Harold Schnitzer
Harold J. Schnitzer (June 8, 1923 – April 27, 2011) was an American businessman, civic leader, and philanthropist. Schnitzer is best remembered for having made over $80 million in charitable gifts over the course of his lifetime, including the establishment of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon and at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
Harold Schnitzer was born in 1923 to Rose and Sam Schnitzer, ethnic Jewish émigrés from Tsarist Russia. Harold was the fifth of seven children of the couple. The elder Schnitzer was in the scrap metal business, beginning the Alaska Junk Company.
Harold anticipated entering the steel industry from an early age, studying metallurgy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 1944.
Following graduation, Schnitzer served a stint in the U.S. Army during World War II as an ordnance specialist.
After the war, Schnitzer entered the family business, Schnitzer Steel Industries, for a time. He did not wish to compete with his four brothers in the company, however, so in 1950 Harold Schnitzer decided to shift gears, selling his share of the business to provide capital for a new enterprise.
The new enterprise founded was a real estate investment company known as Harsch Investment Properties. The name of the firm, Harsch, derived from the first three letters of Harold Schnitzer's first and last names.
Schnitzer began his career as a real estate developer with the purchase of an old warehouse in downtown Portland and its conversion into office space. Over the years Schnitzer's company grew to the point where it owned 130 properties with 21,000,000 square feet (2,000,000 m2) of rentable commercial space in five western states, as well as more than 1,000 apartments. At the time of his death, Harsch Investment Properties employed 225 people.
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