rederic L. Kroesing was born in 1890 in Mulhause, Alsace, then a part of Germany. He immigrated to the United States in 1921 and, as a trained chef and baker, worked in various New York hotels before taking a job as chef in a southeast Alaska cannery. He then moved for a time to the state of Washington.

Ida Emelia Johnson was born in Monson, Maine, in 1893. She was working in a cannery in Anacortes, Washington when she met Fred. They were married in 1926 and moved to Alaska in 1928. Fred got a job as cook at the railroad hospital. On the side, he started raising mink, as mink farming was considered a good investment. In 1938 he traded some mink pelts for land at 10th Avenue and M Street for his mink farm. However, the noise made by aircraft landing on and taking off from the adjacent airstrip between 9th and 10th Avenues, caused the mink to kill their young, forcing Fred to go out of the mink business. During World War II, he was required to spend some time in a detention center in British Columbia.

Fred had built a small apartment house on M Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, and, after World War II ended, he built a cold storage plant there. It was eventually named 10th & M Lockers and after that, 10th & M Seafoods. At the lockers, Fred cleaned and stored fur coats during the summer, and butchered, packaged and stored meat the rest of the year. In 1950 he built the B & C Auto building at 4th Avenue and Eagle Street and another building on 6th Avenue between F and G Streets.

The Kroesings had a son, Lloyd, who was killed in an auto accident on the Glenn Highway in 1955. He is buried in Angelus Memorial Park in Anchorage.Frederic and Ida retired to Anacortes in 1960. Fred passed away in 1968 and Ida in 1972, and they are buried in Anacortes.