Chapter 6 87 REINVIGORATING MANAGEMENT vice president in name only but with continuing salary for another year. Wattis agreed, and, with repeated invitations, kept the vice president’s title until 1945 and his directorship until 1971. With Corey aging and showing little innovation, the limited scope of Bowman’s involvement and the departure of Wattis from active management raised a big question of successorship. Into the midst of this uncertainty came other vexing crosscurrents. The E. O. family suffered from a nagging bewilderment over why E. O. had not received the presidency upon the death of W. H., while the W. H. group wanted Bowman to become general manager. Eccles, on the other hand, hoped to preserve the financial strength of Utah with a competent general manager, who—in his mind—was not Bowman. All of this had kept Corey in charge while the company invariably drifted. To break this impasse, the W. H. family moved to create an alliance between the two Wattis families against Eccles. During the Christmas season of 1943, Stella and George Bowman contacted Ezekiel (Zeke) Dumke (E. O.’s daughter Edna’s husband) and Paul Wattis to arrange a meeting of the two groups in Ogden. Wattis and Shephard (Shep) Mitchell (husband of E. O.’s daughter Veda Ruth) invited Edmund Wattis Littlefield, son of Edmund A. and Marguerite Wattis Littlefield (E. O.’s daughter). The younger Littlefield was then busy in Washington working for the Petroleum Administration for War, but he agreed to attend as a representative of the E. O. family. At the meeting from the W. H. side were the Bowmans, their son Donald Wattis Bowman, and Martin McNamara, representing his mother-in-law, Mary McNamara Brown (W. H.’s granddaughter). Shortly after the meeting began, the W. H. representatives recommended that the two families unite in replacing Eccles and Corey with their own management group. “With all the confidence of a twenty-nine-year-old,” Littlefield later recalled, he listened to the discussion and then said, “I think we ought to talk about getting together, but I want to observe that there is too much nepotism in this company. As a guiding principle, we should find the best qualified person, outside of the company, to run it.” By his own assessment, “Everyone agreed to that proposal, but it wasn’t thirty days before Jerry Seale (George and Stella Bowman’s son-in-law)