There was a period in American business when the same corporate family could put rubber under an automobile, build rocket motors for the military, own radio and television stations, and control a Hollywood film library purchased from Howard Hughes. That company was General Tire and Rubber, and its transformation from an Akron tire manufacturer into a sprawling industrial-media-aerospace organization is one of the stranger stories of twentieth-century corporate America.

What makes the story even more unusual is that one of its physical footprints sat in Wabash, Indiana. General Tire operated a wartime manufacturing plant there, while thousands of miles away the company was acquiring the California rocket business that became Aerojet-General. A decade later General Tire moved into another apparently unrelated field by buying RKO Pictures from Howard Hughes. The connections are not speculative: General Tire’s own corporate descendants and Securities and Exchange Commission records lay out the chronology plainly—radio in 1942, Aerojet in 1945, television in 1948, and RKO in 1955.

The advertising and factory photographs show the identity General Tire originally presented to the public. This was an Akron rubber company selling automobile tires into the rapidly expanding road economy, and nothing in the cheerful automotive imagery suggested that the company name would eventually sit over rocket engineers and television stations.

It Started With Rubber

General Tire and Rubber Company was founded in Akron, Ohio, in 1915. Akron was already emerging as the great American center of rubber production, and General entered a market dominated by companies such as Goodyear, Firestone and Goodrich. The company’s early history followed a recognizable industrial path: manufacture tires, build distribution, acquire additional rubber capacity and sell products into the rapidly expanding automobile economy.

Rubber occupied a crucial position in the new transportation system. A road might be paved with stone, concrete or asphalt, and a truck might contain steel, wood, glass and an engine, but high-speed road transportation still depended upon tires, hoses, belts, seals, vibration control and other rubber goods. The material therefore sat between road construction and the machine using the road.

That relationship helps explain why General Tire’s eventual expansion was not as arbitrary as it first appears. The corporation had started by supplying a technological system rather than simply producing an isolated object. Cars required tires, tires required dealers and advertising, national sales required communications, wartime manufacturing introduced aviation and military customers, and those new relationships opened doors into industries far removed from the neighborhood tire shop.

Wabash Became Part of General Tire’s Industrial Map

Wabash, Indiana, already possessed an unusual transportation-manufacturing history before General Tire arrived. Service Motor Truck had built commercial trucks there during the early twentieth century and participated in America’s World War I motor-transport economy. When the truck business collapsed through the reorganizations and consolidations of the 1920s, the industrial buildings did not disappear simply because the corporate name did. Local industrial history places General Tire in the factory afterlife of the Service operation during the following decade.

The exact parcel succession deserves continued local-document research, but General Tire’s presence in Wabash itself is independently documented. Indiana state history records that the Wabash General Tire operation became part of the state’s wartime production system during World War II, while another state source describes the plant producing bombs during the war.

This was no longer simply civilian rubber manufacturing. Wabash had been pulled into the military-industrial production system along with factories across Indiana making aircraft equipment, ammunition, radios, time fuses, vehicles and ordnance.

The physical afterlife of the factory creates one of the strangest documentary links in the entire story. An Indiana Department of Environmental Management letter dated August 28, 2025, concerns the Former General Tire property at 1 General Street in Wabash. The letter is addressed not only to the mayor of Wabash but also to a representative of Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Inc., the corporate descendant of General Tire’s aerospace business.

More than eighty years after General Tire entered aerospace, an Indiana environmental file can still place Wabash and Aerojet Rocketdyne on the same piece of paper.

That is corporate history leaving a fossil.

The Tire Company Discovered Radio

The first major departure from rubber actually came before Aerojet. During the 1930s General Tire began investing in radio, and in 1942 it purchased the Yankee Network, a New England chain of radio stations. The company’s own later SEC-filed history places the acquisition directly on its corporate timeline.

At first this might seem like ordinary diversification. A tire company had profits, broadcasting appeared promising, and management invested in a growing industry. Yet there was a practical relationship between the two businesses that was very much of its time: tire manufacturers depended heavily on national advertising, automobiles had helped create a mobile mass market, and radio supplied a way to address enormous audiences simultaneously.

General Tire soon moved beyond owning a few stations. By the early 1950s its subsidiary General Teleradio controlled major radio and television properties and was associated with the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Yankee Network and the Don Lee Network. Contemporary television-trade reporting described General Teleradio as the General Tire subsidiary operating WOR and WOR-TV in New York along with other major stations.

