Noah Dietrich

Noah Dietrich (February 28, 1889 – February 15, 1982) was the chief executive officer of the Howard Hughes business empire from 1925 to 1957.According to his own memoirs, he left the Hughes operation over a dispute involving putting more of his income on a capital gains basis. The manuscript of his eventual memoir, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, may have been a key, if inadvertent, source of novelist Clifford Irving's infamous fake autobiography of Hughes.

Dietrich was born on February 28, 1889 in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Lutheran minister John Dietrich, and the former Sarah Peters. Trained as an accountant, in 1910 he started in business in Maxwell, New Mexico, and later moved to Los Angeles and New York City before moving back to Los Angeles. There he passed the Certified Public Accountant exam.

In 1925, at the age of 36, Dietrich met 19-year-old Hughes, who had just wrested majority ownership of Hughes Tool Company from other family heirs. Started by his father, Howard R. Hughes, Sr., Hughes Tool Company – or Toolco, as it was known inside the Hughes empire – manufactured oil drilling equipment, especially the multiple-edge, revolving-teeth roller cutter drill bits the elder Hughes invented.

Dietrich began by running the tool company for Hughes, allowing him to pursue his interests in the film and aircraft businesses. In his memoir, Dietrich observed that Hughes had little interest in Toolco beyond its being a source of wealth and investment. "The tool company," he quoted Hughes as saying, "was my father's success. And it always will be."

In time, Dietrich came to serve as an executive for most of Hughes' enterprises, including Trans World Airlines (TWA), RKO Pictures and Hughes Aircraft.

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