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With Reed in place and Frank ostensibly removed from the case, Governor McFarland, AISC, and others that comprised the Arizona brain trust agreed that further changes were needed to upgrade the legal team. McFarland wanted “the best litigator available in the State of Arizona.” He asked Mark Wilmer to meet him at the Capitol on March 18, 1957. Joining the governor and Wilmer at this momentous meeting were Victor Corbell, president of the Salt River Project; Superior Court Judge Charles Bernstein; AISC chairman Wayne Akin; Charles Reed, the newly installed chief counsel; and Frank Snell, Wilmer’s partner.1 “I don’t remember there being any extended discussion,” Wilmer recalled in 1989. “I had talked with Charlie Reed a little bit about it” and knew the case was in disarray. Wilmer said that it was “sort of a delicate situation.… Charlie [Reed] and I had talked about it quite a bit … I had previously employed him in cases and we had worked together before. They explained to me what a problem they had … the problem with John P. Frank and the problem with everything. So, I had a general knowledge of where the thing was, but I wasn’t particularly up on it.… Anyway, McFarland simply said that it had reached a point where they were going to make a change and, ‘We’re advised by the local Bar that they recommend you.’ We didn’t have a hell of a lot to talk about … because I knew generally what it was all about and I knew it was in a hell of a mess and I guess I felt I had no choice.”2 The evening prior to this fateful meeting, Governor McFarland had called Wilmer at his home, told him that the Arizona Bar Association, and virtually everyone else in the legal community, recommended that he take over the Arizona v California case. After hanging up the phone and informing his wife and four children that he was visiting Governor McFarland the next day, he added that he might be doing “the biggest thing in history, or else I might get run out of town.”3 Chapter Six ENTER MARK WILMER Much was at stake for Wilmer and his increasingly prominent law firm. During the 1940s and 1950s, Snell & Wilmer had become much more than an institutional legal giant; in many ways it now shaped the state’s civil, economic, and political agenda. Significantly, Joseph T. Melczer, Jr., and James Walsh, Wilmer’s former housemate and legal partner in the 1930s, joined the firm shortly after World War II and it became known as Snell, Wilmer, Walsh, and Melczer. Then, Edwin Beauchamp arrived, and his name was added to the letterhead. Recognizing the unwieldy nature of the firm’s name, Walsh, the lawyer to whom everyone went with tough problems, in 1950 suggested that the firm name be shortened to Snell & Wilmer.4 All agreed. In the 1950s, as the firm grew in attorney numbers and prestige, it located its offices in the Heard Building in downtown Phoenix. More importantly, the firm’s regional prominence and contributions to the bar and the community were increasingly noteworthy. Wilmer, as evidenced by his appointment to try the Arizona v California case, had established his position as the preeminent trial lawyer in Arizona. Snell, on the other hand, had emerged as a visionary who helped Phoenix and Arizona capitalize on post–World War II economic and cultural opportunities. For example, he was instrumental in the merger of the state’s two largest utilities into Arizona Public Service and also helped find a constructive use for an abandoned World War II flight training facility in Glendale. The American Graduate School of International Management— the Thunderbird School—continues to play a key role in training graduate students in the complex area of international and global economic issues. His efforts at reforming the corrupt city government with fellow community leaders Walter Bimson, Sherman Hazeltine, and Eugene Pulliam, among others, laid the groundwork for a more efficient local and state government that needed to address the needs of thousands of returning veterans and their families after World War II. And, during the 1950s, as Arizona v California wound its way from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., Snell and other members of the firm worked quietly yet diligently to end segregation in Arizona.5 Just prior to the announcement that Wilmer would join the state’s legal team in Arizona v California, John P. Frank...

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