O'Neil

General Tire's entertainment subsidiary, RKO Teleradio Pictures, Inc., is diversifying in another way. It is spreading into every nook cranny of its own industry, cutting across the traditional

subdivisions of show business.

When veteran movie executive William Dozier showed up for a new job at the RKO Radio studios in Hollywood several months ago, he couldn't find a producer, director, or writer on the place. A maintenance staff rattled about the huge (13 1/2-acre) main lot, and the fifteen sound stages had the desolate air of a summer hotel in the dead of winter. "We had nothing but the buildings," recalls Dozier.

Since RKO was bought from Howard Hughes late last year by the General Teleradio division of the General Tire & Rubber Co., the studio rolled from a virtual dead stop into high gear. When RKO released its huge library of back movies to television last March, it broke a psychological barrier that has gripped Hollywood since TV first flickered.

The drive behind this surge of activity is supplied by a hulking (6-foot-4, 220 pounds) man of many parts named Thomas F. O'Neil, who has little time to take much note of milestones because he is too busy passing others on half a dozen different routes. As president of RKO Teleradio Pictures, Inc., the new General Tire subsidiary set up by the RKO merger, O'Neil presides over the most varied collection of show-business properties extant. They include the nation's biggest radio network (the 586-station Mutual Broadcasting System), two big regional radio nets (the Don Lee Network on the Pacific Coast and New England's Yankee Network); one UHF and five VHF television stations reaching a quarter of the U.S TV audience, seven wholly owned radio stations, a recording company, two music publishing companies and RKO.

Tom O'Neil hardly fits the role of a showman. Son of General Tire's founder and president, William F. O'Neil, he started his career as a tire salesman, got into radio obliquely when his father's company started investing in radio stations to soften excess-profits taxes on its tiremaking income. Tom had never so much as hustled scenery in an amateur theatrical, and still claims few showman's instincts.

But at 41, affable Tom O'Neil has already established himself as a shrewd dealer with a keen eye for costs and profits (he carries a slide rule in his pocket). In the last two years O'Neil doubled the net income of General Tire's entertainment investments to $2.1 million; this year, helped by a fat tax write-off from the RKO investment, they will probably clear at least $6 million.

O'Neil has powerful financial backing from General Tire ($295.7 million sales, $9.7 million net last year), which has more than a few fish frying in other fields: Besides being the fifth largest tiremaker, it produces chemicals, plastics, rockets, guided-missile controls, and one-man submarines, and is the nation's No. 1 producer of tennis balls (Pennsylvania). For all practical purposes, O'Neil is the only link between RKO Teleradio and its huge parent company, and has a virtually free hand from its board of directors.

The younger O'Neil justified confidence when he borrowed $25 million to buy RKO last year. Less than six months later, he had, in effect, recouped the entire debt. To Matthew Fox's C & C Super Corp., a TV distributing firm, he sold 600 RKO movies for $12 million, plus an option to buy 150 more for $3 million. Since O'Neil's RKO studios-plus exclusive rights to televise the 750 pictures in the markets covered by his own TV stations-were worth some $10 million, O'Neil was home free.

O'Neil has set out to exploit this situation with a total disregard for tradition. In 1954, for example, he made the unheard-of move of putting movies on television for a week at a time, showing each one at regularly scheduled hours just as though it were being exhibited at the local movie house. The movies came from the vaults of the Bank of America, which had foreclosed on them when they failed to meet their production costs; they were, however, better than average TV film fare , and O'Neil managed to lease them for $1.3 million.

O'Neil put his 'Million Dollar Movies' on his New York TV station, WOR-TV, where to nearly everyone's amazement they soared to a rating of 80 (meaning 80 per cent of all New York viewers looked at them at one time or another during the week). They did just as well on his

Los Angeles station, KHJ-TV, which, like WOR-TV, was an independent and could not afford the live programming costs which its competitors could prorate over an entire network. [RKO Teleradio's UHF TV station is WGTH-TV in Hartford. The others, all affiliated with networks: WNAC-TV, Boston (CBS, ABC), WHB-TV, Memphis (ABC), WEAT-TV, West Palm Beach (ABC).] In less than a year, O'Neil made back his investment and piled up a $1.3 million profit to boot.

The RKO purchase was a natural, if king-size, sequel to the 'Million Dollar Movie.' Like his television competitors, O'Neil was well aware of the Huge backlog of choice films in RKO's library. He checked with General Tire's board, told them that the biggest gamble would be not to take the gamble, and set out for California last July to track down his elusive quarry. Hughes, who insisted that negotiations be conducted under assumed names to avoid publicity, ultimately met O'Neil

late one night in a Los Angeles hotel room, preceded by a van of lawyers. The price, said Hughes, would be $400,000 more than originally agreed upon. O'Neil did not boggle.

*RKO movie distribution system (32 offices)*

RKO Teleradio has acquired the Unique Corp., a recording company, which, among other enterprises, will sell records of the scores of RKO musicals. Its two music publishing firms, Lamas Corp. and Britton Corp., will publish the music and reap the royalties.

Thomas Francis O'Neil was born April 18, 1915, in Kansas city, shortly before his father, a wealthy tire dealer, packed up and moved back to Akron, Ohio, to found General Tire. One of five brothers [Gerry, 34 is executive assistant to his father; John, 38, is a financial consultant to General Tire; William, 42, is no longer active with the company. The fifth brother, Hugh, was lost at sea as a World War II Navy pilot], he grew up in a baronial Tudor mansion in Akron's best section, and in the family tradition went to college at Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he majored in economics. His 1936 classmates remember him as "Ox" O'Neil, a friendly, easygoing giant who loped about the campus in T-shirt and sneakers and pulled down good marks without seeming to crack a book.

In 1947 his curiosity was piqued by one of General Tire's radio investments, Boston's station WNAC. O'Neil asked for a chance to take a hand in its operation. From then he began to think less and less about the rubber business and became the driving force behind the company's expansion into entertainment.

O'Neil takes little direct hand in actual operations of RKO Teleradio's entertainment empire, leaving that to the hand-picked executives he has put in charge. O'Neils chief lieutenants are RKO

Radio president Daniel T. O'Shea and Willett Brown, president of the Don Lee Network.

-1956 Newsweek