Leonard Samuel Shoen was an American entrepreneur who founded the U-Haultruck and trailer organization in Ridgefield, Washington. After growing up in the farm belt during the Great Depression, he envisioned the market for rental vehicles for families who wished to avoid the expense of professional transfer and storage companies and move themselves around the country.
Early life
Shoen was born on February 29, 1916 in McGrath, Minnesota to Sophie and Samuel J. Shoen. His father moved the family to Oregon in 1923 to farm in the Willamette Valley near Shedd. His father was ethnically Scottish and English; his mother was of Swiss and French descent. Shoen worked his way through Oregon State College by running a chain of beauty parlors and barber shops in Corvallis and nearby Albany, and later at Camp Adair north of Corvallis and at the Hanford Reservation in Washington. Sam earned a B.Sc. in General Science from OSC in 1943, and entered the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland. Shoen was suspended from medical school during his fourth year after he "called out present during a roll-call for an absent classmate", and never returned. Shoen served in the U.S. Navy as a Hospital Apprentice First Class in Bayview, Idaho and Seattle, and was given a medical discharge in 1945 for rheumatic fever. After starting the U-Haul Company, Shoen earned an LL.B. at the Northwestern College of Law, later known as the Lewis & Clark Law School, in Portland in 1955.
Founder of U-Haul
Shoen began his career as a barber. In 1945, at the age of 29, Shoen co-founded U-Haul with his wife, Anna Mary Carty, in Ridgefield, Washington, just north of Vancouver. Anna Mary was the mother of Shoen's first six children. The company was started with an investment of $5,000. In the early years, the Shoens routinely worked 16-hour days, and reinvested all their earnings back into the business. He began building rental trailers at the Carty Ranch in Ridgefield, owned by his parents-in-law, and splitting the fees for their use with gas station owners whom he franchised as agents. The first U-Haul Rental Agent was a Mobil station on Interstate St. in Portland. These early deals were based on little more than a wink and a nod. He developed one-way rentals and enlisted investors as partners in each trailer as methods of growth. In 1951, Shoen reorganized the U-Haul Trailer Rental Company under a new holding company, ARCOA Inc. By 1955, there were more than 10,000 U-Haul trailers on the road and the brand was nationally known. The corporate offices were in Portland, until a 1967 relocation to Phoenix, Arizona. While distracted to some extent by growing his business, Shoen also managed multiple marriagesafter the death of his first wife from a congenital heart defect, and eventually had a total of 12 children, each of whom he made a stockholder. Shoen married Suzanne Gilbaugh in 1958, and they had five more children. Shoen divorced Gilbaugh, and married Suzanne Whitmore in 1978 to have one last child. Some observers say that Shoen saw it as his duty to confer upon his children the fruits of his labors, others say it was to avoid taxes. In either case, he had transferred all but 2% of control to his children when 2 of them, Joe and Mark launched a successful takeover of the business in 1986. In the 1960s, Shoen diversified his holdings by creating Amerco Inc., from Advanced Management Engineering and Research Company. He pronounced the acronym, "a miracle."
Shoen resided in Las Vegas, Nevada. He died on October 4, 1999, at the age of 83, when he crashed his car into a telephone pole near his Las Vegas Valley, Nevada home in what was ruled by the Clark County Coroner's office as a suicide. Shoen was survived by his fifth wife, Carol, and all his children.
