History
The company began in 1945 as Tone Appliances and Furniture, a single store on Belmont Avenue in Chicago. Walter E. Smithe and Bill Shanahan founded the store anticipating a booming economy in the wake of World War II. The two renamed the store Smithe and Shanahan, but Bill Shanahan eventually sold his share to Smithe's brother Charlie.
Walter E. Smithe, Jr. joined the business in the 1960s, and began phasing out appliances to focus on custom upholstery. His sons, Walter, Timothy, and Mark, joined the company in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, the company has eleven showrooms in Illinois and Indiana and is listed by Furniture Today as one of the top one hundred furniture retailers in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Walter E. Smithe
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)