TIA CEO Littlefield reflects on long tire industry career

The excitement of politics drew Roy Littlefield from his small town in New Hampshire to Washington, D.C., but it was luck, he said recently, that landed him among honest people such as those in the tire industry.

After a 50-plus year career — 42 of those lobbying on behalf of the tire industry — Mr. Littlefield, the Tire Industry Association (TIA) chief executive officer, plans to retire at year-end.

"TIA was founded on the small, independent dealer, and I've always tried to be a champion of those individuals," Mr. Littlefield told Tire Business. "And in this industry, the people are so incredibly honest.

"Association work — it's a great environment. I've been in weddings and funerals and baptisms and bar mitzvahs and all kinds of stuff with our members over the years, because we've become such good friends."

• This article appears in the Oct. 25 print editon of Tire Business.

Along with government affairs, events and training for members, he said TIA's biggest impact is often behind the scenes helping small business owners.

"You can really help so many people," he said. "So many dealers who have gotten in trouble (like being audited or facing regulations), we've been able to come in and give them the assistance they need."

Mr. Littlefield sat down with Tire Business recently to talk about his life and career — from the mill to Capitol Hill.

"It was all luck in a way. I grew up in a little town in New Hampshire, and I always wanted to go to D.C."

Mr. Littlefield has been with TIA since it began business under that identity in 2002. He helped settle early internal tensions, stabilize the budget, create a more cohesive overall strategy and grow membership measurably — to more than 13,000 today, from 2,700 in 2002.

"Hopefully, we became more relevant and visible to our members," he said of TIA.

It will be hard to walk away, but he said he feels like the time has come.

"I want to spend more time with my wife and family, and my three grandchildren," Mr. Littlefield said. "The other thing is, you want to give opportunities to new people. You want to bring younger people onto the board, onto the staff, and you don't want to overstay your bounds.

"I've been blessed, but I want to enjoy my life."

Mr. Littlefield was an only child growing up in Milford, N.H., a small town in the southeast part of the Granite State. His father was a woodworker for a company making kitchen cabinets, and he was the president of the union. His mother was the secretary for the man who owned the company.

Mr. Littlefield worked in the mill part-time, too.

"Working there gave me a great appreciation of a few things. One, working with your dad, how neat that is, and two, I learned about hard work, and I learned to appreciate what I had.

"The people that were there, that was their life, and I was fortunate to go to college."

The Littlefield family ancestors came to America in 1636, according to Mr. Littlefield, who has done extensive genealogy research on his family. He is the 14th generation in a direct line, and he was the first to go to college.

Mr. Littlefield attended Dickinson College for his undergraduate degree and then Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

His parents worked hard to get him through college, and his dad died while he was there.

"I asked my mom, 'What can I do to ever repay you?' And she said, 'Do it for the next generation.'"

His three grown kids all have master's degrees.

Softball scholarship

While attending Catholic University, around 1975, Mr. Littlefield started volunteering for Sen. Thomas McIntyre, D-N.H.

Softball is serious business on Capitol Hill; all the House representatives and Senators have a team.

"When people asked what I did for Sen. McIntyre, I would say I was on the softball scholarship," Mr. Littlefield said with a chuckle.

Soon, Mr. McIntyre offered him a full-time job, paying him $10,500 a year.

"That was a lot of money, especially where I came from. I almost fell down when I heard," he said.

When Mr. McIntyre lost re-election in 1978, the senator asked Mr. Littlefield where he wanted to go next. He said he wanted to return to school and finish his dissertation on William Randolph Hearst.

The senator got Mr. Littlefield a job with the Senate Sergeant at Arms, where he oversaw the Senate pressroom.

"I don't think anyone had the job before me, and I don't think anyone had it after me," he said, "but it made me be downtown every day, and it was easy to go to the Library of Congress and do research after work."

In political softball, he was a free agent. He landed on the team of Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Calif. He said it was great to interact with him in such an informal place, and they won the Senate championship that year, losing in the title game to the House.

