Upon his return from a trip to Europe, banker George Eccles, left, was met by his brother Marriner Eccles. Having cut his political teeth on fraternity dynamics, Ed Littlefield now perceived unrest among UCC shareholders. "By the fall of 1944 the W. H. Wattis family made overtures to the E. 0. Wattis family," he related. "They wanted to bury the hatchet and have the two Wattis families oust both Marriner [Eccles, chairman of the Board of Directors,] and Les [Corey, president and general manager,] and take over control of the company." Littlefield attended the family meeting and suggested that the central issue was ending nepotism. The consensus reached by the discussion's end, at least as Littlefield understood it, was to reduce the influence of Eccles and Corey through recruiting an experienced general manager - someone unrelated to the Eccleses, the Wattises, or the Dees. To Littlefield's surprise, he learned within weeks that a member of the W. H. Wattis family had accepted a position as Corey's assistant, rendering the Wattis-Wattis alliance null and void. It then occurred to Littlefield that the family troika could be tipped in the opposite direction to achieve the same result. "I advocated we change our family strategy into one in which we would assure Marriner Eccles full support on any change or program he wished to advance that was in the best interest of the company shareholders," Littlefield explained. "In support of my position, I pointed out that Marriner Eccles had a very successful record and was generally regarded as a very capable individual. "In the UCC [Eccles] required the support of one or the other Wattis family to maintain his control. We, [the E. 0. Wattis branch] treated him as an enemy, and he was dependent upon the W. H. Wattis family to keep his position secure. If we removed the need for him to cater to, or accommodate, their wishes, I was confident he would be willing to pursue a course that would be to the benefit of all the shareholders...."