The son of General Tire and Rubber's founder, Thomas F. O'Neil was running the company's Boston office after the end of World War II when he paid a visit to the offices of the Yankee Network, a chain of radio stations in New England that General had a partial investment in.

Following the visit, Mr. O'Neil phoned his father and said, "Dad, I like the broadcasting business better than the tire business," Mr. O'Neil's son, Shane, told the New York Times.

Encouraged by his father, Thomas O'Neil formed General Teleradio in 1948, combining stations from the Yankee Network and a fledgling Boston television station which, at the time, broadcast to just two TV sets in a local department store.

In January 1951, General Teleradio acquired the Don Lee Broadcasting System, which operated numerous West Coast stations, including KHJ, Los Angeles, and KFRC, San Francisco. In 1952, the company took over control of the Mutual Broadcasting System and New York's WOR.

With interest in television growing, Mr. O'Neil turned his attention to that medium, building motion-picture libraries for his network of stations.

While many Hollywood studios shunned him due to fears that TV would erode their industry, the eccentric entrepreneur Howard Hughes listened to Mr. O'Neil's overtures and in 1954 sold RKO Radio Pictures — an enterprise begun by RCA and vaudeville theater interests two decades earlier — to him for $25-million.

The combined companies, renamed RKO General, added additional radio and television stations across the country and, under Mr. O'Neil's direction, began selling the rights to air their motion picture properties to other independent stations. Mr. O'Neil dubbed this process "syndication."

General Tire and Rubber divested itself of its broadcasting and motion picture properties in the 1980s.

Thomas F. O'Neil, 82, the man who built the RKO General radio group and put the word "syndication" into broadcasting's lexicon, died March 14, 1998 at the age of 82 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, of pneumonia.