Still struggling with the grouping thing. The interim sort-of workaround was to just flatten the whole thing out. Like this.

here is what I want

company1
contact1
contact2
company2
contact3
company3
contact4
contact6
contact7
company4

This is what I have to do for now.

company1 contact1
company1 contact2
company2 contact3
company3 contact4
company3 contact6
company3 contact7
company4

Redundancy and not what I want but it does allow me to go live with the ajax portions of the code and not break the app. We will see what the users think.