The Hearst family

In college, a professor was writing a book on "Tammany Hall and the new immigrant." He wrote topics on the board, and said if anyone wrote about a topic, he would use it in the book.

"One of them was on Hearst, and so I did," he said. That planted the seed.

"Afterward, I told him this would be a really interesting dissertation, and he said one of the problems with Hearst is the family let only one researcher get into the papers, and it was in 1936 by someone hired by the family to write a book."

Mr. Littlefield wrote to one of Mr. Hearst's sons, and the son invited him to New York.

"You know these were in the Patty Hearst days, so you had to go through secret service. It was kind of a big deal for a student," he said.

He was allowed to view the papers and given the freedom to write anything he wanted as long as he didn't write about Marion Davies, Mr. Hearst's longtime mistress.

When Mr. Littlefield finished his dissertation, "William Randolph Hearst: His Role in American Progressivism," the Hearst family offered him a 21-year contract to write seven histories on people in the family. He turned the job down because he said it would feel like writing his dissertation over and over.

Over the years, he has appeared as an historian on documentaries about Mr. Hearst, and his book is still taught in colleges, such as the University of Maryland.

Mr. Littlefield also teaches history, politics and law at Catholic University.

When he finished his dissertation, he wanted to return to New Hampshire and get involved in politics.

"I applied to so many jobs out there. Thank God, I didn't get them," Mr. Littlefield said.

Out of frustration, he applied for seven jobs advertised in the Sunday Washington Post. The next week, he had seven interviews, one of which would land him a career in the tire industry.

The third pile

When Russell MacCleery joined the National Tire Dealers & Retreaders Association (NTDRA) — TIA's predecessor — to build a government affairs program, he had three stacks of resumes. The first included good writers. The second stack of resumes was for those with political experience.

Mr. Littlefield's resume was the only one in the third pile, and he got the job.

"After about the 20th time hearing the story, I said, 'Russ, why don't you tell them what the third pile really was.'

"The third pile was anybody who had a resume who came from New Hampshire, and I was the only resume in that pile. And that's the only pile that really mattered."

Mr. MacCleery became a mentor who taught Mr. Littlefield about building relationships, association management, organization and how the tire industry worked.

"He was really great as a lobbyist and a human being," Mr. Littlefield said. "He taught me so much about how the system really works."

In 1982, the NTDRA was lobbying for the voluntary tire registration bill. When the bill came up for discussion in the Senate, the senator who was to argue on its behalf was unavailable, so the bill went to the bottom of the pile.

Messrs. MacCleery and Littlefield found the senator, and visited the office of the Senate president, where Mr. MacCleery had become friends with his secretary.

"Well, because of that friendship, she took that bill from the bottom, put it on top, and it went on the floor, and it passed," Mr. Littlefield said. The next bill was the budget bill — always the last. Then the Senate adjourned.

There is a frustration and excitement to politics, he said, when out of hundreds of bills, the fine line between yours being addressed could hinge on occasionally buying someone a cup of coffee.

"It taught me, you don't just deal with the top people — deal with everybody," he said.

"And treat everyone the same, because a lot of time those people are going to help you out."

In the trenches

In Washington, Mr. Littlefield learned the importance of building strong relationships and paying attention to details. Because around 80% of bills introduced never get voted on, it takes a lot of work and some luck to get a bill passed.

"You've got to be down there in the trenches, they've got to know who you are, and you've got to do your research on someone," he said.

For example, he said, Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., was extremely interested in issues impacting farmers, so it was beneficial to tie the conversation into agriculture.

One day, Mr. Littlefield went in to talk to Mr. Dole's aide about a retread bill. Then, Mr. Dole walked into the office.

"He said, 'Come on in and talk to me,' so I went in and talked to him and tied in about farmers using retreads and stuff. He was chairman on the Senate finance committee at the time, and he got the bill through for us," Mr. Littlefield said.

