viii UTAH INTERNATIONAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF A BUSINESS addition to facilitating interviews with every senior officer still associated with the company. He also made himself completely available. His sole condition was one about which I had misgivings. He insisted on being the final arbiter on any material written for the general public. However, the only time he ever exercised this prerogative was in withholding a single page in the corporate board minutes. It contained a strategic statement for entering a particular country. Given this mandate and support, I devoted several months to reading and digesting seventy-six years of monthly board meeting minutes and annual shareholder meeting minutes, information which would constitute the factual spine of the story. I was amused by the picturesqueness of the early minutes. For example, at one point the company’s assets included a numerical count of its horse collars and spittoons. Similarly, unpopular personnel decisions were recorded with little heed to the litigious potential of such straight talk. Once this foundational research was in place, I branched out. I conducted interviews with scores of founding family members, their friends, and retired employees. I spent a great deal of time with Ed Littlefield, who, representing the third generation of family leadership, held a phenomenal grasp of the company’s history and evolution. During Utah’s fifty years as a small firm, it engaged in such landmark engineering/construction projects of the twentieth century as Hoover Dam and the Alcan Highway. From there, it went on to become a multinational success story in mining and construction. Utah’s people shared with me numerous historic and contemporary journals and correspondence, adding color and personal interest to what might otherwise have been an honest-butdull, celebratory recitation of company facts and accomplishments. The goal was to create a one-volume record of the company’s numerous projects that would be interesting for the casual reader, educational for the student of American business, and helpful in pointing more serious scholars toward deeper documentary resources. I drafted a few chapters, which Littlefield approved; but the magnitude of the project, which I was doing in evenings and weekends, soon convinced me that a collaboration would be