Rude, Arthur Harry

American manager. Vice-President of Aerojet, 1944-1966.

Arthur H Rude, the son of a Norwegian house painter, was raised in Douglas, Wisconsin. He started out in Douglas as a clerk in a coal office, but by 1920 had his own tire dealership in Los Angeles. By 1930 he had moved to Beverly Hills and was the owner of the Los Angeles General Tire dealership, the largest west of Chicago. By age 54 he had made a lot of money and was contemplating early retirement when Dan Kimball called from Washington. General Tire had just acquired Aerojet, a new rocket ship company, and put him in charge of it. Aerojet Kimball persuaded Rude to be his executive vice president. This was such an outlandish, Buck Rogers kind of idea in 1944 that Rude agreed to join Kimball for a lark. Instead, the team ran Aerojet for 45 years, through its period of most explosive growth to the apex of its success. Rude kept in touch with goings-on at the company, continuing to provide business advice, until his death at the age of 92.