Background
Goodyear was born on June 20, 1877, in Buffalo, New York, the son of Charles Waterhouse Goodyear and Ella Conger. The family was wealthy and socially prominent.
(Additional Contributing Authors Include Stuart Davis, Jon...)
Additional Contributing Authors Include Stuart Davis, Jonas Lie, Eugene Speicher And Others.
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Businessman manufacturer philanthropist author
Goodyear was born on June 20, 1877, in Buffalo, New York, the son of Charles Waterhouse Goodyear and Ella Conger. The family was wealthy and socially prominent.
Goodyear was educated at the Nichols School in Buffalo. He graduated from Yale University in 1899.
After graduating from Yale, Goodyear returned to Buffalo to join his father and uncle, who were lumber manufacturers. The business expanded over the years to include related industries - railroads to transport the logs and companies to process the by-products of lumber mills - and Goodyear assumed an active role in almost all its phases. He became a vice-president of the Goodyear Lumber Company in 1907 and president of both the Norwich and Goodyear Lumber Companies when his father died in 1911. In 1920 he assumed the presidency of one of the country's largest lumber enterprises, the Great Southern Lumber Company, which operated from Bogalusa, Louisiana, until 1938, when the depletion of its lumber supply forced the company to close. Subsidiaries of the Great Southern Lumber Company, which Goodyear headed, included the Bogalusa Turpentine Company and the Bogalusa Paper Company. The two companies merged in 1937 to become the Gaylord Container Corporation. Goodyear was chairman of the board until 1952, when Gaylord Container merged with the Crown Zellerbach Corporation. From 1907 to 1910, Goodyear served as vice-president of the Buffalo and Susquehanna Railroad, which serviced the Goodyear Lumber Company. From 1920 to 1930 he was president of the New Orleans Great Northern Railroad Company, which he organized to bring logs to New Orleans from the hundreds of acres that the Great Southern Lumber Company controlled in Louisiana and Mississippi. In 1930 he merged this line with Gulf, Mobile, and Northern, in which he also had considerable holdings; and this became the Gulf, Mobile, and Ohio Railroad, which ran from Chicago to New Orleans. Goodyear served as chairman of the board from 1940 to 1951 and as chairman of its executive committee from 1931 until his death. From 1928 through 1930 Goodyear's Bogalusa concern also flirted with the idea of transporting logs from the West Coast to be processed at the Great Southern Lumber Company, and he became president of a fleet of ships known as the Redwood Line. When nothing came of the idea he merged Redwood with Swayne and Hoyt, and was chairman of the board from 1930 until the fleet ceased operating in 1942. In 1912 Goodyear succeeded his father as a director of the Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts. He changed the academy from a collection of academic works to one of the nation's premier modern-art museums. He founded the Fellows for Life Fund in 1926, contributions from which helped the gallery acquire many works. Goodyear divorced in 1942 and left Buffalo for New York City. Goodyear emerged as the president of the nascent Museum of Modern Art. He served as its active and opinionated president until 1939. He remained on its board of directors and acquisitions committee, but his commitment to the museum weakened progressively as his taste became increasingly conservative. In 1931 he believed that the museum's collection should have the fluidity of a river; in 1952 he left the acquisitions committee because it approved the purchase of a Mark Rothko painting. He remained a trustee of the museum, however, until his death. After Goodyear died in Old Westbury, New York, on April 24, 1964, the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art expected that most of his collection would be bequeathed to the museum. They were bitterly disappointed. The bulk (more than 300 items) went to the Buffalo Museum of Fine Arts. Buffalo was eventually forced to buy back many of the masterpieces that Goodyear had donated.
(Additional Contributing Authors Include Stuart Davis, Jon...)
President of the Great Southern Lumber Company (1920-1938); President of the Museum of Modern Art (1929-1939)
Goodyear was a surprising man. Solid in appearance, with a perpetual iron-gray crew cut, he had a bulldog set to his jaw that only hinted at a neurotic temper that plagued him all his life. He was a military man - a colonel in the army in World War I, and a brigadier general in the National Guard during World War II. He preferred to be addressed as "General. " But he had a brilliant eye for art, fine furniture, and silver, and this connoisseurship marked him as unique in his time and lifted him above even his substantial success in business.
Goodyear was particularly interested in sculpture, and exhibitions of Aristide Maillol, Rodin, Epstein, Charles Despiau, Gaston Lachaise, and Isamu Noguchi, among others, were brought to Buffalo under his leadership.
Goodyear's own collection, a brilliant assemblage of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art, included paintings by Giacoma Balla, Cézanne, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Salvador Dali, Honoré Daumier, Degas, André Derain, Gauguin, John, Walt Kuhn, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger, Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, Camille Pissarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh; and sculptures by Alexander Calder, Degas, Despiau, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Epstein, Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Maillol, and Noguchi.
On June 29, 1904, Goodyear married Mary Martha Forman (1879-1973). Before they divorced in 1942, the couple had four children. In 1950, he married Zaidee C. Bliss (née Cobb) (1881-1966).