and respect for his skill as an engineer and designer. Dick Hutton, Grumman engineer and later senior vice-president of engineering described him as a "great engineer, respected by many ..." To family and close friends, he was invariably known as "Roy". Having been told of the U.S. Navy's desire for retractable landing gear, Leroy Grumman was awarded , Retractable Landing Gear for Airplanes in 1932, based on an earlier design that he had developed for the Loening Air Yacht. The innovative, manually operated landing gear which progressed from a heavy and unreliable design to a more sturdy version helped his company win contracts from the U.S. Navy. When the Grumman Company received its first U.S. Navy production contract for a two-seater biplane fighter, the FF-1, it featured Grumman's trademark "splayed out" landing gear. Grumman's ability as an engineer and designer was characterized by a Grumman Company engineer as that of "'a master of the educated hunch' who could foresee technical problems and their solutions." He single-handedly invented the famous "Sto-Wing" wing-panel folding system that revolutionized carrier aircraft storage and handling, pioneered on the F4F-4 Wildcat subtype. He worked out the solution by sticking paper clips into a soap eraser to find the pivot point that made the Sto-Wing possible. Although Grumman realized the importance of his close relationship with the U.S. Navy, by the mid-1930s, he began to design aircraft for the commercial market with the development of the G-21 "Goose" amphibian and the G-22 "Gulfhawk", civil version of the Grumman F3F carrier-based fighter. Expansion As the company expanded, it moved to bigger quarters – to Valley Stream in 1931, Farmingdale in 1932, and finally Bethpage in 1937. In 1934, a company legend grew up around the number "250" which marked the zenith for expansion in Grumman's mind. He reasoned that if there were more than 250 employees, "it's going to be too big and we're going to lose control of it. That's where we ought to stop." Company accountant Towl was eventually deputized to tell Grumman that the payroll was already at 256. Although Grumman resisted the "expansionist" efforts that Swirbul advocated, employment grew from 700 in 1939 to 25,500 in 1943, with the company known as the "Grumman Iron Works" (a name derived from their product line's rugged structure and a design philosophy espoused by both Swirbul and Grumman) becoming the primary source for U.S. Navy aircraft. Management