Grumman

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 6th of December 1929, four engineers registered a new company in an old factory on Long Island, New York, that had belonged to the Cox-Klemin Aircraft Company. Leroy Grumman and three colleagues from a firm that had just been absorbed by a larger corporation had decided to start over on their own terms. They welded aluminum tubing for truck frames to keep the lights on. Within a few years, they were supplying the United States Navy with aircraft that would shape the outcome of a world war.

  Grumman became a name synonymous with toughness. Workers on Long Island called it the Iron Works, a nickname earned not by marketing but by the machines they built. The company ranked 22nd among all American corporations for the value of wartime production contracts. It put humans on the Moon. It shaped the skies over carriers in every major naval conflict from World War II through the Cold War.

  This is the story of how a small start-up born in a borrowed factory became one of the most consequential aerospace companies in American history, and how the place it left behind on Long Island still carries traces of its extraordinary reach.

• 2. Built on Long Island

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  Leroy Grumman had started working for the Loening Aircraft Engineering Corporation in 1920. When Keystone Aircraft Corporation bought Loening and moved it from New York City to Bristol, Pennsylvania, Grumman and three colleagues chose a different path. Edmund Ward Poor, William Schwendler, and Jake Swirbul joined him in taking over the vacant Cox-Klemin factory in Baldwin, on Long Island.

  The company officially opened on the 2nd of January 1930, just weeks after the registration date. Early survival depended on welding aluminum tubing for truck frames while the founders pursued the Navy contracts they actually wanted. The first breakthrough came when Grumman designed retractable floats with landing gear for the Navy, a practical innovation that pulled the company into the aviation market.

  The first Grumman aircraft, the FF-1 biplane with retractable landing gear, was developed at Curtiss Field in 1931. It was a Navy plane, and it set a pattern that would define the company for decades. As the work grew, the company relocated through a succession of Long Island addresses: Valley Stream, then Farmingdale, and finally Bethpage, where it would eventually occupy six million square feet across 105 acres leased from the U.S. Navy. Testing and final assembly moved to the Naval Weapons Station in Calverton, a facility spread across 6,000 acres. At peak employment in 1986-23,000 people on Long Island worked for Grumman.

• 3. The Cats of World War II

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  During World War II, Grumman earned its most enduring nickname through a series of fighter aircraft that all shared a feline identity. The F4F Wildcat and the F6F Hellcat anchored carrier air power in the Pacific. The F7F Tigercat and the F8F Bearcat rounded out the family. Alongside the fighters flew the TBF Avenger, a torpedo bomber that became one of the most widely produced carrier aircraft of the war.

  The production numbers tell a striking story. The F6F Hellcat alone accounted for 12,275 aircraft. The TBF Avenger reached 2,290 built, and the F4F Wildcat came to 2,605. The scale of that output required the kind of industrial partnership that was unusual even by wartime standards. Production of the majority of the Wildcats and the Avenger was handed off to the Eastern Aircraft Division, a branch set up specifically for the purpose within General Motors.

  Grumman's ranking 22nd among American corporations in wartime production contracts placed it firmly in the top tier of the national defense effort. The reputation for rugged reliability that the company built through the war years would follow it into the jet age and beyond. The F9F Panther, Grumman's first jet aircraft, had its first flight in 1947, and the upgraded F9F-6 Cougar followed in 1951, carrying the toughness of the wartime planes into a new era of flight.

• 4. Putting Humans on the Moon

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  On the 7th of November 1962, Grumman received the contract to build the Apollo Lunar Module, the vehicle that would carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon. It was the first spacecraft ever designed to land humans on another world, and Grumman built 13 of them.

  Six lunar modules landed successfully on the Moon. A seventh served a purpose no one had planned for: when an explosion crippled the main Apollo 13 spacecraft, the lunar module became a lifeboat that carried the crew safely back to Earth. A test article designated LM-2, which never flew in space, is now on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution.

