Miami’s tire king kept us rolling for decades. Norton Pallot has died at 101
Norton Pallot was the namesake for one of the country’s largest independent tire retailers, a company founded in Miami on First Avenue and Flagler Street as a gas station-tire store in 1924. Soon, Norton Tire outfitted most of the 20,000 cars that roamed the young city’s streets by the early 1930s.
As Miami grew and the U.S. emerged from World War II, Norton’s tires kept cars, trucks, farm equipment, boat trailer tires and even private and commercial aircraft tires rolling.
Pallot, born Nov. 3, 1924, died at 101 on April 7 at his Coral Gables home, his daughter Laurie Pallot Appignani told the Miami Herald.
The family-owned Norton’s flagship Liberty City location became an emblem of American entrepreneurship and community building. A second Norton’s Tire outpost at 15th Street and Alton Road across the causeway in Miami Beach was one of the first local businesses to add a car rental service. Tourists visiting the city that entertainer Jackie Gleason coined in the 1960s, “The sun and fun capital of the world,” rolled around on Norton tires.
When the Liberty City location was engulfed during the McDuffie riots on May 17, 1980, toxic flames were visible on both sides of the Miami mainland for six days. Norton’s torching became the “epochal pyre” image seen by millions worldwide on TV news broadcasts. The primary store eventually relocated to what is now the Doral area in the early 1980s.
That’s the Miami brand, the institution, Pallot led for decades.
How Norton’s got its name
Norton Samuel Pallot, born in New Haven, Connecticut, so that his grandmother could help his mom after his birth, was three months old when his family had returned to Miami and the first Norton location opened in Miami in 1924.
“His life reflects the story of Miami itself: resilience, growth, family, and the American dream,” said Pallot Appignani. “He was not just about business. He was also passionate about giving and community civic engagement. He led the way creating the ‘city beautiful.’ ... instrumental in planting trees along Miami highways.”
The company that carried Pallot’s first name grew to about 40 outlets nationwide, with more than 400 employees and sales of $50 million by 1985. In 1986, the family sold Norton Tire to Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.
“It’s been a team of us running the company for many years,” Norton, then 62, told the Miami Herald at the time of the sale. “Of course, there’s a little sadness, but on the whole, the results for Norton and the public will be very positive.”
The three family members stayed on to run Norton as a subsidiary of Goodyear for about 12 years until Goodyear began consolidating its acquisitions by 1998.
Pallot, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer during its 1986 sale, worked alongside his younger brother Ronald who served as Norton Tire’s president. Brother-in-law Howard Katzen was Norton Tire’s senior vice president. Katzen was 82 when he died at his Coral Gables home in 2017.
READ MORE: The family businessman who helped grow Norton Tire into a national symbol
“The Norton Store, named after my oldest brother, did well with all the new highways going south and people following the sun,” Katzen’s wife and Norton’s sister Barbara Pallot Katzen, wrote in a column published in the Miami Herald in 2011.
So how did a 3-month-old baby come to be the namesake of a legacy company in Miami?
Credit his father, Louis Pallot.
When Pallot opened that first gas station-tire store on Flagler in 1924, he named it after his first-born son, Norton. The growing family, which included wife Gertrude, son Ronald and daughter Barbara, lived near the store, along the Miami River. Norton Tire survived its first major challenge: the 1926 hurricane.
By the mid-1930s, at 11, Norton Pallot pumped gas and wiped windshields at the family gas station. That training — not unlike the kind of traditional first jobs peers his age would work for decades to come in the full-service gas station business of a bygone era — led to his full immersion in the family business.
But not before several major life events intruded.
World War II
Pallot went to Miami Senior High School. During his first year at the University of Florida, after the Allied force’s D-Day invasion of Normandy in late 1944, he was drafted to serve in World War II after the Battle of the Bulge.
By January 1945, Pallot was on board an army transport ship to Normandy and soon after was transported to the German front lines.
“His regiment shipped out in open trucks during the coldest year in Europe’s history. Norton vividly recalled how cold it was especially in the open trucks and nights sleeping on the ground in his pup tent,” his daughter, Pallot Appignani, wrote in the family obituary.
“As a tech sergeant, without the help of computers or calculators, he did artillery calculations in his head, computing firing directions and the amount of ammo needed based on feedback from frontline observers radio messages,” she wrote.
Pallot was a self-taught bugler and played taps for soldiers who died in battle from his, and other, units.
He was about to be deployed to Japan when WWII officially ended in September 1945.
