From Rubber to Radio to Radials, General Turns 100 This Year - Tire Review Magazine

From Rubber to Radio to Radials, General Turns 100 This Year

The General tire brand celebrates its centennial this year, the last remaining piece of the once mighty General Tire & Rubber Co., purveyors of fine passenger and durable truck tires, as well as a wide range of other goods – including Hollywood movies.

The company traces its origins to Akron, Ohio, where on Sept. 29, 1915, William F. O’Neill and his partner Winfred E. Fouse took the leap of faith and joined the more than 300 companies already producing tires to service the fast-growing North American transportation industry.General_Tire_ad_1919

From the beginning, the two partners put their faith in high quality and focused at first on the truck market. Here they pioneered an oversized pneumatic tire called the General Jumbo. Back in those days, trucks ran on solid rubber tires and the pneumatic tire was an innovation that soon caught on.

The General Jumbo caught on, and with the help of a team of independent dealers spanning the U.S., the General Tire & Rubber Co.’s success grew. The company then turned its attention to the passenger car market, releasing the General Balloon Jumbo tire in the mid-1920s. A defining feature of this particular product was its lower 12-psi operating pressure, which delivered a more comfortable ride than conventional pneumatics. Playing off the success, General rapidly expanded its range, which soon included the high-mileage puncture-proof Dual Balloon.

As the 1930s dawned and the Great Depression began, General was the largest truck tire manufacturer in the U.S. with a range that included a full line of pneumatic tires. At the same time, the company went international, establishing a wholly owned subsidiary in Mexico. Then in 1934, General earned an OE contract with major commercial vehicle and agricultural machinery manufacturer International Harvester. By the end of the decade, every major U.S. truck producer had approved General as an OE supplier.

As with other tiremakers of the time, General spread itself into other products and interests, most notably – and unusually – into the world of entertainment. The first steps came in 1943 when General bought controlling interest in Massachusetts regional radio broadcaster Yankee Network. That grew into a stake in the national Mutual Broadcasting System, and then into TV, with a series of smaller acquisitions.

The crown jewel, though, was the 1955 purchase of RKO Radio Pictures from Howard Hughes for the then otherworldly price of $25 million. The tiremaker reportedly quickly recouped most of the purchase price by selling the rights to RKO’s historic film library to C&C Television Corp. for $15.2 million, a deal most experts believe led directly to the flood of feature films to television in the 1950s.

Building from its maxed out Akron factory, the company opened a state-of-the-art tire factory in Waco, Texas, in November 1944; output from the plant helped alleviate the critical tire shortage during World War II and helped build up General’s post-war OE portfolio. In 1955, General Motors became the company’s first passenger tire OE customer.

Deals with other major vehicle manufacturers followed, and in the 1960s General opened new plants in Mayfield, Ky., Bryan, Ohio, and Charlotte, N.C., to meet growing demand. A sixth plant entered service in Mt. Vernon, Ill., in 1973. [The Akron, Waco, Mayfield and Charlotte plants have since been closed; the Mt. Vernon facility has been expanded multiple times and is now one of the country’s largest. The Bryan plant was sold off to Titan International.]

In 1959, General Tire & Rubber Co. built the world’s largest tire test track in Ulvade, Texas. That facility remains active to this day and hosts thousands of tire dealers, OEM engineers and media each year.generaltire-slider

The opening of the Mt. Vernon facility took place at a time when the U.S. automotive industry’s fortunes were changing. The gas crisis and oil embargo in 1973-74 helped foreign vehicle manufacturers gain a stronger foothold in the American market, and the introduction of the CAFE standards didn’t help local carmakers much, either. The 1970s and 1980s proved to be the U.S. auto industry’s darkest, and while General prospered in the 1970s, by the beginning of the following decade its rivals were operating more efficient and modern tire plants.

In an era of buyouts and consolidations, General was not immune from massive change. In March 1984, General Tire & Rubber Co. shareholders approved a change of name, and the company became known as GenCorp Inc., a title that reflected the firm’s growing activities outside the tire sector. Three years later, an investor group operating under the name of General Partners offered up to $110 for each GenCorp share in an all-cash hostile takeover bid, a move that was ultimately staved off by the sale of GenCorp’s tire business to Germany’s Continental AG on Oct. 30, 1987.

In 1995, the company changed its name to Continental General Tire Inc. before being renamed Continental Tire North America Inc. in May 2000 and Continental Tire the Americas in 2010.

The General brand remains integral to the company’s success and appears on a broad range of passenger, performance, light truck/SUV and medium truck tires.

CTA plans to celebrate the anniversary next week at both the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Ky., and during the tiremaker’s annual Gold Dealer Meeting during a Caribbean cruise.

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