Oral History Program Bruce T. Mitchell Interviewed by John Sillito 7 May 2007 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Bruce T. Mitchell Interviewed by John Sillito 7 May 2007 Copyright © 2011 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Utah Construction Company/Utah International Inc. Oral History Project was created to capture the memories of individuals associated with the company. Several of the interviewees are family and relatives, others are personalities involved with Utah Construction Company/Utah International Inc. and some of the company’s prominent figures. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Bruce T. Mitchell, an oral history by John Sillito, 7 May 2007, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Bruce T. Mitchell circa 1970 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Bruce T. Mitchell. It was conducted by John Sillito of Weber State University on May 7, 2007, in Mr. Mitchell’s office on 225 Bush Street, San Francisco, California. Mr. Mitchell worked with Utah Construction/Utah International from 1957 to 1987, during which time he also served as secretary of the company. In the interview, Mr. Mitchell discusses his recollections of Utah Construction/Utah International, and the personalities with whom he associated. JS: I’d like to start with a general question. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got involved with Utah Construction. BM: I was born on Bush Street in San Francisco, not too many blocks from here. I was raised down on the peninsula and went to high school there. I went to Stanford University—both for undergraduate and law school. From there, I went in the Navy. After I got out of the Navy, my wife was expecting, so I went right to work in the first job I could find. It was in the trust department of Crocker Bank. That job seemed to be going nowhere, so I started to look for a better paying position. I talked to the Stanford Law School placement service. When I was in the Navy, I was in Naval Intelligence, then I belonged to a reserve unit, and I let my friends there know that I was looking. A gentleman with Pacific Gas and Electric Company told me to go see their general counsel who was Richard Peterson. He later became chairman of the PG&E board and he is still a good friend of mine at the Pacific Union Club. He had nothing there, but he told Larry McDonald, a member of my reserve unit, that there was a position open at Utah Construction Company. And so I went over and interviewed with the 2 general counsel. In March of 1957, I went to work for what was then called the Utah Construction Company. JS: You mentioned that you had gone to Stanford several years after Ed Littlefield. You told me a story about running into Ed on the train. BM: Well, Ed Littlefield rode the train every day, and at this time I’d only been working for the company a few weeks. I got on the train and he was there with his wife, Jeannik, and he spotted me there and told me to come up and meet her. I had a nice chat with them. JS: I’m getting the feeling that that was fairly typical of Ed Littlefield. BM: That definitely was Ed Littlefield! Marriner Eccles brought Ed Littlefield in because he just wasn’t happy with the present administration. JS: Before we move to Marriner, I’d like to ask you a couple questions about Littlefield’s management. What do you recall from that crucial period in 1957 and 1958? BM: Well that was a very important period, and Ed got to know everybody around the company. I mean he knew me and I was just brand new in his legal department, number three at that time. But he knew who I was and came back to say, “Hello, glad to have you on the train.” But he always did that. We moved to our newer building at 550 California in 1960—that’s not new anymore. We were in the Shell Building at first. When we moved to the new building, he frequently rode the elevator most of the people were using, and then walked to his office instead of taking it directly up from the garage because he wanted to see the people. And he came around to other people’s offices. He wasn’t summoning them to his office: he’d just come in and sit and chat. 3 JS: I guess the office was small enough that it was possible in those days. BM: It was, no question about it. In the Shell Building, I think we were on two floors, and three or four floors when we first went to 550 California. The company was definitely small enough that he could know everybody. We all knew everybody. Granted, the number of employees that would be out on the projects would be something very different. At that time, it was mainly a construction company. There were people who would work temporarily for the company, and that was most of them—except for the project managers—who would be regular employees. JS: There seems to be a kind of a “Stanford Connection” in terms of employees. BM: Yes, quite a number came from Stanford. I think Allen Christensen went to Stanford. I know Ed did, and certainly Ernie Arbuckle did. He was Ed’s roommate, I believe. He was later chairman of Wells Fargo Bank. Arjay Miller came from the Stanford Business School. Of course, Bill Hewlett went to Stanford. Bill Kimball went to Stanford; there’s a Kimball Hall. There’s also a Mitchell Hall—no