Colony, he made an unsuccessful run at acquiring the historic Fox Theatre. Shortly thereafter, the idea for Ink’d Chronicles was coming to life.

“I was having a tattoo party. That is—I hired a guy to come down and do tattoos at my party. This guy showed up who was a tattoo artist and he told me that I could make a lot of money if I opened a tattoo shop on Second Street. So I instantly said, ‘Well, let’s do that—let’s open up a tattoo shop on Second Street.’ And he told me that we couldn’t. He said that he’d [already] tried, but when he went down to City Hall, they had told him ‘no.’”

This got Dipple to thinking. If he used his experience in local politicking and a bit of savvy, maybe he could clear the bureaucratic hurdles to get such a shop opened. He immediately set the thing in motion. He discussed his plans with various community members, all of whom agreed that Dipple was just the right person to bring a tattoo business to the arts colony. He then moved on to the city’s police chief, along with various other council members, and found the response favorable.
Nevertheless, he was met with resistance by some of the less progressive council members. It seemed a tattoo shop was not an approved use for the property, and with a comparatively large mixed-use development going up across the street from his proposed site, some city leaders were worried that the business might not fit the “character of the community.” A tattoo shop might attract a bad element, they feared.

“You could have a pawn shop down here, or a check cashing place,” Dipple says of the stubborn council’s roadblocks, “you know, all the kind of places that signify a struggling area . . . yet you can’t have a tattoo shop?” Dipple approached various council members to convince them that, not only was a tattoo studio a viable business in the Arts Colony, but it befitted the diversity of the neighborhood, and in no way would it blight surrounding businesses.

“I’m all for the First Amendment and all this other stuff,” Dipple said, “but there’s a gallery down the street that has a plaster statue of a man bending over, and out of his anus there’s a TV screen that they’re showing movies on. So I said, ‘you can do that—but you’re afraid of people getting tattoos?’”
Checkmate.

Last November, after months of struggling with the city of Pomona, Dipple was finally able to open his doors at Ink’d Chronicles to resounding enthusiasm (Corey Miller was among the celebrants at the opening). Working alongside his daughter Tess and two full-time tattoo artists, Steve Martinez and Henry Huff, Dipple now oversees the shop’s day-to-day operations while living in the “New York-style loft” in the back with Tess, an acoustic guitar, and a very different life from the one he began.

“I sold [the city council] on the idea that this place was going to look like a salon or an art gallery,” Dipple says, pointing out the artwork on his walls and his canary, Elvis, chirping from a 15-year-old Asian cage. “So they went with me on that concept, and the night of my grand opening, the mayor and the council members walked by and they were giving me the thumbs up, because they could see how vibrant it was and how it’s a perfect fit for downtown. I was really thankful for their approval and for them hanging in there with me because without them I couldn’t have done it.”