Ducommun
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Ducommun Incorporated (: DCO) is a manufacturing company that supplies products, engineering, and support services to the global aerospace and defense industry. It manufactures structural and electronic components and subassemblies for a wide variety of commercial, military, and space aircraft, notably for the Boeing 737 NG and 777 airliners, the C-17 heavy lift cargo jet, the Apache, Chinook, and Blackhawk helicopters, and the Space Shuttle. It also provides engineering and program management services to the United States military, Homeland Security, NASA, and other government agencies.
The company’s revenues were expected to be about $400 million in 2008; it employed about 2,000 people in facilities located in California, Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and New York. The Company’s corporate offices are in Carson, California.
Ducommun is the oldest surviving company in California, established in 1849 by Charles Louis Ducommun, a watchmaker by training, who emigrated to the US from Switzerland in the early 1840s. The Company started as a general store, providing supplies (and credit) to gold prospectors and other pioneers who had settled in the burgeoning pueblo of Los Angeles. At the time, California was still a territory of the US, just on the verge of statehood with the population of Los Angeles then standing at just about 1,600. The store had a public "Circulating Library," lending books if paid in full with a full refund upon return.
In 1857 he married Bertha Rontex, of San Francisco, and they had a baby girl the next year. In 1873 he was an officer of the Los Angeles Chapter No. 33, Royal Arch Masons. They built a "mansion" at 527 Lazard street, east of Alameda street, south of Aliso street, and about 1875 their street was renamed "Ducommun street". In 1892 their vacant "mansion" was donated and converted into the "News' and Working Boys' Home," a woman-run charity (formerly on First street) which charged $1.50 per week for room, board, and laundry. In 1900, the Boy's Home moved to San Pedro street and the mansion was donated to the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles repurposed as a "men's boarding house", called the "Bethlehem Hotel" from the Bethlehem Institutes (nearby, corner of Vignes and Ducommun streets) under the supervision of the Rev. Dr, Dana W. Bartlett. In 1902 a new Bethlehem Men's Hotel was built on Vignes street, and this mansion became a "Japanese lodging house."
In the 1890s he was a stockholder and member of the board of directors of Farmers and Merchants Bank of Los Angeles, of which Isaias W. Hellman was president. Ducommun kept pace with the growth of the Southern California economy, and in 1907 incorporated as The Ducommun Hardware Company, evolving into a value added distributor of metals provided by the Eastern mills. This coincided with the emergence of a defense based industry (e.g., munitions and shipbuilding) as the country entered the First World War, and during the 1920s the arrival of general aviation. Charles Albert Ducommun (one of Charles Louis Ducommun’s four sons) decided early on to support an innovative aircraft designer named Donald Douglas, marking the beginning of the Company’s longstanding partnership with what was to become the aerospace industry. Symbolic of this new relationship, Ducommun tubular steel flew in 1927 on the Ryan designed Spirit of St. Louis during Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight from Long Island’s Roosevelt Field to Paris.
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