The only son of William Getz Crenshaw and Nell Crenshaw, "Bill" was born in Memphis, Tennessee, where his father owned a downtown advertising agency that was successful even during the Depression. He graduated from Christian Brothers' College, a Catholic high school, and entered the University of Mississippi, where he majored in business administration, joined ROTC, and graduated in 1954. With his commission, he entered the U.S. Air Force and was sent to pilot training in Hondo, Texas, where he earned his certificate of proficiency in February of 1955. He completed training in North Dakota in 1955, he was sent to Barksdale Air Force Base where he trained in the KC-97. He married Joyce Smith on April 9, 1960. (They would have three children and seven grandchildren.) Eventually based at Barksdale, he learned to fly the KC-135, an aircraft he loved. "Once I got into that, we just kind of fell in love with each other," he says. Bill was assigned to Looking Glass (a nickname for Strategic Air Command operations), in the 2^nd ACCS Squadron, and based at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where flight missions often lasted sixteen hours. Sent to operations over Vietnam in 1972, he was based at Utapao Air Force Base in Bangkok, Thailand, from where he flew the KC-135 on refueling missions for fighter planes. He accrued enough hours in air (more than 5,000) to reach Command Pilot level in the air force. Bill retired in 1975 and went to work for Lincoln National Life Insurance.