Lee Schlesinger left the Vancouver Barracks around midnight.
He’d had a couple of cocktails with a friend, an officer at the military base, and then climbed into his Lincoln sports coupe to head for Portland, where he lived. The 36-year-old department-store executive turned the car onto West Reserve Street, the radio blaring, and roared off at high speed.
He never arrived home.
The next day -- Dec. 29, 1932 -- police detectives found fresh tire marks on the West Reserve Street dock. A diver soon discovered the Lincoln, upside down, below the Columbia River’s surface. No one was in it.
The assumption: Schlesinger missed the turnoff to the Interstate Bridge and had accidentally driven off the dock, plummeting more than 20 feet into the water. This made sense. The handsome young retailer, who also was a well-known local sportsman, liked to drive fast, and it had been a dark, rainy night. West Reserve had no streetlights.
A map in the newspaper shows the road Lee Schlesinger traversed that resulted in his car landing in the Columbia River.
The tragic incident blared across the front page of Portland’s newspapers. Schlesinger’s friends told reporters it was a terrible accident, a terrible loss for the man’s family and adopted hometown.
Then came a shock: His wife, Laura Anderson Schlesinger, received a strange, terrifying -- and encouraging -- hand-written letter, the message spelled out in childish block letters.
“Your Hudand [sic] is not Dead,” it said. “He Was kidnapped AND his car DRIVEN IN THE RIVER.”
The note told Mrs. Schlesinger to leave $30,000 in small bills on the back step of a house on “3rd St.” It added: “DON’T NOTIFY THE Police OR YOUR HUSBAND WILL BE FOUND IN THE RIVER.”
A ransom note arrived shortly after Lee Schlesinger's disappearance. (The Oregonian)
This turn of events also made sense. 1932 offered the Great Depression at its worst. Snatching well-to-do individuals had become a reliable money-maker for criminals and the desperate poor alike.
Laura Schlesinger dropped off her two young children -- 8-year-old Eleanor and 4-year-old Lee Jr. -- with a friend and went in search of the address listed in the ransom note. She couldn’t find it in either Portland or Vancouver. She finally turned the letter over to law enforcement.
The police dismissed the ransom demand as a hoax.
“It is obviously the work of a crank or someone attempting to play a cruel joke,” a Schlesinger family friend told reporters.
Lee Schlesinger, left, was married and had two young children when his car tumbled into the river. (The Oregonian)
Lee Schlesinger had grown up in San Francisco, the son of a prosperous merchant. He graduated from Stanford University, where he was a popular athlete, and served in the Army during World War I. After the war, he moved to Portland, where he ran the downtown Olds, Wortman & King department store and became an admired man-about-town.
“Everybody was just crazy about him,” his friend Harvey Dick later said.
Dick, a Portland hotelier who played on a traveling polo team with Schlesinger, added that the young retailer was “the greatest guy that I ever had the good fortune to meet.”
As the days -- and then weeks -- passed, new theories about what happened to Lee Schlesinger arose. One had it that “financial and personal difficulties” led him to take his own life. Another posited that “enemies” had killed him and made it look like an accident.
Then the wildest theory: that he “deliberately drove his machine off the dock” but first stepped out of the car and, with the help of conspirators, skipped town.
Rumors began to circulate that the handsome retailer had pushed his car into the river as part of a scheme to fake his own death.
This theory, being the most gossip-ready, found purchase in the community.
But local law enforcement didn’t think it was mere gossip.
The police had increasingly become convinced that Schlesinger was indeed still alive -- they just couldn’t prove it. At the same time, though, they couldn’t find evidence that he had a reason to flee his life. No meaningful sums had been withdrawn from his financial accounts before his disappearance. No one came forward to claim he owed money. No “other woman” surfaced.
“Where is Lee Schlesinger?” The Oregonian asked, months after his empty car was found in the Columbia.
Inevitably, the theories became rather baroque. “Vague reports” came in that “he was serving as an artillery officer in the interior of China and that he had been seen in Hangkow [Wuhan],” stated one newspaper report. “Disguised in a beard and wearing the rough clothing of a Chinese officer, he is said to be like many of his comrades.”
