In the mid-1970s, troubles began brewing among the four oldest sons-Sam, Mike, Edward J. Shoen recalls a friend telling him at one point: “Your problem from now on will be the management of greed.” They ultimately held 95%, leaving him with just 2%. Thinking that his children would eventually run the company together, he began turning over chunks of Amerco stock to his seven sons and five daughters.
They divorced, and he married again and had another child. once threw $1,000 in cash from the 11th floor of Amerco’s offices as a lesson to underlings on wasteful spending.Īfter his first wife died, leaving him with six children, Shoen married the 23-year-old daughter of a neighbor, who bore five children.
“You and Me” contains a newspaper account from June, 1970, of how L. Shoen encouraged his growing staff with homespun management formulas such as E x KH=R (energy times know-how equals results). “The first day we rented a trailer, I set my sights on a 1,000 trailers, and when we got a 1,000 trailers on the road I wanted 10,000,” Shoen wrote in “You and Me,” a 1980 book that is an odd fusion of family history, corporate philosophy and inspirational quotes from such figures as Napoleon, Shakespeare and Kahlil Gibran. Postwar America took readily to this new service, and the company boomed. He often clambered over dealers’ fences in the middle of the night to get to broken-down vehicles. In the beginning, he and his wife, Anna Mary Carty, painted and stenciled all the vehicles themselves.ĭriven to succeed, Shoen spent weeks on the road, developing a network of dealers and repairing trailers.
But he contracted rheumatic fever and spent the rest of World War II in bed, plotting a business he hoped to start: trailer rentals.Īfter a medical discharge, he took $5,000 in savings and began buying and building trailers. His friends there called him “Slick.”ĭuring the first month of his senior year, he was expelled for answering in class one day for his lab partner. worked as a barber to put himself through premedical studies at college. Shoen grew up in Minnesota and Oregon, one of seven children whose father got involved in an array of ventures, including an unsuccessful stint at farming. The seeds were sown years ago for this bitter battle of money, power and ego.
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