Word: jakes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...office is small, with brown linoleum on the floor. Small as the office is, President Grumman shares it with a balding onetime professional basketball player named Leon A. ("Jake") Swirbul, 45, Grumman's executive vice president and production boss. Like Grumman, Jake Swirbul grew up in a small town (Sag Harbor, L.I. - pop. 2,517), also attended Cornell, but left to enlist in the Marines in World War I. Swirbul is big, hard-muscled and walks with the quick steps of a prizefighter. He is talkative, exact (Grumman is vague), with a passion for planning production to the last...
...Team Plays. Roy & Jake have a big job on their hands. The Bethpage plant sprawls over 200 acres employs 21,000 workers. Its five red brick buildings turn out more combat planes than any other single plant...
...Jake work in an offhand manner that once shocked but now delights the Navy. They scoff at the ordinary appurtenances of big business and like to call themselves "the embattled farmers." Roy & Jake have one secretary in common, and she sits down the hall. They seldom dictate letters; when Roy decides that a letter must be written, he painstakingly writes it out in longhand, sometimes puts in a whole day on a draft...
...gregarious Grumman atmosphere workers constantly walk in, to buttonhole Roy or Jake directly, arguing, complaining, or whatever. Says Swirbul: "They don't have to talk to a lot of monkeys along the line." When the office becomes too cluttered with workers, Jake moves into an office next door, where he and Roy also have desks side by side, and 160 model planes dangle from the ceiling...
...alone 5000 feet in the air, lots of things about a plane become important that you can overlook on the ground." The details of design are left to young William T. ("Bill") Schwendler, 40, who bosses the company's 500 engineers. Bill Schwendler sits down with Roy & Jake when a new design is gestating, and they 11 mull it over. He has a sixth sense as to what Roy wants. Thus, to get a prototype of the newest Grumman plane, Roy simply wrote out a memo describing what he wanted, and sent it over to Bill Schwendler...