Gossipers wondered if the Massachusetts Life Insurance Co. would pay out on Schlesinger’s $250,000 policy. So far, the family hadn’t tried to collect.
The missing man’s father, B.F. Schlesinger, railed against the rumor that his son had faked his own death. The elder Schlesinger said he spent thousands of dollars on private detectives, who chased anything resembling a clue and came up with nothing.
But it turned out Massachusetts Life had better investigators.
Just over a year after Lee Schlesinger’s car toppled off that Vancouver dock, the life-insurance company put out a brief, definitive statement.
“We now know he is alive,” the company said.
An Associated Press reporter in Rio de Janeiro soon cornered an expatriate businessman known as Donald Lee Moore. Moore, who operated a small import business in the Brazilian city, “refused today to confirm or deny that he ever admitted in private conversation that he was Lee Schlesinger.”
He did tell the newsman that he had the legal right to use the name Donald Moore.
“I am prepared to defend that right,” he said.
He added, oddly:
“I cannot identify myself even to myself.”
A United Press correspondent also tracked Moore down in Rio. This time Moore admitted he was Schlesinger but asked the reporter to keep it under his hat “to save him from social and business embarrassment.”
The reporter pressed Schlesinger for the reason he’d abandoned his family and country, but the former Portlander refused to say.
“I left for good and sufficient private causes,” he said. “It is nobody’s business but my own.”
He insisted he had committed no crime and was not ashamed of his actions. He also said he’d never tell anyone why he secretly fled Portland.
Portlanders remained fascinated with the polo-playing Lee Schlesinger long after he had left town. (The Oregonian)
Back in the U.S., his wife secured a divorce. Laura Schlesinger said she wasn’t the reason her husband left.
“Lee and I never had any marital difficulties,” she told a newspaperman in Los Angeles, where she and her children had relocated. “When we lived in Portland we were happy -- unusually happy.”
She claimed the problem was financial, even though his parents were wealthy.
“Lee was beset with financial difficulties,” she said, blaming the Depression. “He imagined that he could not see his way through, that perhaps he might hurt someone. He felt he could not face it.”
The mystery of Lee Schlesinger’s fate had been solved -- he was alive -- but now a new fascination with the man took hold, in Portland and beyond. And it remained for decades.
This, as well, made sense. The idea that anyone could pull up stakes, start over somewhere else and become someone entirely new -- someone more successful, more interesting -- was deeply ingrained in the American psyche.
The Oregon Journal tried to catch up with Schlesinger in 1959, more than 25 years after he’d abandoned his family. Now 63, Schlesinger was still in South America, but he was no longer willing to talk to reporters. The newspaper ended up interviewing Portlanders who had visited him in Rio or Buenos Aires over the years.
“They have brought back nothing concrete to clear up any remaining mystery,” the Journal reported.
One of those Portlanders who’d met up with Schlesinger -- that is, with Donald Lee Moore -- was Harvey Dick, his former polo teammate. In the early 1950s Dick and his wife traveled through South America on vacation, and when they reached Rio, Dick started asking around about Schlesinger.
“See a guy named Hyland,” someone told him. “He knows Lee Schlesinger and can tell you where to find him.”
Soon enough, Lee and Harvey were reunited. They played a round of golf, had drinks and laughed uproariously about old times.
Dick returned to Portland and his day-to-day life, running his business, paying his bills. He and Schlesinger didn’t keep in touch. When local writer C.F. Charles asked about Schlesinger more than a decade later, Dick said he had no idea what had become of his long-ago friend. But he seemed thrilled by the possibilities.
“Is Lee still alive and well in South America?” Charles wondered after that conversation with Dick. “Who knows … but Harvey likes to tell the story, and if you were to watch him closely, especially these days, perhaps you may detect a faraway look in his eyes.”
-- Douglas Perry
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Kidnapped? Murdered? A prominent Portlander’s 1932 disappearance fed rumors, but gossip couldn’t top the truth - OregonLive
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