John C. Crean*

The son of an Irish immigrant, John Crean was born in 1925 in Bowden, North Dakota, but when the Great Depression began, the Crean family packed all they owned into two trucks and moved to California. Crean enjoyed his childhood there. He collected bottles to sell and also picked and sold blackberries and cucumbers. He regularly crawled under the local grocery store to pick up the change that had fallen through cracks in the floor.

In school, Crean enjoyed shop class because he could work with his hands. But the academic side of school was a struggle, and he dropped out during his senior year to join the U.S. Navy shortly after World War II started. At the time, any young man who entered service was automatically awarded a high school diploma. After seven months in the Navy, Crean was given a medical discharge. He worked in war plants, shipyards, and aircraft factories before joining the U.S. Merchant Marines, where he was assigned to a tanker delivering oil to the fleet in the Pacific.

After the war ended, Crean worked as an office boy and went back to school at Los Angeles City College. After two semesters, however, he dropped out. Then he began looking for something that would challenge his entrepreneurial spirit and found it in the fledgling trailer industry. Shortly after taking a job on the assembly line of a trailer factory, he was put in charge of the production shop.

Eager to learn all he could about the design, production, and outfitting of trailers, Crean became a salesman for a company that made Venetian blinds for the industry. Dissatisfied with the product he was selling, he designed and built a better Venetian blind; obtained a patent; and went into business with his wife, Donna. The small business prospered, and Crean used the profits to found Fleetwood Enterprises, Inc. to build trailers and mobile homes.

Demand for his products waned in the 1950s, and Crean faced bankruptcy. But with the advent of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's interstate highway system, demand for recreational vehicles soared. Fleetwood became one of the nation's largest producers of recreational vehicles and a leader in the building, retailing, and financing of manufactured homes.

Crean retired from Fleetwood and, in 1992, became the co-host of a televised cooking show titled At Home on the Range, which aired for 10 years. In 2000, he published his autobiography, The Wheel and I. He also completed a housing development that is in Hemet, California, and that is called Crean Acres. He once said, "It is vital to let today's young people know that they can start with nothing and still make it."