relation, I’m sorry to say. But, there’s a Ruth Wattis Mitchell Earth Sciences Building. No relation. She was a Wattis and married Shepard Mitchell, an attorney in Los Angeles. He was on the board for many years. That was before I was secretary. I knew him casually, but I didn’t ever interact with him. JS: Why Stanford? Was it coincidence, or was that a place that was thought of as a training school for business folks? BM: Stanford Business School was very highly thought of. I think it’s primarily a coincidence, but in our legal department we ended up with three from Stanford Law School. It was probably more my doing. I called Stanford Law School placement to 4 see if they had somebody who was interested. So that’s how that happened in my particular case and I think some of the others did the same. And it was all across management: Keith Wallace, the senior vice president, went to Stanford for undergraduate and graduate school. Jim Curry went to the business school. You’re undoubtedly going to interview Jim. He was a key in the merger with General Electric. They relied on him. JS: He’s still in the Bay Area? BM: They live in Hillsborough, but they also have a place in Brisbane, Australia, because he was in charge of the project down there in Queensland. They bought a place on what they call “The Gold Coast” down there. JS: Well, I’d be happy to interview him if it’s in Australia. [Laughter] You mentioned Marriner Eccles a few minutes ago. I’d be interested in your recollections of Marriner. He was still in pretty much full vigor at the time you joined. BM: Oh, he certainly was. Unfortunately, Marriner loved to talk. He especially loved to talk about the history of the company and on any given day I would love to listen except the night before the board meeting when I brought him his agenda book. That was the busiest day of the year for me—I wanted to make sure the agendas were all out and ready to go, and he always wanted to chat about the history of the company. How often do you read about somebody in your economics and history class and then get to know him personally? I got to know him well enough that I called him Marriner and actually went to his home for cocktails one night. He and his second wife, Sally, lived on Telegraph Hill. They had what was the old Ghirardelli apartment— the top two-floor apartment out there. I got to know them both. While I was president 5 of the Commonwealth Club, he came to speak to the Club. I got him in to sit at the board table on occasion. So, I got to know him. He was very bright, there’s no question about it. Very alert and very bright. I was a little worried about his physical health. I’ll never forget the day we were walking from the Bankers’ Club after a board meeting. Ninety-one year old Val Browning was helping Marriner cross the street and Marriner would not walk up to the corner to cross the street with the signal. The cable car was coming and on California Street it was both ways. So I helped him cross it. He was very determined—a very strong personality. JS: I’m sure that came through on those board meetings—that he was strong and forceful. BM: Right, I don’t think there’s any question about it. As I say, at the time I became secretary, Ed was chairman so I didn’t sit on most of the board meetings when Marriner was chairman. JS: What did you do as secretary for the company? Obviously getting ready for the board meeting was a major responsibility. BM: Yes. I prepared the agenda and made sure the agenda books were passed out, and the memoranda were sent to the board in advance of the meeting. I did not send out the quarterly report. Well, sometimes I did, and sometimes it went out from the treasurer’s department. We tried to coordinate that so they didn’t get too many mailings. JS: Did you have a staff of several people? BM: No, I had just one young lady working for me. We were not that large of a company; we didn’t even have an investor relations person until just before the merger. JS: It was pretty decentralized? 6 BM: It was. We did have a stock transfer agent. Once we took over the Lucky Mc Uranium Corporation, then we really became public. The company was definitely a family company. Actually, when I came to work with the company, I said, “Gee, I’d like to buy a little stock in the company.” It didn’t need to be very much. It took me a year. A guy in my Naval Reserve Unit, a broker, said, “I have ten shares.” So I got ten shares of it. When we merged with Lucky Mc in 1960, we started becoming more public. The First Security Bank of Utah was our transfer agent. I worked with them on that—becoming our transfer agent. JS: So for that three or four years the shares were still tightly held. BM: Even after that, we did issue some convertible debentures and gradually the company became more public. I talked to my broker and he started to handle the stock. He said, “There’s not enough float” and gave up. I was told later that Paul Wattis was busy buying the stock whenever he could get his hands on it. I don’t know if you are going to interview the Wattis family or not, but Phyllis Wattis lived in San Francisco. JS: I had the opportunity to interview Phyllis Wattis about a year before she died. She was an amazing woman. BM: Oh, absolutely an amazing