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THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2022
Weyerhaeuser Sr., great-grandson of timber company founder, dies
By PAUL ROBERTS
Seattle Times
George Weyerhaeuser Sr., the
fourth-generation timber family scion
who ran one of America’s largest for-
estry fi rms and was briefl y one of Amer-
ica’s most famous kidnapping victims,
died June 11, his family confi rmed . He
was 95.
Weyerhaeuser Sr., whose father,
grandfather and great-grandfather also
led the timber company that carries the
family name, served as CEO from 1966
to 1991 and board chair until 1999.
Over that period, the Weyerhaeuser
company became famous for a technol-
ogy-driven high-yield forestry model
that boosted output and transformed
the industry, but which also earned the
enmity of many environmentalists in the
Pacifi c Northwest and elsewhere.
Yet Weyerhaeuser Sr. is perhaps more
famous for another role: As an 8-year-
old in 1935, he was kidnapped in broad
daylight off a Tacoma, Washington,
street, kept in a pit in the woods and
released after only his family paid a ran-
som of $200,000 in unmarked bills.
He would later downplay the impacts
of the abduction and frenzied aftermath.
But his daughter, Leilee Weyerhaeuser,
said the experience deeply aff ected his
outlook on life.
“I think that incident forced him to
reckon with who he really was at a very
young age, and he realized how he could
get through it,” Leilee Weyerhaeuser
said.
That lesson certainly applied to his
own life.
On top of his nearly six decades with
the timber fi rm, Weyerhaeuser Sr. also
found time to serve on boards at Boe-
ing, Safeco, the Federal Reserve Bank
of San Francisco, the Rand Corpora-
tion, and Chevron, among others. He
was also a key supporter for Weyerhae-
user King County Aquatic Center, which
was a central venue in the 1990 Seattle
Goodwill Games.
George Hunt Walker Weyerhae-
user was born July 8, 1926, in Seattle,
to Helen (Walker) Weyerhaeuser and
John Philip Weyerhaeuser Jr., grand-
son of company co-founder Frederick
Weyerhaeuser.
Twenty six years earlier, Freder-
ick Weyerhaeuser and 15 partners had
paid $5.4 million to the Northern Pacifi c
Railway for just over 1,400 square miles
of forestland in Washington state. The
deal was “the largest private land trans-
action in American history to that time,”
according to the company.
By the mid-1920s, the company oper-
ated 22 mills, a lumber distribution cen-
ter and a steamship company.
In May 1935, when young Weyer-
Gary Stewart/AP Photo
George Weyerhaeuser Sr., right, gently alerts President Ronald Reagan that his scheduled time to
depart has arrived during a visit to a log export facility in 1984 in Tacoma.
haeuser was 8, his grandfather, John P.
Weyerhaeuser Sr., died. It was his obit-
uary, which detailed the family’s timber
wealth, that reportedly inspired the kid-
napping plot by William Dainard, 33,
Harmon Metz Waley, 23, and Margaret
Eldora Thulin, 19.
On the afternoon of May 24, Weyer-
haeuser Sr. was on his way home from
Lowell Elementary School in Tacoma
when he was snatched by two men in
a 1927 Buick. The kidnappers drove
him to a secluded woods and put him in
a freshly dug pit where he was held in
handcuff s.
His family soon received a ransom
demand for $200,000 in old $20, $10
and $5 bills. Once the money had been
gathered, his father was instructed to run
a personal ad in the Seattle Post-Intelli-
gencer that read, “We are ready. Percy
Minnie.”
On June 1, after eight days imprison-
ment in earthen pits, car trunks, closets
and even a Uneeda cracker carton, Wey-
erhaeuser Sr. was left on the side of a
forest road near Issaquah, Washington,
with two blankets and a dollar.
After walking to a farmhouse where a
family was sitting down to breakfast, he
was reunited with his family.
