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.