Leonard Samuel Shoen was an American entrepreneur who founded the U-Haul truck and trailer organization in Ridgefield, Washington.
14 Facts About Leonard Shoen
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Leonard Shoen's father moved the family to Oregon in 1923 to farm in the Willamette Valley near Shedd.
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Leonard 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.
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Leonard Shoen served in the US Navy as a Hospital Apprentice First Class in Bayview, Idaho and Seattle, and was given a medical discharge in 1945 for rheumatic fever.
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Leonard Shoen began his career as a barber while attending Oregon State University in the years leading up to World War II.
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In 1945, at the age of 29, Leonard Shoen co-founded U-Haul with his wife, Anna Mary Carty, in Ridgefield, Washington, just north of Vancouver.
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Leonard Shoen 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.
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Leonard Shoen developed one-way rentals and enlisted investors as partners in each trailer as methods of growth.
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In 1951, Leonard Shoen reorganized the U-Haul Trailer Rental Company under a new holding company, ARCOA Inc.
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Leonard Shoen married Suzanne Gilbaugh in 1958, and they had five more children.
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Leonard Shoen divorced Gilbaugh, and married Suzanne Whitmore in 1978 to have one last child.
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Some observers say that Leonard Shoen saw it as his duty to confer upon his children the fruits of his labors, others say it was to avoid taxes.
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Leonard Shoen 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 the Clark County Coroner's office ruled a suicide.
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Leonard Shoen was survived by his fifth wife, Carol, and all his children.