By Jerry Ackerman, Globe Staff

PAST GLOBE 100 RANKING 1997: 5 1996: 5 1995: - 1994: - 1993: 45 1992: - 1991: 87 1990: - 1989: -

RAFTON - Ten years ago, as the Globe 100 was introduced, front-page headlines marked the impending end of the Cold War.

From this, it was said, would come a ''peace dividend,'' as spending on arms gave way to consumer goods.

At the Wyman-Gordon Co., number one on the Globe 100 list this year, top executives speak of the ''peace dividend'' with scorn, recalling how it failed to materialize for them. Instead, Wyman-Gordon, a 115-year-old leader in high-strength metal alloys for jet engines and aircraft, energy, and military applications, barely escaped being crushed by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The fact that Wyman-Gordon did survive the cuts in defense work is a tale of managers who took risks to restructure a traditional company to be market-oriented while retaining its historic strengths.

It is also, said David P. Gruber, 56, chairman, president, and chief executive of Wyman-Gordon, a story of luck and especially fortuitous timing. The company bought out a major competitor - just as business was showing signs of improvement.

''The company has really done a tremendous turnaround in the face of adversity,'' said analyst Peter Arment at JSA Research in Newport, R.I.

Wyman-Gordon, while still combating adversity, was flying high last year on a surge in air travel. Airlines are earning record profits and plowing them back into new airplanes. The world's major aircraft makers have a backlog of more than 2,500 planes on order. Almost every one of those planes means business for Wyman-Gordon, which supplies parts to the three big manufacturers of jet engines - General Electric Co., the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies Inc., and, in Britain, Rolls-Royce PLC.

Wyman-Gordon also sells Boeing Co. landing gear parts, wing braces, and airframe components and makes rotor blades and parts for helicopter manufacturers.

These applications all demand great strength, achieved with combinations of titanium, nickel, and other metals with steel to resist stress and high temperatures. The parts are made even tougher in mammoth forging presses, here in Grafton and in Texas and Scotland, that exert up to 50,000 tons of pressure per square inch. ''I like to say the parts we make for airplanes are the most flight-critical parts,'' said Gruber, who became president and chief executive in 1994 and chairman in October.

About 70 percent of Wyman-Gordon's $705 million in sales for the 12 months ended Nov. 30 - the period used to rank Wyman-Gordon for the Globe 100 - came from commercial aircraft orders. Another 10 percent came from military work, according to company reports, and most of the rest from pipe and components for energy industries.

Contrast that with 10 years ago, when Wyman-Gordon relied on the military for 60 percent of its revenues, about $400 million a year at the time. Much of the rest was in commercial aircraft work, but that, too, was doomed as the recession, later compounded by Gulf War fears, cut into travel.

''We were in free fall in volume,'' Gruber said. ''There wasn't any business.''

Facing a bleak future, James Walsh, the chief executive hired four years earlier from Raytheon Co., resigned in May 1991. Fortuitously, new management was at the ready top brass recently ousted from the Worcester-based Norton Co. after a hostile takeover by Cie. de Saint-Gobain of France.

Among the team: Gruber, general counsel Wallace Whitney Jr., and John M. Nelson, who moved from chairman of Norton to become chairman and chief executive at Wyman-Gordon. Not only did they have experience, they were also on a first-name basis with major local stockholders. ''Since we had their confidence, we were able to take some tough steps,'' Nelson recalled.

By 1992, with sales below $200 million, Wyman-Gordon had laid off 80 percent of its employees. ''At one point we were below 900'' people, Gruber said, compared to about 5,000 in the 1980s. Employment now has rebounded almost to 1980s levels.

Survival tactics put the company into consumer markets for the first time, making titanium golf clubs. Demand for the clubs has waned, but the experience was an eye-opener for a firm that had relied on its expertise and reputation to attract business and never expected its managers or engineers to be innovators.

''Everything we had done before,'' Gruber said, was ''made to blueprint,'' following customer specifications. From the golf club experience, he said, ''we developed a market focus instead of an engineering focus. We learned to be proactive.''

