In the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, Kidder Peabody was in a perilous situation. In 1931, Albert H. Gordon bought the struggling firm with financial backing from Stone & Webster. Since electric utilities were considered somewhat risky, Stone & Webster set up its own investment banking operation to finance their own projects through bond sales. Many of the utilities were municipally owned and Stone & Webster's investment banking unit served them in other offerings. Eventually, as fewer investment banking clients were engineering clients, there was an incentive to divest and merge the unit with another investment bank. Edwin Webster's father, Frank G. Webster, was a Senior Partner of Kidder Peabody, and Kidder had actively supported Charles A. Stone and Edwin as they started The Massachusetts Electrical Engineering Company, which later became Stone & Webster, in the 1890s. Gordon helped rebuild Kidder Peabody by focusing on specific niche markets including utility finance and municipal bonds. Stone & Webster had thus become an integrated company which designed utility projects, built them, financed them, and operated them for municipalities.