Tacoma Auction Features Rare Titanic Boarding Pass

When she boarded the Titanic on April 10, 1912, a young Finnish woman named Anna Sofia Sjoblom pinned her immigrant-inspection card to the inside of her jacket.

That conscientious act kept the two-piece card intact four days later, when Sjoblom and hundreds of other passengers scrambled off the sinking ship after it struck an iceberg. Sjoblom found her way to a lifeboat, and within a month had settled in Tacoma with her uncle.

More than eight decades later, her inspection card has surfaced in Tacoma. The card, recently sold by an unidentified relative to an antique shop, will be the centerpiece of an auction in Tacoma on April 10, the 87th anniversary of the start of the Titanic's ill-fated maiden voyage.

Organizers expect the card to fetch at least $5,000, with likely participants including phone bidders from the East Coast and lawyers representing anonymous clients.

"It truly is a historic document that survived an unbelievably overwhelming chance of not surviving," said Alan Gorsuch, co-owner of Sanford & Son Antiques in Tacoma, which is holding the auction. "As fragile as that paper is and considering what few things survived the Titanic, it's amazing."

Gorsuch and his wife, Cheryl, have been storing the card in a safe-deposit box since acquiring it about six months ago. They won't reveal the identity of the seller, saying only that it came from the widower of Sjoblom's grandniece.

After the widower walked into their store with the card, the couple spent dozens of hours researching to confirm his accounts and the authenticity of the document. They found repeated references to Sjoblom in historical works, including Walter Lord's 1955 book, "A Night to Remember."

While there are a smattering of existing partial or torn tickets and inspection cards from the Titanic, the Gorsuches say Sjoblom's card - which includes both pieces - is the only known complete Titanic boarding document in existence.

The inspection cards, which were proof that third-class passengers had been quarantined for diseases such as syphilis and tuberculosis, were essential upon arrival at Ellis Island in New York.

In Sjoblom's case, Gorsuch said, the card also served as her ticket, because she and three male friends were transferred onto the Titanic at the last minute, after a coal strike bumped them from the Adriatic. Both ships were owned and operated by the White Star Line.

Paul Louden-Brown, vice president of the Titanic Historical Society, said fewer than a half-dozen of the cards are still known to exist, most of them privately owned.

If passengers didn't have their inspection cards to present to U.S. immigration authorities, they were shipped back to England. That may explain why Sjoblom cared for the card so painstakingly, pinning it on the inside flap of her jacket.

"Those cards are incredibly rare," Louden-Brown said in a telephone interview from the society's office in Herne Bay, England. "To an immigrant, that was like an American Express gold card. Without it, they'd be sent right back."

The day the Titanic sank was Sjoblom's birthday, though accounts differ as to whether it was her 18th or 20th. While her three companions perished in the sinking, Sjoblom made it onto a lifeboat - No. 16, reportedly the same boat that carried J. Bruce Ismay, the White Star Line chairman.

After moving in with her uncle in Tacoma, Sjoblom later married Gordon Kinkaid. The couple had a daughter and a son and later moved to Olympia. She died in 1975.

Her inspection card is the latest in a wave of Titanic paraphernalia to hit the auction circuit on the heels of the James Cameron movie that broke box-office records and reeled in 11 Oscars last year.

A postcard from the Titanic - never mailed by the teenager who wrote it - sold for $24,150 in a London auction last year, and a White Star Line poster advertising the ship's return voyage from New York pulled in $9,300. An original Titanic luncheon menu, pasted to the back of an oil painting of the ship, recently was appraised at between $75,000 and $100,000.

Louden-Brown said there's not much of a track record to indicate what Sjoblom's card might go for, because the few remaining Titanic tickets and inspection cards have seldom, if ever, changed hands.

"It really is almost impossible to put a price on those things," he said. "It could go for a couple thousand dollars, or for tens of thousands of dollars. There really is a feeding frenzy when it comes to Titanic memorabilia at the moment, because of the film."

The auction will be at Sanford & Son Antiques, 743 S. Broadway in Tacoma, beginning at 10 a.m. April 10. Preview days are April 7-9. Participants must buy a catalog for $25. For more information, call Sanford & Son at 253-272-0334.