The Norwegian passport of Johannes Blankrud, a laborer committed to Oregon State Hospital who was discharged in 1920. The document and a mystery pair of keys remained in his patient file, which is now at the Oregon State Archives (Rachel Alexander/Salem Reporter)
A bright red booklet caught Todd Shaffer’s eye as he was working through a stack of patient files.
Shaffer, an archivist with the Oregon State Archives, said it’s not unusual to find surprises in the decades-old records of people committed to the state’s psychiatric hospital.
But Johannes Blankrud’s file had something Shaffer had never seen before: a Norwegian passport.
The passport was issued in 1927 and apparently mailed to the hospital shortly after. Shaffer said its presence in the file was a mystery, as were two small metal keys included.
Hospital records shows Blankrud was discharged in 1920 and deported to Norway soon after, a common practice for discharged immigrant patients. There’s no logical reason the hospital would have come into possession of his passport years later.
The archives posted about the find on its Facebook page Feb. 7, setting off a small historical scavenger hunt as some interested citizens scoured genealogical databases, newspaper archives and Census records to flesh out Blankrud’s story.
Tim Dingman, a researcher in Iowa, emailed Shaffer a nine-page document with scans of church records, ship manifests and other historical documents tracing Blankrud’s life.
“This almost became a crowd-sourced research project in an organic way,” said Carla Axtman, managing editor of the Oregon Blue Book, who helps compile stories from the archives and share them with the public.
Through those records, a more detailed but still incomplete picture of Blankrud’s life emerged. He was born in Norway in 1884 near Fumes, a village about 80 miles north of Oslo.
By 1910, Census records show Blankrud living in Spokane, Washington, with his brother Carl after traveling to the U.S. in 1906. He worked as a laborer in a lumber mill and a cabinetmaker.
His patient file at the state hospital doesn’t make clear how he ended up in Oregon, but in April 1914, a Multnomah County judge committed him to the hospital in Salem.
The examining physician reported that Blankrud’s habits were “bad” and listed the cause of his “attack” as “masturbation.” His symptoms were described only as “talks irrational, religious mania.”
Johannes Blankrud’s Oregon State Hospital patient file (Oregon State Archives)
He spent six weeks at the hospital, then returned to Norway, where he was committed to an asylum for six months. Blankrud came back to the U.S. in 1915 and by 1919, had been committed to the state hospital for a second time.
“At present this man is very much disturbed in mind, has hallucinations of hearing, is excitable, restless and believes the spirits direct his actions and inhibit his thoughts,” a March 25, 1919 patient report read. “He seems to be a clear case for deportation.”
Newspaper reports said Blankrud was deported soon after, but he sought to return to the U.S. Apparently, a young woman in Spokane, Lena Updahl, had captured his interest.
The Spokesman-Review, Spokane’s daily paper, reported Blankrud returned to the area in October 1920, deceiving immigration officials to re-enter the country.
A Feb. 18, 1921 article in Spokane’s Spokesman-Review on Johannes Blankrud’s marriage and subsequent deportation.
After a warrant was issued for his arrest, he married Updahl in Spokane. On Feb. 4, 1921, the couple began what papers described with levity as their “honeymoon” – a government-paid trip to Seattle with other deportees awaiting transport back to their home countries.
Shaffer, the archivist who found the passport, said he’s enjoyed seeing more information about Blankrud’s life come together, even if the mystery of the passport remains unsolved.
He said archivists increasingly seek not just to preserve documents, but also to share stories and publicize their findings. Blankrud’s file is an example of how even a fragment of someone else’s life can resonate.
“Sometimes the ones that don’t have all the answers are the most interesting,” Shaffer said.
He has spent much of the past two years indexing decades-old records from the Oregon State Hospital. He tracks the files he’s processed in a master spreadsheet, something researchers can use to quickly identify which box a particular patient’s file is located in.
The files, like Blankrud’s, detail the commitments, diagnoses and treatment of Oregonians with mental illnesses confined to the institution in the early part of the 20th century.
Schaffer said he’s found several surprises while indexing the files. His favorite is a nun from Mt. Angel committed to the hospital in the 1930s.
“I flip open this file, and staring at me at the very top of this stack of paper is a metal handle of a kitchen utensil…that somebody has filed down into a screwdriver. And I’m looking at that and I’m like, ‘There’s a story here,’” Shaffer said. He began reading her file.
The nun was quite clear from the start of her commitment that she didn’t belong in the state hospital and set about trying to escape by any means necessary.
“That was her single-minded fixation was to get out of the state hospital,” Shaffer said.
To do so, she apparently commandeered a spoon or fork from the kitchen, filed it to a point and used it to pry the bars off her upper story window, while also threatening her roommate to silence.
Her rope of tied sheets broke mid-fall, resulting in the nun’s injury. She somehow made it to Portland but then sought hospital care for her injuries and was re-committed to the state hospital, where she escaped again. Shaffer said records eventually show her working as a nanny for a wealthy family in Seattle, then living in the Bay Area.
“It’s just crazy,” Shaffer said. “It’s got every element of an amazing story.”
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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