Paul Blankenhagen didn’t want any help. He just wanted to keep what he had.
Fiercely independent — some might say stubborn — he lived alone for decades in a dilapidated home without running water or sewer service. Thick with dust and grime, the bleak structure had cluttered rooms, gouged walls and a teetering foundation.
The 76-year-old man refused assistance from social workers, city nurses and housing inspectors who paid visits to his Wooster Avenue residence across from Sherbondy Park.
“Why would I pay attention to anyone coming here and telling me ‘You have to get out of here?’ ” Blankenhagen told the Beacon Journal in 1982. “I can see it’s a program, a doctrine of hate to get someone out of town.”
His weathered face and rumpled clothes were coated with soot from a coal stove and kerosene heater that he used to heat his home. His eye sockets were hollow. When he walked on city sidewalks, he tapped a cane.
Blankenhagen was blinded as a 10-year-old in May 1917 while playing with dynamite caps in a toy cannon at his family’s home at 867 Kling St. He also lost his left thumb and forefinger in the blast.
The boy studied for eight years in Columbus at the Ohio School for the Blind, where he learned to read Braille, play accordion and saxophone, and become self-sufficient.
Returning to Akron, Blankenhagen operated a newspaper stand in front of the Portage Hotel at Main and Market streets. He was a fixture on that corner for years.
By 1928, he had saved enough money to buy a wood-frame house in the 700 block of Wooster Avenue. Then he embarked on his greatest adventure, traveling the country from coast to coast as an itinerant musician during the Great Depression, returning occasionally to Akron.
Eventually, the road lost its allure and Blankenhagen came home. When he applied for a blind pension in 1940, though, Summit County commissioners refused, saying he hadn’t lived for 10 years in Ohio as required by law.
“There’s no legal basis for any payment to him because there hasn’t been a single calendar year where he’s lived here the full year,” Commissioner Henry B. Bixler said.
Although Blankenhagen lived in his house for the next 40 years, he never reapplied for the pension. It was a matter of principle to him.
House begins to crumble
He rented his upstairs rooms to boarders — $70 a month — for the next decade. Then his sewer system broke in 1950 and he refused to pay for repairs, saying the city should be liable for its pipes.
Consequently, the city shut off his water service in 1954 because there was no place for it to drain. Next, the natural gas was disconnected.
Blankenhagen lost his boarders but stayed in the sooty house as it crumbled around him. In the late 1960s, his only income was a $108 disability check each month from Social Security.
He tapped his cane to a corner store for food and paid a helper to pick up a weekly ration of water and kerosene.
His animosity toward public officials deepened over the years. He described his life as “one succession of trouble.”
“I can assure you there is no happiness around this town for me,” he told an interviewer in 1969.
In 1971, the Akron Health Department ordered Blankenhagen to correct his water and sewer problems. According to an agency report: “Mr. Blankenhagen has refused all offers of assistance and wants to be left alone.”
When a contractor volunteered to fix the sewer line for free, Blankenhagen ran him off the property and began futilely digging a hole himself.
City officials tried for 10 years to get Blankenhagen to correct the sanitary problems on his property. The homeowner admitted using a basement stove to burn human waste with kerosene.
“What else can I do?” he said.
In 1982, the city requested a court order to evict Blankenhagen from the crusty house because the structure was “unfit for human habitation.”
Peg Corneille, director of the Summit County Legal Aid Society, defended Blankenhagen at a hearing in Summit County Common Pleas Court: “This is an old blind man who has lived this way 40 years and is very self-sufficient. His lifestyle is certainly different than others, but it’s our position he was not harming himself or others in the way he lives.”
However, Judge Frank Bayer ruled in the city’s favor and ordered the eviction.
“Open the door or we’ll kick it down,” a deputy shouted May 12, 1982, after no one initially responded to knocks.
Friends coaxed Blankenhagen into leaving. He put on a necktie, opened the front door and surrendered his house of 54 years. Two days later, a hydraulic crane tore the building down.
Blankenhagen stayed at the Haven of Rest, where he enjoyed hot showers, donned new clothes and was fitted for an artificial eye.
New home in Akron
Strangers sympathetic to Blankenhagen’s plight set up a trust fund at Bank One to raise money to build him a new house. Several benefits were held, including a party attended by 400 people at the Moose Lodge.
“I didn’t know there were so many nice people in Akron,” Blankenhagen said at the fundraiser.
That summer, local volunteers and contractors built a $10,000, three-room house on the site of Blankenhagen’s former home. At least 25 companies donated materials and services. The residence had a new furnace, refrigerator, stove and furnishings.
A crowd of well-wishers gathered for a ceremony July 5 as Blankenhagen accepted the keys to the new house.
“Welcome home!” someone shouted.
Blankenhagen smiled at the kindness of strangers.
“Some people came to the front and tried to do something in a friendly way, and it’s appreciated,” he said. “All I can say is ‘Thank you’ to the people who provided it.”
If only the story could have ended there.
Happy feelings lingered for a few weeks before vanishing overnight. In August, thieves broke into the home and stole most of the appliances and furnishings, a heartless crime that appalled the community.
People hoped a new home would solve Blankenhagen’s troubles, but the residence unexpectedly became a target that looters couldn’t resist.
It was the final straw for Blankenhagen, who abandoned the house to live in a Columbus motel room.
“I’m not looking to move back at this time,” he told a reporter. “My plans are to stay here. There’s nothing I can do in Akron. They have no law and order and I can’t maintain law and order myself.”
Paul Blankenhagen was 89 years old in 1995 when he died in a nursing home near Columbus.
His “succession of trouble” reached its inevitable conclusion, a sad ending for a tough man who could only endure so much.
Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.