The corporation was beginning to control two different kinds of movement. Tires enabled machines to move across physical roads, while broadcasting allowed information to move invisibly across enormous distances.

The cargo was changing.

Meanwhile, a Group of Rocket Experimenters Was Working in Pasadena

While General Tire was expanding from rubber into radio, a completely different story was unfolding in Southern California. In the 1930s, Frank Malina, Jack Parsons and Edward Forman began experimenting with rocket propulsion around Caltech under the guidance of Theodore von Kármán. Their work eventually moved into the Arroyo Seco outside Pasadena because rocket experiments were too dangerous for ordinary campus surroundings.

The Army Air Corps became interested in using rockets to assist heavily loaded aircraft during takeoff. By 1941 the Caltech group had demonstrated jet-assisted takeoff, or JATO, and the work had ceased to be merely experimental. It had become militarily useful.

These photographs preserve the transition before it acquired the polished appearance of the aerospace industry. One shows an early outdoor rocket-motor experiment conducted with improvised equipment and sandbags; the other shows an aircraft taking off under rocket assistance, demonstrating the moment laboratory work became a practical aviation technology.

A manufacturing problem immediately followed the scientific success. Caltech could research rocket propulsion, but it was not organized to manufacture thousands of propulsion units for military customers.

So the experimenters created a company.

Aerojet Was Born From the Caltech Rocket Group

Aerojet Engineering Corporation was formally incorporated in 1942. NASA’s detailed history identifies the six original participants as Theodore von Kármán, Frank Malina, Martin Summerfield, Jack Parsons, Edward Forman and attorney Andrew Haley. The corporation emerged directly from discussions about how to turn Caltech’s successful rocket work into a production organization capable of fulfilling military demand.

This is the critical transformation. A laboratory proves that something works, but a working device is not yet an industrial system. Large-scale production requires capital, purchasing, contracts, factory space, accountants, manufacturing engineers and relationships with government customers.

Aerojet supplied that corporate shell.

The young company was important, but it was also financially vulnerable. Rocket engineering demanded more resources than a small group of researchers could indefinitely supply. General Tire saw an opportunity.

In 1945 the Akron company purchased Aerojet Engineering. The present corporate history of Aerojet Rocketdyne describes the acquisition directly, noting that General Tire’s purchase marked its entrance into aerospace and defense.

The tire manufacturer now owned a rocket company.

Aerojet-General Made the Connection Impossible to Miss

The relationship eventually became visible in the company name itself: Aerojet-General.

The photographs of the Aerojet-General administration and engineering operation are valuable precisely because the sign over the building removes any need for metaphor. “General,” the name associated with an Akron tire company and an Indiana rubber plant, had been attached directly to one of America’s important propulsion companies.

The aerospace business expanded rapidly during the Cold War. Aerojet worked on solid and liquid rocket motors, missiles, space-launch systems and other propulsion technologies. Its later corporate history includes programs far removed from anything William O’Neil could have imagined when General Tire was founded in 1915.

Yet the path from tire to rocket was not magical. World War II had taught industrial corporations how to move between civilian manufacturing and defense production. Rubber companies already understood chemical engineering, military contracting, aircraft requirements, testing, standardization and high-volume manufacturing. General Tire did not need to invent rocketry itself if it could acquire the organization that already possessed the expertise.

Corporate ownership allowed technical knowledge to move without requiring the parent company to begin again from scratch.

The Same Company Was Building a Broadcasting Empire

At almost exactly the same time, General Tire was expanding in the opposite direction—away from heavy industry and into communications.

By 1948 the company had entered television through WNAC-TV in Boston. General Teleradio then operated stations in markets including Boston, New York and Los Angeles while participating in national radio-network ownership.

This meant General Tire now sat above businesses with radically different outward appearances. One subsidiary dealt with transmitters, studios and broadcast schedules. Another dealt with propellants, test stands and military contracts. The original corporation still dealt with rubber and industrial products.

A viewer listening to a General-owned radio station would have no obvious reason to associate the program with a rocket motor.

A soldier or engineer looking at an Aerojet propulsion system would have no obvious reason to think about a television station.

The separation existed at the level of products and public image. At the level of ownership, they were moving closer together.

