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:
“I believe my ardour for invention springs from his loins. I can’t say that the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.”
—Caresse Crosby (1892–1970)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)