“My father never complained. He was always focused on everyone else’s happiness. The closest he ever came to complaining was when he would smile and say, ‘Getting old is not for sissies,’” said Pallot Appignani.
Pallot finished college at the University of Miami and joined his father’s Norton Tire Company.
A Norton-UM football partnership
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In the early 1980s, Pallot renewed his UM ties by hiring head football coach Howard Schnellenberger to serve as Norton’s spokesman and pitchman on TV commercials.
The partnership was a roaring success. Pallot told the Herald that Norton profits went up 30% after the Hurricanes clinched the national championship with a 31-30 Orange Bowl victory over Nebraska in January 1984. He attributed some of that success to Schnellenberger. But the partnership went flat when the coach left UM with three years remaining on his contract. Angry college football fans cussed out life-sized Schnellenberger posters inside Norton’s stores.
“People can’t get to Howard personally,” a Norton spokesman told the Herald in 1984. “That’s not a situation we wanted.”
Norton signed Schnellenberger’s successor Jimmy Johnson to a five-year contract to resume television commercials that summer. The new coach was all in, joking that if his university-provided car didn’t roll on Norton tires he “might go out and get a lug wrench if they aren’t.”
A booming automotive industry
The post-war period fueled a boom in the tire industry, prompting the company’s growth from the Miami and Miami Beach stores to the addition of the 75,000-square-foot warehouse location in Liberty City on the southwest corner of 54th Street and Northwest 27th Avenue in 1955.
As more highways popped up in surrounding neighborhoods and through the state, promoting travel, Norton Tire Company thrived, adding locations across Florida, as well as building a wholesale national and international business.
In 1972, his father Louis, the company founder, died. His mother Gertrude, named chairman after her husband’s death, died in 1982, a year after she retired.
Norton Pallot, using those quick mathematical calculations he’d learned during the war, ran Norton Tire with his family members while serving as vice president of Biscayne Federal Savings. He also was on the board of directors for Dade National Bank.
Among Pallot’s charitable and civic roles, he was president of the Miami-Dade Better Business Bureau and the local chamber of commerce. He was honored by the Jewish Federation with its President’s Leadership Community Service Award.
“What made my father so special was not only what he built, but how he lived. He was strong, warm, curious, funny, deeply loving, and full of integrity. He never looked for attention or accolades, but they followed him anyway,” said his daughter.
Pallot also loved world travel, playing tennis and golf, skiing, fishing and hunting, alongside his family.
Miami burns
Then, in May 1980, the Liberty City Norton Tire Co. location was burned to the ground during the McDuffie riots. The entire city block-sized Norton Tire warehouse was leveled, save a massive, fireproof computer vault that kept the company’s business records intact.
Pallot revisited the scarred site 35 years later in 2015. Then 90, he said that a friend from Uruguay had called him in 1980 to tell him he’d seen his building burning on the news.
“They just let the thing burn itself out. It looked as if the whole community was on fire,” historian Marvin Dunn told the Herald at the time of that 2015 visit. “That was the image that flashed around the world, the Norton Tire company burning.”
Pallot moved the family business to Doral a few years after the destruction. The land sat empty for decades. Portions nearby now include apartments and businesses. There’s been talk of opening a Presidente Supermarket on that land for years.
In 2005, a quarter-century after the conflagration that defined an era of Miami, claiming 18 lives and destroying $100 million in property, Pallot reflected in a Miami Herald profile.
Four white police officers had beaten Black, handcuffed insurance agent Arthur McDuffie, 33, to death with their flashlights near the intersection of North Miami Avenue and 38th Street in December 1979.
“I’ve become more understanding why Blacks went through that period of rage. They were discriminated against,” Pallot said in 2005. “The tone of many whites was to create pain and despair by the way they acted.
“We have people from all over the world, especially Latinos here. We have to find a way to live together. I believe that during the educational process, that Blacks, whites and Latinos will get together,” Pallot said at the time.
“In my view, his greatest impact on Miami was that he was part of the generation that helped build it,” said his daughter, Pallot Appignani. “He did not just do business here. He helped shape its entrepreneurial spirit, its civic fabric, and its sense of possibility.”
Survivors and services
Pallot’s survivors include his wife of more than 75 years, Gloria Mantell Pallot; children Steven Pallot, Laurie Pallot Appignani and John Pallot; his brother Ronald Pallot and sister Barbara Pallot Katzen; and four grandchildren.
Services were held.
This story was originally published April 15, 2026 at 7:08 AM.