Then Howard Hughes Put Hollywood Within Reach

Howard Hughes made the next transition possible because he already inhabited the overlapping worlds of technology and entertainment. Hughes had become famous as an aviator and aircraft entrepreneur while simultaneously financing films. By 1948 he had taken control of RKO, one of Hollywood’s major studios. RKO’s own history describes Hughes taking ownership that year and subsequently interfering so heavily in production that the studio entered a period of serious instability.

Hughes is important here because his career demonstrates how easily aviation and entertainment could coexist inside the same financial world by the middle of the twentieth century. He did not need to choose between airplanes and movies. He could own interests in both.

The contrast is striking. Hughes appears as the polished aviation-industrial celebrity, while the RKO building advertises a completely different product: movies, stars and public fantasy. The studio’s famous radio tower was already a visual reminder that broadcasting and cinema were converging before General Tire entered the picture.

RKO had been created in the late 1920s partly from the merger of film and radio interests, and even its name—Radio-Keith-Orpheum—carried communications into the studio’s identity. By the Hughes period, however, the company had become financially troubled and increasingly difficult to operate.

General Tire already possessed the piece that made RKO attractive.

It owned broadcasting.

In 1955 General Tire Bought RKO From Hughes

The sale occurred in 1955. SEC-filed corporate history states that General Tire purchased RKO from Howard Hughes for $25 million, while RKO’s own historical account confirms the transfer.

The surviving trade-paper headline captures just how strange the transaction looked even at the time: a giant Hollywood studio and its assets were passing from Howard Hughes to a company still publicly identified with tires. The photograph of Hughes beside it makes the crossover between industrial aviation wealth and entertainment ownership impossible to miss.

General Tire did not simply acquire sound stages and an old Hollywood name. RKO possessed something particularly valuable in the new television economy: a large catalog of motion pictures.

RKO’s official history states that after the General Tire acquisition, the company began selling broadcast rights to RKO films to television stations across the country.

That changed the economic meaning of the movie library.

A completed film was no longer merely something shown during its original theatrical release. It had become reusable inventory.

A Film Library Is a Transportation System for Images

This is the point where the apparently bizarre General Tire conglomerate begins to make sense.

A tire company’s original business was tied to physical transportation. Rubber helped vehicles move over roads. General Tire’s broadcasting operations dealt with another kind of movement: radio and television signals crossing space. RKO supplied content capable of moving through those channels repeatedly.

A film library therefore behaved differently from a factory. The expensive act of producing a film might have occurred years earlier, but ownership of the negative and distribution rights allowed the same material to generate revenue again through television.

General Tire already owned stations.

RKO owned films.

The combination placed a content library beside distribution channels.

The corporation did not have to believe that tires and movies were the same business. It only had to recognize that profitable infrastructure could exist in radically different forms.

The road carries vehicles.

The transmitter carries signals.

The rocket carries payloads.

The film catalog carries stories across time.

General Tire ended up owning pieces of all four systems.

The Company Eventually Sold the Studio but Kept the Media Machine

General Tire did not remain a conventional Hollywood producer for long. Its later corporate timeline states that the movie-production business was sold to Desilu in 1958 while General retained its radio and television holdings.

That decision is revealing. The physical studio operation was less important to General’s long-term media strategy than broadcasting and the control of communications properties.

The corporation increasingly became known through RKO General, the company that operated major radio and television stations. By the mid-1960s, the media side had become enormously important financially: General’s SEC-filed history says RKO was responsible for 43 percent of the corporation’s profits in 1965.

A tire manufacturer had built a media business large enough to become one of its principal sources of earnings.

That was no side hobby.

Wabash Makes the Corporate Transformation Physical

The Wabash connection matters because otherwise the General Tire story can sound like nothing more than a series of Wall Street transactions. Wabash gives the corporate structure a physical floor.

Indiana records show General Tire manufacturing there during the Second World War. Later environmental records continue to identify the former General Tire property, and the 2025 remediation correspondence includes Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings as a co-applicant.

The continuity is not that Wabash workers secretly built Pasadena rockets or edited RKO movies. That would overstate the evidence and make the real history less interesting.

The continuity is corporate.

A manufacturing site in Indiana and a rocket company descended from Caltech ultimately occupied branches of the same expanding organizational tree. RKO’s film library later entered that tree as well.

Factories, rockets and movies became assets capable of being administered at the same corporate level even though the people working inside them performed completely different jobs.

