during World War I, Alfred du Pont and other minority shareholders launched a lawsuit against Pierre du Pont, alleging that he had acted as an agent of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours company, who should be rightful holders of the shares. The suit was extremely well publicized and acrimonious. In 1916, shortly after company shareholders voted to remove Alfred du Pont from its board of directors, the United States District Court found that Pierre du Pont had operated in bad faith, ordering a stockholder vote to determine if the stockholders (aside from those who owned the disputed shares) wished to purchase the disputed shares. By a share ratio of 33:13, shareholders did not, and, accordingly, in 1918, the court dismissed the action. Alfred du Pont brought an appeal which ended unsuccessfully in March 1919. No longer involved in running E.I. du Pont de Nemours, du Pont instead began to invest in newspapers, as a publisher of which he successfully opposed T. Coleman du Pont's bid for the presidency and Henry A. du Pont's third run for the Senate. According to the du Pont Trust, he also "established an investment firm, Nemours Trading Corporation, and an import-export business in New York" and acquired a majority interest in the Delaware Trust Company. Widowed and third marriage A bad business transaction had left him nearly bankrupt when, in January 1920, his second wife died. Missing an eye since his earlier accident, he was now also nearly deaf. But his life was about to change with his third marriage. Du Pont had been corresponding with Jessie Ball, 20 years his junior, since the time of their meeting in 1898 when she was 14. By 1920, Ball was an assistant principal at an elementary school in San Diego, California, and du Pont began courting her, at the same time divesting himself of assets and cutting back on spending. He wed Ball on January 22, 1921, and the couple returned to the East Coast to settle into Nemours. The couple had no children of their own, but Ball du Pont accepted young Denise, a child du Pont had fostered with his second wife, as her own. She also helped mend rifts between du Pont and the estranged children of his first marriage. Ball du Pont proved to be a great assistance to him as well in his work, as did her younger brother. Edward Ball