person. I’ll never forget the time after GE took us over. I’d get a call from GE about what the dividend was, and so I let Ed Littlefield know, of course, then I would call Mrs. Wattis’ office. One time she said, “Bruce, what am I going to do with all that money?” [Laughter] I have never forgotten that because she was so generous. She did wonders for San Francisco’s cultural life, there’s no question about it. We had dinner in the Wattis Room at the Symphony Hall one Saturday night, and that was the last time I saw her in the Wattis Room. She 7 remembered me when I saw her in her wheelchair. JS: An amazing woman. I meant to ask you one other question about office operations. When the company merged with GE, did you stay on as secretary of the board? BM: Yes, I was still secretary of the board. We had no public stockholders then. I was also senior counsel of the legal department, doing a lot of other things besides being secretary. JS: I see. And when did the senior counsel part start? BM: That was before I was secretary. I became assistant secretary when Johnny Horrigan was the secretary of the company. I helped him a great deal with stockholder meetings and things of that sort. Then Albert Reeves became secretary when Johnny retired. When Al was getting ready to retire, he brought me in. I had attended several board meetings before I became secretary. JS: Let me ask you about a couple of other people who were involved. What is your sense of Bud Wilson as an individual? What role did he play? BM: Well, he was more of an operations man than Ed was. I don’t think he had quite the people skills that Ed did. Bud was really an operator, and a good operator. He did not have any real role in the merger. The merger was done by Ed Littlefield with Reg Jones first, then they brought in their financial people. This thing was kept very, very quiet. There was no movement in the stock of any kind whatsoever. The only people who knew about it here, in San Francisco, were Ed and Jim Curry because Jim did the numbers. I do know that Ed first brought the thing to the board when it was in executive session, which meant that I was not there as secretary; nor was Bud Wilson, as a 8 member of the board; nor was Bert Ladd, who was head of Ladd Petroleum, which we had taken over. None of the three of us were in the meeting. But when the merger was presented formally to the board, Ed indicated it had been discussed in executive session and that they had approved it. We had an interesting board…there were some very well-known people like Bill Hewlett, Arjay Miller, Ernie Arbuckle—I’m forgetting names—then there was the head of Wells Fargo Bank, Carl Reichardt. There were representatives of the families. Tommy Dee, Val Browning, Paul Wattis, Jr.—well, Pat Wattis was on it and when he died his son Paul Wattis Jr. came onboard. Oh, and George Eccles, of course. He was a very strong man. He was head of the audit committee and a very strong individual. I thoroughly enjoyed George Eccles. JS: How did George differ from Marriner? BM: I think he was a little more relaxed. One time we needed something for the stockholder’s meeting, so I sent my assistant, Joyce Schlegel, a very pretty blonde, to get it from the office. She’s a very pretty blonde and she was carrying all this stuff— George just laughed. He thought it was funny. He just got the biggest tickle out of it. JS: I guess he and Marriner would butt heads every now and again. BM: Oh I’m sure. They were strong personalities, both of them. They were very, very bright and, of course, Marriner…you know all the history of the Eccles family, the two sides of it and all of that, I don’t need to go into that. But it was because of Marriner that there were the “wealthy” Eccles and then the “other” Eccles. JS: That’s right. It is interesting what you said a few minutes ago about being able to associate with somebody you’ve read about—even Spencer Eccles credits Marriner as 9 a big part of his graduate education. BM: Oh, I just loved it when they’d sit there in his office and I could listen to them talk. JS: Except the day before the board meeting? BM: Except the day before the board meeting! That day I couldn’t do it, and I just didn’t feel like I could walk into Marriner’s office and sit down—he would tell me about something else. JS: So, what you’re saying is Bud Wilson was an operations person? BM: Yes. And I don’t believe he knew about the merger until the day before the board meeting. Bert Ladd found out about it the same time I did, I think. And he was a bit concerned because he talked to his people at Ladd Petroleum, and had joined Utah because of Ed Littlefield running the company. He knew Ed and he knew the way he did it and he knew that they would still run the show. And, of course, under Reg Jones we still ran our show out here. It wasn’t until Jack Welch came along that people moved in on top of us. JS: So, you were associated with the company between the time of the merger and the sale to BHP? BM: Oh, yes. I was associated with the company from 1957 to 1987. The BHP people came up here. Jack Parker stayed on the board; Reg Jones went off the board. John Burlingame from GE was on the board for a while, too, but he did not stay. I think only Jack Parker stayed. JS: You mentioned Ladd was a little concerned. Was he concerned that it would adversely affect his company? BM: Well, his company’s people. He had formed his company—it was called Ladd 10 Petroleum—and he had some good people working with him. I worked with them mostly by phone, especially during the merger because I handled the in-house legal department in part of the Ladd Petroleum, LVO, and GE mergers. I also worked with Margaret Gill, who was a partner in Pillsbury Madison and Sutro. She is a very bright attorney. She was the second woman partner at what we called “PM&S.” She was easy and fun to work with. