William Rosenberg was born in Boston, Massachusetts one of four children of Nathan Rosenberg, a grocery owner, and Phoebe Rosenberg née Swart, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Rosenberg grew up in Boston’s working-class Dorchester section and was educated in public schools.[1] Due to financial problems, he was forced to leave school by eighth grade to help support his family, who had lost their store in the Great Depression. After several different jobs, at age fourteen, he went to work for Western Union as a full-time telegram delivery boy. At seventeen, he started working for Simco, a company that distributed ice cream from refrigerated trucks, rising from delivery boy to national sales manager at age twenty-one, supervising the production, shipping, cold storage and manufacturing and managing 40 to 100 trucks.[