Grumman's reign on LI: humble start, lunar high point

Grumman Corp's success in building the spidery-looking vehicle that landed astronauts on the moon brought it worldwide acclaim, but to generations of Long Islanders, the company was as familiar as a next-door neighbor.

For decades it was a reliable employer to fathers, sons and daughters. Its blue trucks rumbled through suburban streets carrying parts, or sometimes even wings and engines, and usually before dawn. It has often been said that if Long Island was a company town, Grumman was the company.

Grumman paid for hospitals, Little League teams, hunt clubs, and sponsored drives to raise money to help the sick and injured. "Anything that had to do with the community, Grumman was first in line," said Dick Dunne of West Islip, a retired company public relations executive.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, Grumman was known for giving free turkeys to its thousands of employees at Thanksgiving.

Pearl Kamer, a regional economist for the Long Island Association, remembers her family getting some of those turkeys.

"Both my husband and my brother worked on the [lunar lander]," Kamer said. "They were both Grumman engineers. They told me about working in the 'clean room' and all of the excitement that went on."

What was then known as the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. opened for business at the beginning of the Depression, Jan. 2, 1930, in a cinderblock building in Baldwin.

The company was headed by a quiet engineer named LeRoy Grumman and some partners - Leon A. (Jake) Swirbul, Ed Poor and Clint Towl. The company had a drill press, a woodworking machine, some power drills, a few desks and chairs and a drafting table.

They started with a small Navy contract to repair floats for amphibian airplanes. But by 1931 the company had built the XFF-1 fighter, a biplane that delighted the U.S. Navy and gave Grumman an edge in the young field of naval aviation.

Eventually, Grumman became the nation's largest provider of naval aircraft. During World War II, some 40,000 people worked for the company, turning out Hellcat and Wildcat fighters to help win the war in the Pacific.

After a postwar lull, Grumman resurged in the 1950s, manufacturing Navy Cougar and Panther fighter jets. By the 1960s the company had about 30,000 employees, making it Long Island's largest employer. Its payroll would remain at about 30,000 for more than two decades, until the late 1980s, when the military buildup began to wind down.

Even so, most of the '80s proved to be stellar for Grumman. The company was building the Navy's premier fighter jet, the F-14 Tomcat, which starred in the Tom Cruise movie "Top Gun," and four other types of naval aircraft. The F-14s were built at Bethpage; final assembly and test flights were at Calverton. "That [the F-14] worked out pretty well, because it was in service" almost 30 years, said Joseph Gavin, who retired as Grumman president in 1985 and now lives in Amherst, Mass.

But in 1994, weakened by declining Pentagon contracts with the end of the Cold War and having already shed thousands of employees, Grumman sold itself to a competitor, Northrop Corp. of Los Angeles.

The company, now Northrop Grumman, is the nation's second-largest aerospace and defense company, headquartered in Los Angeles. At Bethpage, the company's work primarily consists of designing radar equipment for Navy aircraft.

With 2,000 people on the payroll here now, Northrop Grumman is small compared to the old days, but it remains Long Island's largest defense contractor in terms of employees.