Lear Siegler, Inc.

Lear Siegler Incorporated (LSI) is a diverse American corporation established in 1962. Its products range from car seats and brakes to weapons control gear for military fighter planes. The company's more than $2 billion-a-year annual sales comes from three major areas: aerospace-technology, automotive parts, and industrial-commercial. The company, however, is basically anonymous, since its products are either unmarked or bear only the label “LSI”. But Lear Siegler, which went private in 1987, is an influential part of the manufacturing industry in the United States. Unlike Lear, LSI does not produce executive jets that bear the “Lear” name.

During the late 1950s, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, America (and Southern California in particular) was experiencing an unprecedented boom in aviation technology and aerospace research and development, based on a "space race" inaugurated by the launch of Sputnik, a simple but startling first in a long history of scientific and technological competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

In June 1955, seven months after the consolidation of the precursor Siegler Corporation business entities and relocation of corporate headquarters to a downtown Los Angeles address.

Over the next decade and a half, Brooks, who became Siegler’s first president, established a reputation for supervising numerous startling acquisitions, Hallamore Manufacturing Company, an electronics firm, became Siegler’s first acquisition.

During the 1960s, the company expanded rapidly.

Lear Siegler Incorporated was created as a result of the 1961 merger between the Siegler Corporation (Los Angeles) and Lear Avionics Inc. (of Santa Monica, also known as Lear Inc.). Lear Inc. was an aerospace electronics firm.

The merger was complete by 1962, and the new company was named Lear Siegler Incorporated. The deal, which cost Siegler five shares for each seven Lear shares, nearly doubled the company’s sales - from $96.2 million in 1961 to $190.8 million by the end of 1962.

John G. Brooks was founder, President and Chairman of Siegler; and William Lear was founder, President and Chairman at Lear.

The merger was based on Brooks' plan of acquiring and growing successful but possibly unrelated operating companies (with resources and management in common) into one of the first conglomerates (with a focus on aerospace, defense and consumer markets) and Lear’s goal of divesting his ownership interest in Lear to pursue development of his Learjet corporate aircraft (the first pure jet private aircraft) as well as other engineering innovations.

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