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:
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)