The year was 1946. Young Bill Crane began to have some very serious second thoughts about what he had just done. He was still very young. Originally from Grafton, Illinois where his father ran a grocery store, he had attended Alton High School for his senior year because Grafton did not offer a twelfth grade class. During his senior year, he was a star player on the Redbirds basketball team. After graduation, he went to work. Now he had just quit his job in a large local industry accounting department and had just possibly made the biggest mistake of his life, him with a young wife and a beautiful little baby boy (that would be me, of course, young Billy) at home. Jobs were not exactly plentiful at the time, and Christmas was soon approaching.

One day in his door-to-door job search, Bill walked into a store called Alton Refrigeration located on the 550 East Broadway block of Alton, Illinois. It was a dramatically different company than the Alton Refrigeration & Home Furnishings that exists today in terms of the products that were then sold. Alton Refrigeration had already been around since the early 1930s and specialized in home and commercial appliances. Then owned by Messrs. Otto Becker and Edward Cox, the products they sold in their store included dairy cases, meat cases, freezers, furnaces, stokers, water heaters, hardware items such as paint as well as toys. Also in the mix were newfangled items such as refrigerators, air conditioners and automatic washers and dryers, and the company not only sold these products, they serviced them as well. After a short meeting with the owners, Bill Crane was hired on the spot. Little did he know his new job would last a lifetime and take some dramatic turns along the way....