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Norris had never heard of Northwestern Aeronautical Corporation. Northwestern, formed in conjunction with Twin Cities-based Northwest Airlines, made wooden gliders for the war effort. Allied forces used the unpowered gliders at the Normandy D-day invasion and at other battles to silently carry troops into enemy territory. The company assembled fifteen gliders a day in a huge plant on Minnehaha Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Nor had Norris heard of John E. Parker, owner of Northwestern Aeronautical. Parker was a Naval Academy graduate, a social hobnobber, and an entrepreneur. A jovial, round-faced man with an amazing recall for names and faces, he was universally liked. Parker and his wife lived in Washington, D.C., about three months a year and spent the other nine months at the Commodore Hotel in St. Paul, a ritzy little hotel with a rich, dark wood decor and big, luxurious rooms. Despite his apparent wealth, John Parker was facing a potential financial crisis. As sole owner of Northwestern Aeronautical and part-owner of the Toro Company, much of his capital was tied up. Northwestern Aeronautical had a dim future, because with the war's end there would be no imaginable need for wooden gliders.

For Parker, the disintegration of Northwestern Aeronautical would be a giant loss. He liked to claim that Northwestern was the second- or third-largest contractor to the war effort, and now his company was about to collapse with a suddenness that few businessmen ever experience. Parker was desperately searching for a solution to his problem when a high-ranking navy official called him. Through channels, the official said, he had heard that the navy was looking for an investor. He knew little about the opportunity because the information was classified. Highly classified. He told Parker to go back to Washington and to talk to naval officials there.

Parker did, and was stunned to find that the first naval official they wanted him to meet was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, former commander of the Pacific Fleet. It was clear that the navy was pulling out all the stops in its effort to find an investor. Parker was escorted into Nimitz's office, where the admiral shook his hand and jabbed a finger in his chest. "I've looked into your background and there's a job that I'd like you to do," Nimitz told him, "and it may be more important in peacetime than it is in wartime." Nimitz then made a fleeting reference to a particular naval group, saying that it was important to keep the group together. And that was it.

Being an Academy graduate, Parker had the proper respect for naval authority. "Aye, aye, sir," he said, though he had no idea what he was agreeing to. Later Parker was ushered into the assistant secretary of the navy's office and then into the office of the judge advocate, who gave him legal advice on the matter. By the time Parker finally met with Norris and Engstrom, he was only aware that the navy thought that this proposed venture was vitally important. Or at least he was aware that the navy was trotting out its biggest names in an effort to woo him.

Norris and Engstrom made the same pitch to Parker that they'd already made to a dozen other potential investors. They told him that they'd been involved in highly classified work and would like to continue it on a private basis, but that they needed an investor to pick up half the tab for their new venture. They promised at least three years of service and laid out a few of the potential business applications for the technology.

After they finished, Parker still knew almost nothing about the proposed venture. Nimitz hadn't given him a shred of information about it, and had said only that it was of great importance to the country. Norris and Engstrom had provided a little bit more, but even their information was sketchy. They apologetically explained that it would be a felony to reveal any more, and Parker accepted their explanation. By the end of the fourth meeting they still hadn't told Parker who his new customers would be.

Parker had grown wealthy as an entrepreneur and was far shrewder than any of the navy men suspected. No, he didn't understand digital electronics or vacuum tubes, and he couldn't assess the technical capabilities of Norris and Engstrom. But he could read between the lines. He implicitly understood that the company's main customer would be the navy—that was plain enough—and he knew that the navy had already assessed the capabilities of Norris and Engstrom. If Norris and Engstrom had come up short in its estimation, he wouldn't be here. It was a roundabout way of evaluating the situation, but it was all he had. Parker liked to tell his friends that it was a little bit like taking on a symphony orchestra without knowing a note of music, but that didn't worry him.

Besides, there was this issue of Northwestern Aeronautical. Parker had already declared the glider factory as war surplus and had liquidated his inventory. The company was clearly on the verge of collapse—that is, unless he could pull off a last-minute miracle. And this new venture certainly fell into the category of a last-minute miracle. If he could pull it off, he knew that the new company could potentially offer jobs for his current employees. Whatever machines the navy men planned to make, machinists and assemblers would be needed to build them.

Parker considered everything: the fate of Northwestern, the loss of jobs for all the machinists at his plant, the risk of investing in a project he didn't understand. But one image kept coming back to him—Nimitz jabbing a finger in his chest and saying, "There's a job I'd like you to do." In 1945 most of the country still felt a sense of common purpose and patriotism, and an order from someone the stature of Admiral Nimitz was almost impossible to resist, especially for a Naval Academy man. So Parker sold his $300,000 stake in the Toro Company to fund the new venture.

Then he called together Norris, Engstrom, and Captain Ralph Meader from the Naval Computing Machine Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. They and their wives met for dinner—in grand Parker style—at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C. The navy men agreed to sign a contract binding themselves to three years of service to the new company; Parker agreed to head a group that would purchase a hundred thousand shares of the company stock at ten cents each. Pooling their resources, the navy men bought the other hundred thousand shares, and the deal was complete. Parker then returned to the St. Paul glider factory and announced to a band of cheering machinists that their jobs had been saved.

In January 1946 the group incorporated the new company, calling it Engineering Research Associates (ERA). The navy men immediately hired forty members of the "Seesaw" staff, and Parker arranged for the new company to share his cavernous glider factory with Northwestern Aeronautical. Sharing quarters with Northwestern was critical because ERA wasn't yet qualified to carry out a major government contract. Although most members of its staff had worked for the navy during the war, ERA didn't have a corporate track record. Northwestern Aeronautical, however, did have a track record. So by setting up shop in the glider factory, ERA could work on major contracts that had been officially awarded to Northwestern Aeronautical.

As far as the navy brass was concerned, Parker had saved their codebreaking operation. The machinists in St. Paul also considered Parker a savior—his last-minute heroics were responsible for saving their jobs. Norris and Engstrom were the only ones with an inkling of the business potential that could emerge from the new enterprise, but even they had more personal concerns. Parker's cash influx was helping free Engstrom from a life as a Yale math professor, and Norris no longer faced a return to his job as an X-ray machine salesman with Westinghouse.

Everyone was pleased. They had taken an obscure military technology and transformed it into a private enterprise. They wanted to congratulate themselves for their foresight and steadfast determination, but Norris and Engstrom knew that their victory was not born of their own resolve. The real reason for the formation of Engineering Research Associates was that the U.S. Navy wanted it that way, and had pushed the company into existence through the bony finger of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.