The contents had survived the upheavals of eighty years, including a storage-locker auction after his death and a fire forty years earlier. Hauled between dozens of residences and offices over a lifetime, the archive escaped the fate of most paper. It endured through commitment and a measure of chance—like my father.
Without much thought to the mental cost of writing his life story, I impulsively asked my brother if I could borrow the documents and attempt one. He agreed. I was relieved when all the boxes arrived intact from one coast to another. It was a sort of miracle. I could hardly believe he sent them.
Now in my possession, the responsibility felt real. They rested on and under an upholstered bench near my front door, undisturbed. When I walked past them, my mind conjured up all the ways the boxes could be lost, or stolen, or damaged in a plumbing mishap under my watch. I questioned my ability to be a custodian, much less to synthesize my father’s astonishing life into a book.
The documents inside would not sanitize anything. I knew they held brutal truths—depression, regret, betrayals, and loss—that competed with good memories. And to examine my father’s life would cause me to consider mine.
Over time, the boxes disappeared into the fabric of the bench. A year passed before I opened the first one at random. Lying face up was a colorfully ornamented, hand-calligraphed 1923 certificate of attendance at Vacation Bible School in McGrath, Minnesota. Beside it rested a pale yellow 1999 death certificate from the Las Vegas coroner, and beneath were a handful of Red Cross certificates, each with silver-foil merit seals marking his donations of gallons of blood. Overwhelmed and saddened, I closed that box and put it back. Months passed.
Encouraged by a friend, I opened a second box. It was a heavy one. Inside were fifty-seven years of daily diaries. I had seen my father writing in these books, but to see all fifty-seven together was impressive. As I placed them on shelves, the 1988 diary shot out—exploding on the floor. Its binding tore loose from the grey vinyl cover. My chest tightened when I saw that, written on the first line of most days during that awful year, was this pleading invocation: “Thank you, God, for all the circumstances in my life.”
Slowly—over years—I read his hand written diaries aloud, deciphering his penmanship for transcription. The earliest diaries are vivid narratives, describing in a few words how he founded and incrementally grew a multi-billion-dollar industry from the iconic U-Haul trailer.
The first, from 1942, is slighter than a deck of cards, with Pocket Diary embossed on the thin leather cover. Each three-by-four-inch page is devoted to a week’s entries, with space for a few abbreviated sentences, written with a fountain pen in the tiniest of handwriting. His diaries, and his handwriting grew larger. From the start, he made a habit of taping favorite poems and affirmation on the inside covers.
More than once, I scrutinized his entries for self-consciousness. I found none. Instead, his observations and whereabouts crowded the page, spilling into the margins— swift and comprehensive, a monoprint of the day.
In his final decade, the diaries became voluminous records. The 1990 diary, written with the aid of a personal computer, is nearly 90,000 words printed on continuous-feed perforated paper that folded like office origami onto the tray of a noisy dot-matrix printer.
The remaining boxes were packed with management bulletins, business lectures, re organization and marketing plans, newspaper articles, flight logs, audio recordings, court documents, photographs, correspondence, and business cards he carried for over sixty years as an entrepreneur.
Recycled folders were labeled in black marker with names and places, then filled with records in his good enough—not perfect—style that defined the inception of all his ventures. Outdated vendor marketing binders were repurposed with handwritten paper titles secured with packing tape over the original logos. One transparent sleeve held a well-loved pair of haircutting scissors.
Recovered files from his word processor held hundreds of thousands more words, including two drafts of an autobiography written a few years before his death—without which I would have been lost. One, titled simply, Memoir, traces his childhood. The other, The Life and Work of Leonard S. Shoen, recounts his young adulthood—both written in third person. There were two reflective commentaries as well, Dense and Nepotism: the first an outline of his failure to understand the organic limitations of two of his sons, the second, a cautionary reckoning.
Decades of documents were read, scanned, and shuffled as I searched for clues and patterns, hoping for my father’s blessing as the codex of his life took shape. What began with curiosity and reverence at the sight of the archive gave way to self-doubt, then comprehension, and finally the unburdening of my heart. His biography draws on research, interviews, and my experience—but I leave my father to frankly reveal himself in his own words, which consistently illustrate both his enduring faith and his fallibilities in the face of a multitude of troubles.
Near the end of his life, after listening to seven weeks of testimony in an Arizona courtroom, juror Gini Brand declared his life story—unbelievable.
One hundred years after my father’s birth in 1916, his archive was shipped to me in a dozen banker’s boxes. Six months earlier, I had rustled through one or two of them at my brother Sam’s home in Oregon and found myself struck by what I saw. Inside were the intimate details—and purpose—of a man I loved and respected. The boxes held a carefully documented life.