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Margaret. JS: Was Utah an enjoyable company to work for? BM: Yes, very much so. There were times when the general counsel that we had…I liked him, he was capable, but he didn’t ever work hard and he was not ambitious. I wondered whether I should go elsewhere, but I didn’t want to. People did not leave often because it was a fun place to work. It was a very honest company, which was nice because you see all that’s going on in management today at some places. I’m sure it’s not typical across the board, but there’s certainly just enough of it. There was never anything of that sort at Utah. JS: That’s one thing that I have noticed, that there wasn’t a lot of turnover. People stayed for a long time. BM: People did stay, and people would come into my office. One said that somebody had proposed something in Indonesia—a kind of a bribery thing—and he wouldn’t have come visited me if he wanted me to not say no. I had two or three vice presidents who came in and brought it to me, and they knew I’d say no, which I did. They were pleased because that’s the reason they had come. JS: You gave them the answer they wanted to hear. That leads to another question. Literally, Utah International is operating with hostile governments in Latin America and 11 sometimes-hostile governments in Australia. BM: Oh, I think the very reason that Ed made that arrangement to sell the company was the prime minister of Australia. We always got along very well with the premier from Queensland, but not with the prime minister, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam passed a special tax that was applicable only to companies that made above “x” amount of money—which was Utah. Nobody else, not even BHP, the big Australian company, was affected. JS: So, it was designed specifically to tax Utah? BM: That’s correct. And, of course, in Peru, they nationalized Marcona. Although we got a contract on shipping from there and we still owned the ships. JS: I wonder what the Wattis brothers or even the Corey brothers would think of this little company out of Ogden, Utah, operating on this international scope. BM: Yes…I don’t know. I remember Lester Corey. He was on the board, and I’d see him at times at board meetings. I certainly met him, but I didn’t know him. JS: He was still on the board that late? BM: He was still on the board in the 1950s and into the 1960s. It’s come a long way from the Corey Brothers Construction Company. JS: What is your recollection of Allen Christensen? BM: He was a rather difficult person to deal with. I’ll just give one little vignette, which happened to me personally. Several months after I came onboard, Bill Pier left the company—Bill was head of the legal department—and then they brought in Albert Reeves as senior vice president. He was never general counsel because I don’t think he ever took the bar in California. Al did some legal things, but he never really 12 practiced law. He was senior vice president. At any rate, Bill decided to leave and they were right in the middle of negotiations. We built the Stockton Elevators and there were some problems with them, so Allen Christensen was negotiating the deal with the head of Stockton Elevators and Pacific Vegetable Oil. Then Bill left and all of a sudden it came into my lap. I went in to see Al Christensen and he mumbled; it was almost impossible to understand him. He was a pleasant enough guy but he didn’t communicate well. JS: He could’ve never operated in the way that Ed did. BM: No. He was more of an operating type. The strength of Ed and the strength of the company…Ed was the financial man, but he also knew the operations and there were good operating people around him and he listened to them. We would acquire properties all over the place. But if they weren’t economically feasible, we’d drop them. We got all kinds of wonderful properties in Alaska, out in the middle of the boonies, but it was not economically feasible. Ed could see if it was economically feasible. Ed is the guy who did the arrangements for the thing that got us into the mining business in a major way: Lucky Mc Uranium. Ed did the banking arrangements on that with First Security, Crocker, and Bankers Trust. I know that Crocker from down here was involved. Marriner Eccles was chairman of the Federal Reserve, chairman of First Security and chairman of Utah at the same time. That would not happen today. JS: What you’re describing, as I understand it, is Ed’s ability to see those kinds of people. He wasn’t looking for people that were like him; he was looking for people who could complement him. 13 BM: Yes. And he