Leonard Shoen

Leonard Samuel Shoen (February 29, 1916 – October 4, 1999) was an American entrepreneur who founded the U-Haul truck 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 around the country.

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.

[4][6] Shoen began his career as a barber while attending Oregon State University in the years leading up to World War II.

[4] He began building rental trailers at the Carty Ranch in Ridgefield, owned by his parents-in-law,[5] and splitting the fees for their use with gas station owners whom he franchised as agents.

[5] While distracted to some extent by growing his business, Shoen also managed multiple marriages after 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.

[1] 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 the Clark County Coroner's office ruled a suicide.