as the project engineer to supervise the firm's construction of 52 Loening M-8 monoplane observation/fighter aircraft under contract to the Navy. His duties included test flying as well as serving as the production supervisor. Grover Loening, the company president, was so impressed with his work that he offered Grumman a position. After a reduction in rank to ensign in the peacetime U.S. Navy, Grumman resigned his Naval commission in October 1920, becoming a test pilot flying various types of Loening amphibians while doing some design and development on these aircraft. He quickly moved up in the Loening organization, becoming the factory manager and then general manager with responsibility over aircraft design, a position he held until the company was sold in 1929 on the eve of the Depression to Keystone Aircraft. Keystone closed their Manhattan factory and moved operations to Bristol, Pennsylvania. Company founding Unwilling to leave Long Island to continue working for Keystone, Grumman joined fellow Loening employees Jake Swirbul and William Schwendler in resolving that their best option was to quit and form their own company. Grumman mortgaged his house for $16,950 and Swirbul's mother borrowed $6,000 from her employers to help set up Grumman Aeronautical Engineering Co. The co-founders were soon joined by Ed Poor, Grover Loening's business manager, and E. Clinton Towl, who had recently come from Wall Street. These five men formed the company's inner circle of management for the next 50 years. Loening and his brother, Albert P. Loening, also became investors. The company was named after its largest stockholder and first president. On 2 January 1930, the company took possession of an abandoned auto showroom garage in Baldwin, New York, that had once been the Cox-Klemin Aircraft Co. factory. Initially, the new company, with only 18 people on salary, had contracts to repair damaged Loening amphibians (surplus parts had been bought from the Loening works) and traded on its expertise in working with aluminum by building aluminum floats and producing aluminum truck bodies. The first project of the new company involved Grumman and Swirbul, as president and vice-president, on hands and knees, sorting out and matching nuts and bolts, prior to assembling Loening floats. Swirbul and Grumman oversaw the day-to-day operations of the company. While the employees in the plant felt comfortable calling the outgoing Swirbul "Jake", no one ever called Grumman anything but "Mr. Grumman" out of deference to his reserved manner