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Roy & Jake work in an offhand manner that once shocked but now delights the Navy. They scoff at the ordinary appurtenances of big business and like to call themselves "the embattled farmers." Roy & Jake have one secretary in common, and she sits down the hall. They seldom dictate letters; when Roy decides that a letter must be written, he painstakingly writes it out in longhand, sometimes puts in a whole day on a draft.
In the 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.
Whenever a question arises over the design or size of almost any plane in the world, Roy clambers on a desk, finds the model.
The Eraser Plane. Grumman designs his planes in the same informal manner Once he was trying to crack the tough problem of designing a plane whose wings could be folded back, making it possible to pack more on an aircraft carrier. With his feet cocked on his desk, he picked up a square gum eraser and a handful of paper lips and went to work. He stuck the clips m the eraser, worked them back & forth until he had the solution. He believes you can "see things that way you can't on a blueprint." Hellcat wings now fold back as neatly as a bird's.
For similar reasons, he still flies himself. He says: "When you're alone 5000 feet in the air, lots of things about a plane become important that you can overlook on the ground." The details of design are left to young William T. ("Bill") Schwendler, 40, who bosses the company's 500 engineers. Bill Schwendler sits down with Roy & Jake when a new design is gestating, and they 11 mull it over. He has a sixth sense as to what Roy wants. Thus, to get a prototype of the newest Grumman plane, Roy simply wrote out a memo describing what he wanted, and sent it over to Bill Schwendler.
Despite this offhand management Grumman is adept at finding his way through the jungles of governmental red tape. What he cannot cut, he blandly ignores. When the Army tried to get rumman to camouflage his plants, he objected, said it was unnecessary and would interfere with production. When the Army insisted, Grumman said: "From the-air, we find the plant by flying over to Mitchel Field and taking our directions from the runways there. Maybe you ought to camouflage them first." The Army quit bothering him. The Navy lets Grumman do things much as he wants, sure they will be all right. Said Vice Admiral John McCain : "The name Grumman on a plane or a part is like sterling on silver."