Late at night in 1984, senators took a break while discussing tire regulations in the highway bill. Most of the lobbyists had gone home, Mr. Littlefield said, but he still was there. Mr. Dole saw him and asked, "Hey, don't you guys have a position on these tire taxes?"

He was brought into a meeting room to discuss it.

"That's when the excise tax on truck tires went up significantly, and that's when the passenger excise tax was eliminated," Mr. Littlefield said. "Passenger retreading really almost died after that, and truck tire retreading just expanded tremendously.

"New tire taxes were so high that the differential between a retread and a new truck tire were great enough that the 1,000 retreaders that were left at the time used more rubber than they did when we had 10,000 retreaders and did all of those passenger retreads."

Put me in coach

Mr. Littlefield's career in the tire industry began in 1979 as director of government affairs at the NTDRA. He also did work for the American Retreaders' Association (ARA) as a part-time director of government affairs and became executive director of the Washington/Maryland Service Station and Automotive Repair Association. In 1994, he became executive vice president of the Service Station Dealers of America and Allied Trades.

TIA was created in 2002 by the merger of the Tire Association of North America (successor of the NTDRA) and the International Tire & Rubber Association (successor of the ARA). Mr. Littlefield was named TIA's executive vice president in January 2003.

"When the merger took place, and I was selected, I was like, 'Put me in coach, I'm ready to play,'" he said.

"There was no advertisement, no big thing. It was just handled pretty quickly and non-controversially, and I was really lucky. I was just in the right place at the right time."

He was advised to figure out how to quash anger over the 1984 tire excise tax, because it had been a "sore subject for everyone." He said members of TIA got together with stakeholders and came up with a plan that instead of figuring the tax by weight, it would be done by load capacity.

"And everyone was bought in, the retreaders and the manufacturers, and that's an example of what happens when an industry comes together, because we got that through Congress very quickly," he said.

"That was a very exciting thing to be able to pull that together and have it go full circle in 18 years."

With TIA, he helped settle early internal tensions, stabilize the budget, create a more cohesive overall strategy and grow membership more than sixfold.

"We didn't let the training get away with the membership. … We tried to make programs you had to be a member to utilize, workers comp program, garage keepers liability program, etc."

The organization has trained 200,000 technicians since the program began in the late 1990s, he said.

"In the tire industry, independents are independent. Several of them will sell several brands, and I think that brings our industry closer. I think there is more respect back and forth because of that relationship. The manufacturers recognize the need for training and to support training, greatly."

Honest people

Mr. Littlefield said he thinks membership will continue to grow as TIA attracts larger retailers, but the organization's focus always will be "one-on-one with small retailers."

"The combination is going to bring in a lot of members and gives us a lot of clout," Mr. Littlefield said. "When you can break it down by congressional district and you can go into a congressman's office — we have people in all 435 districts now — that makes a difference."

In modern politics, frustration has grown as PACs and super PACs have created a "pay to play" scenario, he said.

"A group like TIA overcomes that because the members are so believable — honest, small businessmen who work hard are very believable.

"When I testify, I never testify alone. I'm not the expert in the industry, the dealers are. My expertise is to understand the system and to input their expertise at the right time."

He said because of the competitive nature of Washington politics, if your group doesn't speak up, "You'll probably get hit, because it's just the easiest thing to do."

He said the exhilaration for him has always been passing the bill with the dealers.

"We're working toward more unity in the (tire) industry and better relations with people, and I think the industry is hopefully going to continue to be profitable on all levels and it's just going to keep getting better."

In retirement, Mr. Littlefield said he's going to "enjoy life" and his family. He hopes to remain involved with TIA in some capacity on the political side. He's going to continue teaching at Catholic University, and he may even write another book.

"It will be hard to step away, because I care so much about the organization and about the people in it," he said. "You work really hard to make it better and build it up and give (members) what they deserve and expect.

"Whenever you invest in anything, I think it is hard to walk away from it."