But the ordeal wasn’t over. The kid-
napping had made the national news,
thanks to a reporter who maneuvered
to interview Weyerhaeuser Sr. even
before he returned to his family, and the
result was a “media frenzy,” said Leilee
Weyerhaeuser.
“He had told us that for him, the
worst trauma came from being encircled
by reporters with cameras and questions
and microphones,” she said. “As a lit-
tle boy, trying to face that kind of media
presence was really diffi cult.”
Weyerhaeuser Sr. himself played
the stoic. During a 1969 interview with
Sports Illustrated, he suggested that the
kidnapping had a bigger eff ect on his
family than it had on him.
“A (young) boy is a pretty adapt-
able organism,” he said. “He can adjust
himself to conditions in a way no adult
could. It didn’t aff ect me personally
as much as anyone looking back on it
might think.”
But Leilee Weyerhaeuser thinks the
incident taught her father to be for-
ward-looking. Challenges that “would
be discouraging to some people, he
would be looking for the way to go into
the future and have it be better,” she
said.
That applied to people, too. When
one of the kidnappers was released from
prison, Weyerhaeuser Sr. hired the man.
“He did me no harm,” Weyerhaeuser
Sr. said of the man during a 2016 inter-
view with radio station KUOW. “And he
was only in his 20s.”
In his teen years, Weyerhaeuser Sr.
spent summers working for his family
company, often as a manual laborer in
the woods and mills. He served in the
U.S. Navy in World War II and, after
graduating from Yale University, con-
tinued working his way up through the
timber business.
In 1948, Weyerhaeuser Sr. married
Wendy Wagner, whose family had been
in the timber business, and the couple
had six children: Leilee, George Jr., Sue,
Phyllis, David and Merrill. George Jr.
died of a heart attack in 2013. Wendy
Weyerhaeuser died in 2014.
In the late 1950s, Weyerhaeuser Sr.
entered the executive ranks at company
headquarters in downtown Tacoma, as
an assistant to the executive vice presi-
dent, but quickly moved up. In 1966, at
age 39, he became chief executive offi -
cer and president.
During his tenure, the company
launched several major initiatives.
In 1967, Weyerhaeuser rolled out its
high-yield forestry strategy — essen-
tially, a continuous process of logging
and regeneration that included replant-
ing clear-cuts within a year of harvest;
fertilizers and herbicides; thinning; and
breeding more productive, faster-grow-
ing seedlings.
By the 1990s, Weyerhaeuser oper-
ations in the Pacifi c Northwest were
producing twice the timber volumes of
their natural counterparts, according to
a 1997 report by the World Resources
Institute.
He was also heavily involved in the
design of the company’s 425-acre cor-
porate campus in Federal Way, which
opened in 1971 to international acclaim
as one of the fi rst suburban headquarters.
Weyerhaeuser Sr.’s executive career
was also marked by major challenges
and controversy. The 1980 eruption of
Mount St. Helens fl attened 68,000 acres
of timber land and forced a massive sal-
vage operation. Environmental activists
pressured the company to end or limit
logging on some of its millions of acres
of forest as a way to protect wildlife
habitat.
Weyerhaeuser Sr., who was suc-
ceeded by Jack Creighton in 1991, is
believed to be the last family member to
serve in company management.
In 2021, the company reported net
earnings of $2.6 billion on sales of $10.2
billion.
Weyerhaeuser Sr. wasn’t entirely sat-
isfi ed with the direction of the company
or the industry after he stepped down.
He was unhappy with the company’s
decision to sell the Federal Way campus
and move its current location to Seattle’s
Pioneer Square, in 2016. “He thought it
was terrible,” Leilee Weyerhaeuser said.
Weyerhaeuser Sr. also questioned the
industry’s growing focus on Wall Street,
share price and short-term results, which
he saw as ill-suited in a business whose
products took decades to mature. As
someone who had worked in the mills
and forests, “he was never thinking that
Wall Street knew how businesses should
be run.”
A memorial service is being planned.
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