Raymond C. Firestone, a former chairman and chief executive of his family's tire company and a philanthropist, died on Friday in the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland. He was 86 and had houses in Bath Township outside Akron, Ohio, and in Southern Pines, N.C.

The cause was heart failure, said Bob Troyer, a spokesman for the Firestone family.

Mr. Firestone was a son of Harvey S. Firestone, who founded the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in 1900. Raymond Firestone went to work for the company in 1933 and was its president from 1957 to 1964, its chief executive from 1963 to 1973, its chairman from 1966 to 1976 and a longtime member of its board.

In the years from 1963 to 1976, while he headed Firestone, the company's annual sales increased to $3.9 billion from $1.4 billion, Mr. Troyer said. He was the last of Harvey Firestone's five sons to serve in the active management of the company, which in 1988 was bought by the Bridgestone Corporation.

Over the years, the beneficiaries of Mr. Firestone's philanthropic largess included Princeton University, which he attended, its Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library and other educational, civic and charitable institutions and organizations in Ohio and elsewhere.

Raymond Christy Firestone was born in Akron and graduated from Princeton, where he was the captain of the polo team, in 1933. He started at the family company in a Los Angeles sales office. He was promoted to district store supervisor in Los Angeles in 1934 and rose through the company's executive ranks, with time out for World War II service as a pilot in the Air Transport Command from 1942 to 1944.

He then returned to the company, which had operations important to the war effort. He went on to become an executive vice president from 1954 to 1957.

He married Laura An Lisk in 1934; she died in 1960.

Mr. Firestone is survived by his wife of 32 years, the former Jane Allen Messler; two daughters, Christy An Gordon-Creed and Judith An Thiel, both of Camden, S.C.; a stepdaughter, Eleanor Hunter of Pittsford, N.Y.; four grandchildren; two step-grandchildren, and a brother, Leonard K., of Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Raymond C Firestone