That was the new scale of American business.

The 2025 Paper Trail Is Almost Too Perfect

The surviving IDEM correspondence from Wabash offers an extraordinary ending to this part of the story. The document concerns environmental remediation at the former General Tire manufacturing site. One recipient represents the City of Wabash; the other is listed as Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Inc., 2001 Aerojet Road, Rancho Cordova, California.

A place in Indiana associated with trucks, rubber products and wartime manufacturing is therefore still connected administratively to the corporate descendant of the California rocket business General Tire purchased eighty years earlier.

The addresses alone tell the story.

1 General Street, Wabash, Indiana.

2001 Aerojet Road, Rancho Cordova, California.

Those names are remnants of an American corporation that kept changing what kind of company it was.

Rubber Was Only the Beginning

General Tire’s later history makes the transformation even more dramatic. The corporate timeline shows acquisitions and holdings extending beyond tires, rockets and broadcasting into steel, airlines, hotels and other businesses. Eventually the original tire operations themselves were sold. In 1987, GenCorp—the holding company created from General Tire’s restructuring—sold the tire business to Continental and increasingly concentrated on aerospace and technology.

That means the most surprising transformation was still to come.

The rocket company outlived the tire business inside the corporate lineage.

General Tire had begun in 1915 because automobiles needed rubber. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, its descendant was acquiring additional space and defense businesses. In 2013 it acquired Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and combined the operation with Aerojet to create Aerojet Rocketdyne. The holding company itself eventually adopted the Aerojet Rocketdyne name.

The subsidiary had effectively become the identity of the parent.

Rubber capital had completed its conversion into aerospace capital.

What Kind of Company Was General Tire?

The answer depends entirely upon the year.

In 1915, it was a tire company.

In 1942, it was a tire company that owned a radio network.

By 1945, it also owned a rocket company.

By 1948, it was in television.

By 1955, it had purchased RKO from Howard Hughes.

A few years later it was selling off the physical movie-production operation while maintaining the broadcasting system. By the 1980s it was restructuring away from the tire business that had created the company in the first place. Eventually the surviving corporate identity centered on aerospace and defense.

The chronology makes the familiar labels almost useless.

Calling it a tire company describes its origin.

Calling it a broadcaster describes part of its middle period.

Calling it an aerospace company describes what ultimately survived.

The corporation changed faster than the public language used to describe it.

Rockets, Radio, and Hollywood Were Less Different Than They Looked

There is a temptation to treat the combination as a bizarre mid-century conglomerate with no internal logic. Some of it certainly reflected the era’s enthusiasm for diversification, but the businesses also shared something more fundamental.

Each involved controlled movement through a technical system.

The tire controlled the contact between vehicle and road.

The radio network controlled the routing of sound to an audience.

Television added moving images to that signal.

RKO supplied a reusable stock of those images.

Aerojet controlled propulsion.

The products were dramatically different, but every business depended upon engineering systems, distribution, regulation, licensing, maintenance and large networks of specialized personnel.

A modern corporation did not need all its subsidiaries to make the same object. It needed them to produce valuable functions that could be financed and managed inside the same ownership structure.

That was the world in which rubber, rockets and movies could finally occupy the same balance sheet.

The Story Hidden Behind the RKO Globe

The famous RKO logo depicted a radio tower standing on top of the globe, sending lightning-like signals outward. For movie audiences it was simply studio branding, one of the familiar emblems that appeared before a film.

Seen against General Tire’s history, the image becomes almost accidentally perfect.

The company that eventually owned RKO had begun by putting rubber beneath machines traveling across the ground. It then purchased radio networks capable of crossing the continent without roads. It acquired a rocket company working on machines designed to leave the ground entirely. Finally it purchased a Hollywood company whose films could be transmitted into millions of homes.

The radius kept expanding.

Road.

Radio.

Air.

Space.

Screen.

And in the middle of that expansion sits one corporate history running from Akron to Wabash to Pasadena and Hollywood.

No secret organization is required to make the story extraordinary. The documented corporate record is stranger than the simplified histories in which tire companies make tires, movie studios make movies and rocket scientists remain safely sealed inside laboratories.

For a time, one American corporation held pieces of all three worlds.

It sold the tire.

It owned the transmitter.

It financed the rocket.

And it bought Hollywood from Howard Hughes.