John Landis Grove, founder firstly of Grove Crane and then access equipment manufacturer JLG, died on 16 June 2003 at his home in Greencastle, Pennsylvania following a long illness. He was 82.
He began his career as a machine operator for Landis Tool Company and then, when World War II started, with Westinghouse, building steam turbines for battleships. After a period in the army medical corps, working as a nurse at Wakeman General Hospital in Indiana, he returned to Westinghouse. A strike there prompted John and his brother Dwight to go into partnership in 1946, along with Wayne Nicarry, producing farm wagons with the $7,000 they had saved between them during the war. Production soon reached about 10,000 wagons a year. Needing a machine to move heavy steel, John L Grove built himself a hydraulic crane, which led to orders from neighbours.
By 1955 Grove Manufacturing Company was building about 15 or 20 cranes a year. The company was divided with Dwight taking the farm wagon business and John taking the cranes.
In 1967, with annual sales at $30m, he accepted an offer to sell from the conglomerate Kidde Inc. Aged 47, he bought a motor home and took a year out travelling the country with his wife, visiting friends he had made in the construction industry. Aged 47, he felt too young to retire and so, prompted by an awareness of the risks of working at height, he developed the concept of an access basket on a telescoping arm, with the controls in the basket. In partnership with Paul Shockey, a plant was opened in 1969 and in July 1970 JLG shipped its first machine. He retired from JLG in 1993 Although both Grove Crane and JLG Industries were pioneers, innovators and market leading businesses, John L Grove was more than just an equipment manufacturer. He was a leading figure in the business community in the state of Pennsylvania, director of many organisations and involved in many charitable works, including the John L Grove Medical Center in Greencastle.
John L Grove was born in January 1921, the son of a Mennonite preacher, and grew up on a farm where the most exciting thing that happened, he once said, was a Saturday night trip to the grocery store. He was thrown out of the Mennonite church at the age of 16 for going to the cinema, he said. On marrying Cora Wagner in 1943 he joined the Lutherans. John and Cora, who had no children, recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.
