Word: swirbul
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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...
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...
...with less than 20 officers and employes. President and chairman was Leroy R. Grumman, who had engineering degrees from Cornell and M.I.T., experience in naval aviation (he enlisted as a machinist's mate, second class, resigned as a lieutenant), and a wealth of aeronautical ideas. Leon A. ("Jake") Swirbul, the vice president and general manager, was also a Cornell man, a onetime Marine passionately interested in Army fighting planes-a man who couldn't work with his coat on. W. T. ("Bill") Schwendler, chief engineer, turned out to be one of the crack aeronautical engineers of the period...
...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...