Moore: Honored to be part of tire industry

Editor's note: Miles Moore spent more than four decades covering the tire and rubber industries for Crain Communications Inc. He retired in April 2020, after spending his entire 43-year career with Tire Business, and sister publication Rubber & Plastics News. Mr. Moore is one of just four individuals being honored this year by the Tire Industry Association. He will receive the Friend of the Industry Award on Nov. 1 during TIA's Centennial Celebration events in Las Vegas, prior to the opening of the SEMA Show.

I never thought in the first 22 years of my life that I would spend the next 43 writing about tires.

Like all of my other journalism school friends in the 1970s, I had big dreams — not so much of being Woodward or Bernstein, in my case more like Roger Ebert.

But, also like my other journalism school friends, I needed a job, and a friend from Akron told me about a Help Wanted ad in the Akron Beacon-Journal for an assistant editor at a publication that covered the tire and rubber industries, called Rubber & Plastics News.

I started in Akron two days after I graduated. Three years later, they transferred me to Washington, and three years after that, when they started a second publication, Tire Business, I took on the Washington duties for that, too.

There I stayed until I retired last year.

Roger Ebert I wasn't. But obviously, I liked the job.

I learned a lot of things I would never have learned at the movies. I learned that a tire, which I had always taken for granted in my previous life, is one of the most remarkable of all manufactured products — an incredibly complex feat of engineering and chemistry, designed to support the entire vehicle, taken for granted because it works so consistently well, and vilified on the rare occasions when it doesn't.

I learned what it takes to build a business, and to keep one going — not well enough to try founding one myself, but well enough to write about the subject. (And believe me, whenever I got the details wrong, I heard about it. The experts were my audience.)

I learned about the razor-thin profit margins that businesses in the industry deal with — especially small businesses. I learned about the problems they had in attracting and keeping qualified employees, arranging for health benefits, dealing with environmental regulations.

As the Washington reporter, I learned above all about how government regulation can help, or hinder, the smooth operation of a tire dealership or a rubber product manufacturing facility.

Above all, I learned about the people who make up the tire industry — people of dedication, knowhow and integrity. They are people who love what they do; who support their neighbors and communities unwaveringly; and who provide products and services of paramount importance to their communities, and to the world.

So soon I will accept the Friend of the Industry Award from the Tire Industry Association. I will never be able to express the humble gratitude I feel to receive it.

I can only say I am honored that TIA regards me as a friend to the industry, because I will always regard the industry, and the people in it, as friends to me.