always asked: Is this thing practical? And he was better at working with people. Marriner said, “I just don’t know what’s going on with the company when Allen Christensen is running it.” That’s why he brought in Ed Littlefield. And that became the Executive Committee: Marriner Eccles, Allen Christensen, and Ed Littlefield. That was when I came onboard. JS: I gather that the board met quarterly? BM: Yes. JS: Did the Executive Committee meet more frequently? BM: They met as needed because they were all on the same floor. They were really in adjoining offices, especially when Marriner was here. Marriner always spent one day more than six months out of the state. He paid income taxes in Utah, not in California. [Laughter] He had a place in El Dorado and had the apartment here, but he also had a permanent apartment, I believe in the Utah Hotel in Salt Lake City. He spent more time out-of-state than he did in-state. JS: You mentioned you were president of the Commonwealth Club? Were you president when Eccles spoke about Vietnam? BM: I wasn’t president at the time but I was there when he gave the speech. JS: Tell me a little bit about that. BM: That goes back too many years for me to really recall his speech, but he was very forthright in his opinions. JS: Well, let me ask it a different way. In general, what was the reaction of corporate folks to his views of Vietnam? BM: Unquestionably, a lot of people agreed with him, but what they felt in corporate circles, 14 I don’t know. What they felt about Marriner being a New Deal Democrat, that would make a difference, too. He was really the architect of Roosevelt’s fiscal policy, and then he got in a fight with Harry Truman, of course. It told you a lot about Marriner because, by golly, he was not going to resign from that board. They couldn’t force him out, either; he had a fourteen-year term because chairman comes up at five years. He was a very strong individual. JS: One other name: Weston Bourret. BM: We knew him as Wes. He was head of exploration. He’s the guy who went where Lucky Mc was down at Riverton, Wyoming. He took a look up at the geology there and he said, “This looks good.” You probably know about Neil McNeice finding the Lucky Mc. JS: That was a major turning point for the company. BM: I was the counsel when we spent one month in Cheyenne, Wyoming, trying the SEC case [Knauff, et. al., Plaintiffs v. Utah Construction and Mining Company, et. al., Defendants]. That was brought against us because of the Lucky Mc merger, which was very interesting. We started out in the same courtroom in which Harry Sinclair was tried. Our judge, Ewing T. Kerr, was the third judge of the Wyoming District Court in the history of the state. It was 1967 and I was chairman of the Republican Committee for San Mateo County at that time. I always remember that date: that’s when our congressman died and when Shirley Temple Black ran for the seat. JS: So, you spent a month in Cheyenne? BM: Yes. We commuted back and forth every weekend. On Saturdays, we worked with the files and interviewed people here, then went back on Sunday evening. Every Monday 15 morning, Ewing T. Kerr would have a lineup of people who had stolen cars in California. [Laughter] This has nothing to do with the history of the company, but I thought it was interesting. There would be a policeman stationed at Evanston, Wyoming; he would watch for cars and he would get plates that were from stolen California cars. He would radio ahead to Green River and to Rawlings so they’d pick up the car when they went through those cities. JS: Well, that is interesting. BM: But any rate, we went up there and we spent the week up there. Most of management was up there. Marriner was not, Ed testified. Jack Bates was our counsel. Pillsbury Madison and Sutro was our general outside counsel. JS: We’ve talked about people, we’ve talked about projects, and we’ve talked about operating on a national and international stage. One thing we really haven’t talked about directly was the impact of Utah Construction on the Bay Area. BM: Well, we did building projects over in Alameda. We did a fill in Alameda. That may have triggered the “Save the Bay” group, so there was no more filling of the Bay. We did Bay Farm Island and South Shore. We developed those ourselves. It was a little difficult because I also represented Utah at some of the Alameda City Council hearings—Pillsbury Madison and Sutro represented first, and then later on I did. We set up reclamation districts. I was a trustee of the reclamation districts. There were two of them there—one for South Shore, one for Bay Farm. It was difficult for a company of our size to be a developer, because you get up before the council, and they will ask, “Will you do this, will you do that?” Well, the vice president in charge of the project would have constraints on how far he could go—he would have to go 16 back to the headquarters. It was better to have a developer standing there and saying, “Yes” or “No.” It just didn’t work that well, so then they brought in other developers as partners. I think some of the partners still maintain an investment today. JS: And, Utah was instrumental in building BART? BM: Yes, we worked on the tunnel under the bay. JS: Would people in San Francisco