A mortgage and a garage in Baldwin

In 1929 Keystone bought the Loening aircraft company and announced it was leaving Long Island for Pennsylvania. Its general manager, a quiet Cornell engineer named Leroy Grumman, refused to go. He mortgaged his house for $16,950, his colleague Jake Swirbul’s mother borrowed $6,000 from her employers, and with William Schwendler, Ed Poor and Clint Towl they registered a company on 6 December 1929. On 2 January 1930 they moved into an abandoned car showroom in Baldwin that had once been the Cox-Klemin aircraft works. There were 18 people on the payroll. The first jobs were repairing Loening amphibians and welding aluminium truck bodies. The president and vice-president spent day one on their knees, sorting nuts and bolts.

The educated hunch

Grumman was almost not a pilot at all. A Navy medical board wrongly diagnosed him with flat feet; a clerical error then sent him to an MIT course for pilot trainees, and he kept quiet and earned his wings in 1918. That luck shaped the company. Grumman patented a retractable landing gear in 1932, and the Navy’s first Grumman fighter, the FF-1, carried his splayed wheels into its fuselage. Colleagues called him a master of the educated hunch. He found the pivot for the Sto-Wing, the folding wing that let carriers pack in far more fighters, by sticking paper clips into a soap eraser.

The Cats go to war

Then came the war, and the Cats. The F4F Wildcat held the line over the Pacific in 1942 while its successor was rushed into being: the F6F Hellcat first flew on 26 June 1942 and 12,275 were built in just over three years. Hellcats were credited with 5,163 kills in the Pacific, 56 per cent of all US Navy and Marine air victories, at a recorded cost of 270 Hellcats in air combat — a ratio of 19 to 1. The TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, 9,839 built, carried among its pilots a 20-year-old future president, George H. W. Bush. Demand was so great that General Motors set up its Eastern Aircraft Division to build three-quarters of all Wildcats and Avengers.

The Grumman Iron Works

Grumman had once insisted the firm should never grow beyond 250 people or it would lose control; his accountant had to tell him the payroll had already reached 256. By 1943 it employed 25,500. The rugged aircraft that poured out of Bethpage earned the company its nickname, the Grumman Iron Works, and the founders kept an odd discipline: Grumman and Swirbul shared one office and vowed never to leave it with a disagreement unresolved. In the summer of 1944 the shy founder borrowed a front-line Hellcat for a half-hour joyride; the test pilots fined him a dollar for landing with flaps down, and he paid five.

The craft that landed on the Moon

After the war Grumman stayed on the carriers with the Panther and Cougar jets, the S-2 Tracker and the Albatross amphibian, and branched out with the Ag Cat crop-duster and the Gulfstream I, a purpose-built business turboprop. Its greatest prize came on 7 November 1962: the contract for the Apollo Lunar Module. On 20 July 1969 the Long Island-built Eagle landed on the Moon. Six lunar modules touched down in all, and a seventh, Aquarius, kept the Apollo 13 crew alive after an explosion crippled their spacecraft. The company renamed itself Grumman Aerospace that year, and lost the Space Shuttle contract to Rockwell.

Tomcat, Hawkeye and the last fight

The 1960s and 1970s brought the A-6 Intruder, the E-2 Hawkeye radar picket, the EA-6B Prowler and the F-14 Tomcat, first flown on 21 December 1970 and made a film star by Top Gun. In 1981 the company fought off a hostile bid from LTV, with its own pension fund buying shares in a defence later tested in the courts. At its 1986 peak Grumman employed 23,000 people on Long Island. The end of the Cold War finished it: in 1994 Northrop paid $2.1 billion, topping a $1.9 billion offer from Martin Marietta, to create Northrop Grumman. Bethpage closed, and the Calverton hangars became film studios. The Hawkeye is still built today.

Fábricas

• Baldwin garage · Baldwin, Long Island — Former Cox-Klemin works, first home from January 1930
• Valley Stream and Farmingdale · Long Island, New York — Successive homes in 1931 and 1932
• Bethpage · Bethpage, New York — Headquarters and main plant from 1937 on land leased from the US Navy; later converted to offices and housing
• Calverton · Calverton, New York — Testing and final assembly at the 6,000-acre Naval Weapons Station; now Grumman Studios and an industrial park

Gente

• Leroy Randle Grumman · co-founder, president 1939–1947, chairman 1947–1966 — 1895–1982; Naval Aviator No. 1216
• Leon “Jake” Swirbul · co-founder, president 1947–1960
• William Schwendler · co-founder, engineer
• Edmund Ward Poor · co-founder, former Loening business manager
• E. Clinton Towl · co-founder; president 1960–1967, chairman 1966–1976
• Joseph G. Gavin Jr. · president 1976–1985
• John Cocks Bierwirth · chairman 1976–1988 — Led the defence against LTV’s 1981 bid

Récords y primicias

• Hellcat: credited with 5,163 Pacific kills, 56 per cent of US Navy and Marine air victories of WWII
• Prime contractor for the first crewed spacecraft to land on the Moon, Apollo 11, 1969
• Largest corporate employer on Long Island for much of the Cold War
• X-29: forward-swept-wing technology demonstrator, first flight 1984