Findlay Courier file photo

When David Giffels and I wrote Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron, its title had the catchy ring of a television game show but a subtitle that could have been more inclusive. Throughout 1997 in weekly special sections of the Akron Beacon Journal, the subtitle—typographically an overline—read A History of Rubber in Akron.

The subtitle morphed from “History” to “Story” for the version that we and our editor, Deb Van Tassel Warner, subsequently whittled into the book published by the University of Akron Press a year later. Maybe “story” sounds more inclusive or “history” was off-putting because this, after all, was a significant but perhaps still modest journalistic attempt to bring up to date the city’s long affair with its principal industry. We found ourselves in a world of closed factories and a city no longer The Rubber Capital of the World, thanks to its abandonment by all but one of its largest tire manufacturers.

In any case, both the newspaper series and the book were about more than Akron. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.’s announcement this week that it will purchase Cooper Tire & Rubber Co., born in Akron but raised to prominence in Findlay, served as a reminder of this. We went anywhere and everywhere to dig into rubber’s past and present and even looked to the city’s future in polymers, of which rubber is only one.

Splitting the 52 “chapters” of the newspaper series, David and I saw the sights and sites that contributed to making Akron the Rubber City it became. I think David may have loved more than any other his trip—actually we both went—to Spencer, a West Virginia town that contributed so many workers to Akron’s rubber industry that it became legendary. Spencer was the focal point but the broader theme of David’s story was the great migrations of workers to Akron not only from West Virginia but also Pennsylvania and states throughout the South, a region that would eventually take tire building away from Akron by offering the companies cheaper labor in more modern rubber shops, where tire builders, with right-to-work laws, did not belong to the United Rubber Workers union or its successors. Akron could be a contentious labor environment.

There were other ways. Small-town ways. It didn’t always have to be a labor-versus-management fight. Cooper proved this in Findlay over more than a century and now will join Goodyear’s corporate structure, bringing, as the Akron Beacon Journal’s Jim Mackinnon pointed out, its “complementary brands and solidifying [Goodyear’s] position as the third largest global tire manufacturer based on revenue.” Cooper alone is the fifth largest North American tire maker. And, it may be first in community building.

I realize it has been 25 years since I drove 120 miles west from Akron and spent time at Cooper and with the people of Findlay. The faces have changed now but the feeling I got is everlasting and my hope is that the Cooper personnel who join Goodyear will bring with them what I saw and felt. The culture will, no doubt, differ but among the large tire makers this is, I think, the best of matches. Goodyear is the company founded by Frank Seiberling and his brother Charlie, a great ambassador of the message that Frank and wife Gertrude sent when they risked their investment to build a neighborhood—Goodyear Heights—because they thought if they had Stan Hywet, the workers should have good housing and perhaps a fruit tree in a yard that was part of landscaping designed by Stan Hywet’s own landscape designer. Beyond generous, Frank was calculating; he believed happy workers would remain and work hard.

That is what Cooper built in Findlay, seat of Hancock County, with a population of about 41,000, an increase of 3,000 or so since I visited in 1997. I know small towns. I grew up in a very small one—about 4,000—in Northeastern Oklahoma, but a nearby community, Bartlesville, is about the size of Findlay and dominated by a large company, Phillips Petroleum. It was the place to which a number of young people from my small town, Nowata, gravitated if they wanted greater economic opportunities but did not want to lose what smaller towns offer. What  I found in Findlay is what made Cooper able to carve out the niche and culture that attracted Goodyear.

Harry Millis, a rubber industry analyst in Cleveland at the time, observed the same thing about Cooper: “You’re talking to a conservative, old Midwesterner,” Millis reminded me, “but I’ve always felt there was an advantage in being in a small place. I think there is a little greater work ethic in smaller communities and a greater feeling of camaraderie, that we’re all in this together, that we’re all a part of the community. You just can’t build that same type of feeling in a larger urban environment.”

Akron and Goodyear may be an exception. This is the community and the company—the late Robert Mercer at the helm—that fought off Sir James Goldsmith’s takeover attempt with the help of Congressman John Seiberling, grandson of Goodyear’s founder. So while I know the $2.8 billion purchase is based on what Cooper, a mid-tier tire maker, brings to Goodyear in marketing here and abroad (especially China), it does not hurt that Cooper has been the kind of place that words like “neat” do not sound outdated and the company matters more than the next rung up the career ladder.

Cooper employs 1,650 in Findlay, the majority in its factory; some in the corporate office will not survive the headquarters transition back to Akron, where its history began in 1914 when brothers-in-law John Schaefer and Claude E. Hart bought the M and M Manufacturing Company that made tire patches, tire cement, and tire-repair kits before adding tire rebuilding a year later by buying Giant Tire and Rubber Company, one of 134 tire manufacturers nationally, 40 of them in Ohio. The company moved in 1917, taking over the buildings of the failed Toledo Findlay Rubber Company.

“The move from Akron to Findlay was the right move,” Patrick W. Rooney, then Cooper CEO, told me. “Not being in Akron forced us to think independently.” And maybe better.

There were bumps in the road and there could be rocky moments in the move to Akron, a place that once was home but never in the sense of Findlay. If this combining of strengths can make two Ohio rubber companies even better, I don’t think anyone at Goodyear is going to forget the lessons Cooper learned in small-town Findlay—hard work, cooperation, the right niche filled better than by anyone else. Maybe Cooper will share these lessons with Akron’s one remaining halcyon-years giant and Goodyear will listen.