At the same time, the company engaged in creative financing, floating $90 million in junk bonds paying 10.75 percent, to tide it over the deepest months of its crisis.

The borrowing helped produce four consecutive profitable quarters, which, in turn, allowed Wyman-Gordon to go forward with a longstanding opportunity to buy out a competitor, the Cameron Forged Products Co. plant in Houston. Even so, with almost no cash in hand, the deal was stock-based, and the seller, Cooper Industries Inc., a $5 billion-a-year auto parts and tool maker, got 47 percent of Wyman-Gordon's shares.

The risk that Cooper could execute a hostile takeover was real, Nelson said. ''Luckily for us it worked out very well,'' he said.

Cooper still holds 38.5 percent of Wyman-Gordon - but with Wyman-Gordon stock trading around $20 a share, the deal has doubled its original $100 million value.

Because Wyman-Gordon uses a fiscal year that ends May 31, its impressive 1997 numbers won't be reflected in year-end results. That is because the company's most versatile piece of machinery, a 29,000-ton forging press at the Houston plant, was unexpectedly shut down in December to repair serious structural defects.

Keeping up the flow of work without that press, Gruber said, has required extraordinary overtime and transportation expenses, trimming operating margins from 16 percent last year to about 6 percent so far in 1998. Work scheduled at the Cameron plant was moved to Grafton, but delays will mean reduced revenues until the Houston press is back in service, probably next month.

That shutdown followed problems with another press in Houston that took a larger toll. An explosion in December 1996 killed eight employees and has cost Wyman-Gordon millions in fines and settlements with families. Other lawsuits are pending.

Also in December, Wyman-Gordon refinanced its junk bonds and raised additional capital with a $150 million placement at 8 percent interest. But a one-time charge of $5.2 million in connection with the deal resulted in red ink for the quarter.

The company is cautious about its future, pointing out that its $1 billion worth of back orders will take two years to work off. But Wyman-Gordon has plans. In March, an agreement to form a joint venture in China with an aluminum forging company was announced. Other joint ventures already operate in Turkey and Australia. And in April, the company announced a deal to buy a Buffalo, N.Y., company that makes seamless aluminum pipe similar to what Wyman-Gordon makes from other metals - products used in electric power plants and oil fields.

Wyman-Gordon also is building a factory in Colorado that will build nine-passenger business aircraft from composite materials - carbon fiber, Kevlar, and polymers - under a contract with VisionAire Corp. of St. Louis.

Another Wyman-Gordon subsidiary, Scaled Composites Inc. in Mojave, Calif., designs, builds, and tests lightweight aircraft prototypes and other products made from composites. Its accomplishments include a prototype car for General Motors and components for America's Cup yachts.

Analysts, high on Wyman-Gordon despite production woes, predict strong profits to come on sales near $750 million this fiscal year and over $800 million in fiscal 1999.

Founded to make parts for the textiles industry, Wyman-Gordon progressed into components for rail cars and then automobiles - reigning for years as the nation's largest independent maker of crankshafts. Aircraft work took off during World War II, and in 1953 the Pentagon built the Grafton plant and its biggest forging press as part of the national Cold War defense buildup.

Gruber's office, in a low-slung building that resembles many found on Army bases, reflects these no-frills roots. No personal mementos are in sight, and the pictures on the walls are of airplanes, mostly futuristic models developed by Scaled Composites.

The only other wall hanging is a framed reprint of comments made by US District Judge Kimba Wood in 1990 when she sentenced junk-bond financier Michael Milken to prison for crimes committed in connection with 1980s corporate takeovers. It was given to Gruber by a friend at Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette, the New York investment house that arranged Wyman-Gordon's 1993 bonds.

Gruber said he is known as ''the kind of guy who likes to figure out new places to go, new things to try out. I had a lot of ideas about how to refinance the company, some of which may have been too clever for their own good.'' The judge's words are there, he said, as an ''admonishment ... to watch how far I go in trying to change things.''