Cooper Hewitt says...
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1898, John Gordon Rideout entered the University of Washington as an architecture student only to have his tenure interrupted by World War I. He served in the United States Navy in 1917, and after the war worked as a graphic designer in Chicago; he co-founded the Chicago Society of Typographic Artists.
In 1931, he relocated to Toledo, Ohio to open an industrial design firm with fellow designer Harold Van Doren. The pair's clients included the Toledo Scale Company, Air King Products, Wagner Manufacturing Company and American National Company. Four years later, in 1935, Rideout broke away from Van Doren and founded his own firm, John Gordon Rideout and Staff, in Cleveland, Ohio; the reason for the move was primarily to be closer to his fiancée (and later wife), Alice Chalifoux. In 1941, Rideout closed his office only to reopen two years later in Chagrin Falls, Ohio; in 1944, he hired architect Ernst Payer to marry industrial design and architecture at his firm. That same year, Rideout was one of the fifteen co-founders of the Society of Industrial Designers.