  As the Apollo program wound down, Grumman competed for the next great prize in American spaceflight. The company was one of the main contenders for the contract to design and build the Space Shuttle. That contract went to Rockwell International instead. The loss closed one chapter of Grumman's space work, but the lunar module remained the high-water mark of the company's engineering legacy.

• 5. Cold War Skies

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  The 1960s brought two aircraft that defined Grumman's postwar identity. The A-6 Intruder, which first flew in 1960, was a twin-jet attack aircraft built to strike targets in any weather. That same year saw the first flight of the E-2 Hawkeye, a twin-turboprop aircraft that provided airborne early warning and became a fixture on carrier flight decks. The U.S. Navy still flies the Hawkeye aboard carrier air wings.

  The 1970s added the EA-6B Prowler, an electronic warfare variant built on the Intruder airframe, and the F-14 Tomcat, which first flew in 1970. The Tomcat became the signature fleet-defense fighter of the late Cold War era, and Grumman built 712 of them. The aircraft appeared in feature films including Top Gun in 1986 and Flight of the Intruder in 1990, giving it a cultural presence that outlasted its service life. The U.S. Marine Corps, the last branch to operate the Prowler, retired it on the 8th of March 2019.

  Beyond its combat aircraft, Grumman produced the experimental X-29 in 1984, an aircraft that flew with forward-swept wings. Only two were built, but the design pushed the boundaries of aerodynamic research. That spirit of experiment had been present since the company's earliest days in Baldwin, and it persisted through the Cold War's final years.

• 6. Beyond Aircraft

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  In 1944, as World War II neared its end, company executive William Hoffman turned Grumman's aluminum expertise toward a different product. Using the same material the company shaped into fighter wings, he developed a canoe that was lighter, stronger, and more durable than traditional wood-hulled designs. Grumman moved its boat-making operation to Marathon, New York in 1952, and the canoes built a substantial market share.

  Grumman also moved into business aviation, beginning production of Gulfstream aircraft in the 1950s. The Gulfstream I turboprop, model G-159, carried 200 examples into the air. The Gulfstream I-C version was stretched to seat 37 passengers, and several regional airlines used it for scheduled service. The Gulfstream II jet followed, with 256 built. In 1978, Grumman sold the Gulfstream line to American Jet Industries; through subsequent ownership changes, Gulfstream became a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics in 1999.

  The Grumman Long Life Vehicle, a mail truck built for the United States Postal Service, entered production in 1986 and ran through 1994. It was designed for a 24-year service life, later extended to 30 years, and a large portion remain in postal service operation today. The company also entered the fire apparatus business in 1976 by purchasing Howe Fire Apparatus, manufacturing fire engines under the Firecat name and aerial tower trucks under the Aerialcat name.

• 7. Merger and Aftermath

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  The end of the Cold War changed the economics of American defense manufacturing faster than most companies could absorb. Defense spending fell, aerospace firms consolidated, and the landscape that had sustained Grumman for six decades began to shift. In 1994, Northrop Corporation bought Grumman for $2.1 billion, topping a competing offer of $1.9 billion from Martin Marietta to form Northrop Grumman.

  The merger effectively ended Grumman's presence on Long Island. Northrop Grumman closed nearly all of the facilities there. The Bethpage plant was converted into a residential and office complex, with what had been company headquarters becoming the corporate home of Cablevision. The Calverton plant became a business and industrial complex, and former aircraft hangars were repurposed as Grumman Studios, a film and television production center.

  The canoe line found a separate future. Outboard Marine Corp. bought the boat division in 1990, producing the last Grumman-brand canoe in 1996. Former Grumman executives then formed the Marathon Boat Group to continue making the canoes, and in 2000 the group reached an agreement with Northrop Grumman to sell them under the original Grumman name and logo. In Calverton, a portion of the old airport property was set aside as Grumman Memorial Park, a permanent acknowledgment of everything the company had built.