Jake Swirbul
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Leon A. "Jake" "The Bullfrog" Swirbul (March 18, 1898 – June 28, 1960), was an aviation pioneer and co-founder of Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation.
He was born in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. His family moved to Long Island when he was a child. He grew up in Sag Harbor and graduated from Pierson High School. He attended Cornell University until 1917 when he left school to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Jake Swirbul and Leroy Grumman met in 1924 at Loening Aeronautical Engineering Co. in New York City, one of the many small aircraft firms that sprang up after World War I. When the firm's Manhattan factory was closed after its sale to Keystone Aircraft in 1929, Swirbul and Grumman decided to form their own company. Grumman mortgaged his house to contribute $16,875, and Swirbul contributed $8,125. Two other Loening employees, Bill Schwendler and Ed Poor, contributed a little and former Wall Street banker E. Clinton Towl made up the fifth employee of Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, formed January 2, 1930.
Swirbul's unique, personable and intimate management style is credited as being the perfect complement to Grumman's engineering skill. The two men formed a close business partnership that fostered growth, managing to keep the company alive during the Great Depression. As World War II approached, Swirbul's contacts in the US Navy kept Grumman's production lines running, and his scalable management style is credited with Grumman's ability to ramp up production faster than any other company when war broke out and to maintain higher profit margins than any other aircraft company throughout the war. In 1944, the Navy asked Grumman to slow production to 500 airplanes a month even though Swirbul said he could build 700 a month. In March, 1945, Grumman built a record 664 aircraft. When peace broke out, Swirbul effectively scaled down Grumman's operations so quickly that the company was the only American aviation company to post a profit in 1946.
Jake Swirbul died of pneumonia while ill with colon cancer on June 28, 1960 shortly after Grumman began work on the Gemini program and one month after the roll-out ceremony for the A-6 Intruder. His funeral was attended by thousands of Grumman employees - a testament of how well he was loved at the company.
The Swirbul Library at Adelphi University is named in his honor
As a young man, Swirbul was a great athlete. He played basketball with a passion and talent, especially. He was a very modest man and rarely spoke about himself. After he and Grumman had met, and were beginning their business, Swirbul found a location for it to flourish. Towl traveled to Baldwin to look over the headquarters that Swirbul had found. It was a small building that was very close to the Long Island Rail Road tracks. Earlier, it had been an aircraft factory, so the men knew it would be a perfect location. At that time, it was an abandoned auto showroom. Their hope was to design and manufacture planes that could be used to help the U.S. soldiers, but they had chosen to invest in such a company at a very rough point in time. Money was tight, and it even got to the point where Swirbul and Grumman had to pick up scrap metal from the side of the road. He created a style of managing his business that was successful in creating a smoothly running corporation. His style was very easy to admire, but hard for others to try to copy, because he was an organizing genius. He told customers and workers that his doors were always open.
"He always had his desk where he could see through the door," his wife, Estelle, said in 1971. "He always said it was the hardest thing in the world for a man to go in and see the boss -- that they would get right to the door and then turn around. So when Jake saw a man walking up and down, he would say, `Want to see me?'"
