CRIME: Snatch by Egoist

As the noon recess bell rang through the halls of Tacoma’s Lowell School one day last week, books slapped shut, doors banged open and the boys tramped out toward home and lunch. A slim nine-year-old named George Weyerhaeuser loafed along in a sweatshirt and tennis shoes discussing with a friend the form and technique of competitive jumping. The friends parted and George proceeded to nearby Annie Wright Seminary, there to wait for his 13-year-old Sister Anne to come out and be driven home by the Weyerhaeuser chauffeur. A mother of one of the Wright girls spoke to George as he dawdled in front of the school. “He just wandered away,” she later recalled, “and I did not notice which way he went.”

The Weyerhaeuser chauffeur drove up. Anne came out. Together they waited minute after minute for little George. When he failed to appear, they hurried home to tell his parents who started a search of the neighborhood. At 2 p.m. the Weyerhaeusers notified the Tacoma police of their son’s disappearance. The Governor of Washington dispatched a special detachment of the state patrol to join the hunt. Within 24 hours 15 Department of Justice operatives from Portland, Seattle, San Francisco had converged by plane, train and car on Tacoma. The fearfully expected ransom note, posted at 6 p.m., signed “The Egoist” and demanding $200,000 for George’s safe return, arrived special delivery at the Weyerhaeuser home at 6:25. It directed that communication with “The Egoist” be inserted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer over the name of “Percy Minnie.” Next day secrecy could be preserved no longer. The second morning the nation’s Press shrieked that one of the richest children in the U. S. had been KIDNAPPED.

In the East, editors scrabbled desperately through lean morgue folders for facts to show their readers just what calibre folk the Weyerhaeusers are. But in that vast quarter of the Union from St. Paul to Seattle the name needed no exposition. There the abduction of George, great-grandson of Frederick Weyerhaeuser, caused the same kind of sensation the East would feel if Miles, great-grandson of J. Pierpont Morgan, were snatched. For the Weyerhaeusers are the royal family of the U.S. lumber business. Their kingdom, sprawled from Wisconsin to Washington, is a broad 3,000 square miles of the country’s best timberland supporting 94 Weyerhaeuser-operated or affiliated corporations which gross $20,000,000 a year. The fact that the Weyerhaeusers and associates have lost up to five million dollars a year for the past decade has not worried them overmuch.

The first and greatest Weyerhaeuser arrived in the U. S. in the middle of the last century. Frederick Weyerhaeuser was a sturdy, tireless young German immigrant farmer from Niedersaulheim. For two years he worked in a brewery at Erie, Pa., giving it up “when I saw how often brewers became their own best customers.” His next job was in a sawmill on the banks of the Mississippi at Rock Island, Ill. Then he was made manager of a lumberyard. Thrifty Frederick came out of the 1858 panic with his boss’s lumberyard and $8,000 profit. Then he turned to the source of the lumber business, the forest. Snow in his beard, year after year he sleighed through the northern woods buying timber, selling part of it to others, forming holding companies, but always retaining the biggest individual share, what was in practice the controlling minority. When the north woods were stripped, he moved into Idaho, into Oregon and Washington.

“This is not for us,” Frederick Weyerhaeuser told his partners when he bought his first acreage west of the Rockies, “nor for our children, but for our grandchildren.” Frederick had by that time begotten John Philip and three younger sons, three daughters. He had settled in a great house in St. Paul, whose richest citizen he was. But with shyness and dislike of ostentation characteristic of Weyerhaeusers to this day, Frederick’s house was not quite so big as James J. (“Empire Builder”) Hill’s next door.

In 1914, Frederick Weyerhaeuser died without ever having lost his German accent. Eldest Son John Philip, already a well-aged man, had moved to Tacoma to take over the western part of the Weyerhaeuser empire, leaving younger brothers Rudolph and Frederick in control at St. Paul. Two of John Philip’s sons went to Yale. Of the third generation, these are so far the most outstanding Weyerhaeusers. When Son Frederick got out of college (1917) he nailed a rubber hook to his office door, amused himself at his father’s repeated attempts to hang his coat on it. He is now president of Weyerhaeuser Sales Co. John Philip Jr. took to the forests after graduation (1920), started the firm on selective cutting, is now executive vice president of the biggest Weyerhaeuser operating company.

Fortnight ago John Philip Sr. died. John Philip Jr. had returned from the interment at Rock Island the morning his Son George was abducted.

A bed sheet was flown from the rear of the Weyerhaeuser home, visible far out on Puget Sound and apparently a signal to the kidnappers. Mrs. Weyerhaeuser departed for Seattle and two notices were published, according to the kidnappers’ directions, in the Post-Intelligencer, the first saying, “expect to be ready to come Monday,” the second pleading: “Due publicity beyond our control please indicate another method reaching you. Hurry relieve anguished mother.” But the week-end passed without George’s return. Of all George’s friends and relations, most optimistic was his schoolteacher. Said she: “He has such an endearing personality I don’t think his kidnappers would harm him.”