Titanic Boarding Pass Fetches $100,000 -- Trading-Card Collector From Pa. Buys Only Known Complete Ticket

TACOMA - Within 3 seconds, it was clear the price of the world's only known complete Titanic boarding pass would dwarf the opening bid of $5,000.

It went to $10,000, $15,000, $20,000. The numbers kept rising.

Amid excited commotion, employees monitored bids coming in from the Internet and over long-distance phone lines. They shouted "yes, yes" to let the auctioneer know that a bidder was still in.

Up it went: $35,000, $40,000.

Prospective buyers in the audience kept pace until the price reached $50,000. Six Internet bidders stayed in until $60,000.

But the big-money folks were on the phone, and the last few nods and shouts were made by three women with the auction house that had cell phones stuck to their ears.

"He's at $100,000. Are you in? Are you in?" shouted Cheryl Gorsuch to Jeff Trainer on the other end of the cell phone. "He's in!"

Trainer, a trading-card collector from Allentown, Pa., bought the boarding pass yesterday for $100,000.

He said, through Gorsuch, that he got an exceptional deal and would have gone as high as $125,000. He plans to enjoy the boarding pass for awhile before he decides what to do with it, he said.

"It was such an adrenaline rush, you can scrape me off the ceiling later," said Gorsuch, beaming. "We had people bidding from all over the world."

Gorsuch and her husband, Alan, who own Sanford and Son Antiques in Tacoma, bought the boarding pass about six months ago from someone who is believed to be a distant relative through marriage of the original owner, Anna Sofia Sjoblom.

The couple won't reveal the name of the seller or the amount they paid for the pass, but they established the opening bid at $5,000. Ten percent of the profit will be donated to a local charity, they said.

Gorsuch said when they first bought the pass, which they'd stored in a safety deposit box, they knew it was special. But they didn't know how special until they did the research.

They found out that the pass is believed to be the only complete boarding pass in existence, that the name Sjoblom meant Sea Rose in Finnish, and that Sjoblom, who was a third-class passenger on the Titanic's maiden voyage, had given one of the first survivor's accounts for Walter Lord's book, "A Night to Remember."

Sjoblom had pinned her boarding pass to the inside of her coat after she boarded the Titanic April 10, 1912. When the ship went down four days later, on her 18th birthday, she and a girlfriend escaped by climbing a ladder to the upper deck where passengers were being loaded onto lifeboats.

"I wish she were here to enjoy it," said Sjoblom's daughter, Evelyn Hendricksen of Seattle, who came to watch the historic bidding with her son, Spike Hendricksen, and several other family members.

"She was very quiet and wouldn't have shown her excitement, but I think she would have been thrilled," she said.

Spike Hendricksen said for a while there was talk in the family of getting a trust together and trying to buy back the boarding pass.

"But we pretty quickly realized we didn't have enough money," he said.

Spike Hendricksen says his grandmother survived, moved to Tacoma and married Antoine Peterson, with whom she had two children, Evelyn and Harold. Within two years, she divorced him and remarried.

The boarding pass, though, apparently stayed with the Peterson family, Hendricksen said.

He said family members don't feel bitter that the valuable document now belongs to someone else.

"Actually, it's been good to meet a lot of these people involved," Hendricksen said. "Of course, if we'd known about it, it wouldn't have left our possession. I think we would have kept it in the family.

"Who knows? Maybe someday someone will buy it who wants to return it to the family.

"Life is so full of twists and turns, you never know where it'll end up."

Christine Clarridge's phone message number is 206-464-8983. Her e-mail address is: cclarridge@seattletimes.com