Word: swirbul
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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...
...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...
...Technology for training in aeronautics. When he was discharged, he was expert enough to get the job of general manager of the Loening Aeronautical Engineering Corp. at $4,200 a year. In 1929, the flurry of plane company mergers made Grumman's job a poor one. Jake Swirbul, who was works manager at Loening, and Bill Schwendler, just getting started as a designer, were in the same boat. The trio decided to start their own company to repair planes. Grumman plunked $16,875 into the new company, Swirbul $8,125, and Schwendler...
While test pilots were still wringing out the last of the bugs, Grumman Production Boss Leon A. Swirbul started to get the factory tooled. Three months after the first test flight, "Jake" Swirbul had rolled the first production model...
...their first day of business, in for repair came a flying boat so large that its nose stuck out in the street. A passing motorist crashed into it, immediately threatened suit. Grumman and Swirbul retired to the corner dog wagon, there ate hamburgers moodily, brooding on the unprofitable aspects of a business launched with a legal action. But after the second cup of coffee they decided to stick. The plaintiff dropped his suit when the partners offered to repair his car free. Next step was to saw off the amphibian's tail, repair it, reattach the amputated section...