recognize Utah Construction as not just a “player,” but as a good citizen? BM: They do now. I had never heard of the company before I interviewed. The first day I came to work, there was a headline on the front of the paper: “Rub a dub dub, too many men in a tub!” There were a group of guys going out to work on the dredge and they overloaded the raft. The Coast Guard picked them up. So, here’s my first day and my wife opens the paper and says, “There you are on the front page.” Oops. [Laughter] We were not known. Now, when people say they worked for Utah Construction Company, they still know the old name—it’s Ed Littlefield’s company. It’s not known as Marriner’s or Allen Christensen’s, but Ed’s company. He became president of the Chamber of Commerce here. JS: In San Francisco? BM: Yes. He was also head of the Business Council, nationally. Normally, our company was not large enough to have somebody be head of the Business Council; that’s generally for very, very large corporations. We ultimately became part of the Fortune 500, but we were way down the list. It probably all happened through Marriner; he had all the contacts. When I was asking Ed how active I should be in Jr. Chamber, and whether it was alright to go ahead and do this thing or that, like the Commonwealth 17 Club, he told me Marriner had encouraged him to become head of the Chamber. JS: Was the company open to involvement in both politics and business? BM: Well, there were two of us who were presidents of the Commonwealth Club. Charlie Travers, who was head of the commercial land development department, was also a president of the club. They were encouraging outside activity. Not necessarily political—I think I’m the only one who was active politically. JS: There was no attempt on the part of the company to say, “We need to have some of our people involved in Republican politics and some of our people involved in Democratic.” BM: I’m unaware of it. I was thoroughly involved in Republican politics, as you know, when I was chairman of the San Mateo Republican Committee. Well, that was nights and weekends. JS: There was not a problem? BM: Occasionally I’d have to take a day off when we had a state committee meeting, or when I was an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach in 1968. JS: So, you would have been involved during the Reagan years? BM: Yes. I was county chairman when Reagan was elected governor both times. That guy was an amazing person. I introduced him at the College of San Mateo when he spoke. He had the little blue cards which you read about and they were in felt-tip pen. Some pickets were there and he answered their questions. Later on, when he was governor, I was president of the Commonwealth Club. He used the same old blue cards and handled questions quickly. A lot of people didn’t give him enough credit. He 18 was very smart on his feet. JS: It was a crucial period here when Brown beat Nixon and then when Reagan beat Brown. There was a lot of shifting around. BM: Oh yes. But, I think we got along with everybody. Pat Brown and Jerry both spoke when I was president of the Commonwealth Club. You never met a more charming person than Pat. He was a genuine charmer; his son was the opposite. We had enough Democrats in the company to be sure. Bill Pier, who I talked about earlier, was a Democrat. Albert Reeves had been a Republican congressman from Missouri. JS: In Utah, they thought Marriner was a Democrat. When he ran for the Senate in the Republican primary in 1952, a lot of people said, “Oh, I thought he was a Democrat.” BM: I always thought he was a Democrat, too. JS: One of the issues on the board was the question of profit sharing for employees. BM: That was before my time. That is the reason we went into Delaware. There was a meeting right before I came to work for the company, and at that time they moved from Utah to Delaware because Delaware law was much better known and settled. JS: So, they had their corporate offices there? BM: Not the corporate offices, that’s another interesting question. Ed said, “Bruce, look at the records. When did Utah move its corporate offices from Ogden to San Francisco?” I read everything and said, “Ed, I have no idea.” It was just a little bit more, a little bit more, and a little bit more. They were in the Crocker Building on Montgomery Street before they moved to the Shell Building. But, it just happened bit-by-bit. Probably in part because Christensen lived here. I didn’t hear this directly, but at one time the company was thinking of moving to 19 Palo Alto and building a headquarters down there. It was reported that Marriner said, “If we can go to Palo Alto, we can go back to Salt Lake.” That ended that. JS: Well, that’s interesting. BM: It was by osmosis. And it really happened during World War II. JS: E.O. and W.H. were gone by then. BM: Yes, those people were gone. Christensen was company president. Ed was not with the company at the time. He comes later on. JS: I’m trying to think if there is anything else I need to ask you. You’ve been very helpful and very generous with your time. I appreciate your willingness to sit down and discuss the company. BM: I’m very happy to. It was a wonderful place to work. I’m very proud and happy to have worked there.