JOSEPH J. LONGO ’51
Giving Back in Gratitude for Successful Family Business

“Service Through Knowledge”® is the trademarked slogan of the family-owned company that NJIT graduate Joseph J. Longo’s father started in the basement of their home—and now has more than 100,000 square feet of factory space, selling and servicing machinery in eight Northeast states. Joe says that the “knowledge” in the slogan of the Longo Electrical-Mechanical Co. Inc. comes from his education at NJIT—which is why he gives back regularly to the school, including scholarship gifts and a bequest planned in his will.

“Without the degree, and especially the knowledge that went with it, the business could never have gotten to where it is now,” says Joe, 90, who graduated with an electrical engineering degree in 1951 and retired from the family firm in 2005. “The rigor of that education was beyond description.”

In gratitude, Joe has made numerous gifts to the college, including one that will soon result in naming the electrical machine lab in his name.

“I can look at my report card right now, and I can barely believe what it was like,” says Joe, who proceeded to list from that report card seven courses that he took in a single semester—from machine design to business law. “We would go to school from 8 or 9 in the morning until 4 or 5 in the afternoon. I would get on a train and get home by 6, have dinner, and hit the books until 11. Then do the same thing the next day. And Saturday it was lab reports all day. They made us work.”

Joe has lived his entire life in Morristown, New Jersey, about 25 miles from campus, and never really considered going to college anywhere else. (He and his wife Madeline still live there, enjoying their ten grandchildren.) But after starting school at what was then the Newark College of Engineering in 1944, Joe left after one year to join the Merchant Marine and then helped his father build the family business before returning to NJIT in 1948 to complete his degree.

He described the steady growth of the company now known as “Longo” as a “Horatio Alger story”; from that basement company begun by his father—an Italian immigrant with a fourth-grade education—to the company with more than a hundred employees now owned by Joe’s son, who graduated from Notre Dame. And when Joe was named NJIT alumnus of the year in 1990, he gave a speech crediting the school for the breadth of the education that allowed him to manage all aspects of the burgeoning company.

In 1995 Joe co-wrote a book titled Maximizing Motor Efficiency. He has served on the board of the Morris County Chamber of Commerce and is a past member of the Morristown Rotary Club. He remains active in the community as secretary on the board of trustees at County College of Morris County and as a consultant to several small businesses.

“The most important thing I learned in college was English,” Joe says with a laugh. “Most engineers loathe the word English; they say, ‘Just give me that slide rule’—or now, computer. But I learned to write very well, and it gave me the ability to articulately describe our business in our advertising messages and when I communicated with people. The professors were not just good; they were great.”