Edmund Wattis Littlefield
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Edmund Wattis Littlefield (1914 -2001) was a prominent California businessman and philanthropist. Littlefield was the grandson of Edmund Orson Wattis, Jr, one of the founders of Utah Construction. Littlefield started his business career as a water boy for the Utah Construction Company. He received an undergraduate degree in 1936 and an MBA in 1938 from Stanford University. During World War II he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy and an analyst on petroleum supplies for the war effort.
In 1951, Littlefield return to Utah Construction Company as the vice president of finance. He became the general manager and principal officer of Utah Construction Company in 1958. Under his leadership, Utah Construction Company became the most profitable mining and land development company in the United States in the 1960s, and in 1976 merged with GE in the largest corporate merger at that time. The merger and subsequent appreciation of GE stock gave Littlefield ranking on the Forbes 400 list of weathiest Americans with a net worth of $2.3 billion in 2001.
Littlefield served on the boards of some of the largest corporations in America, including GE, Bechtel Investment, Chrysler, Del Monte, Hewlett-Packard and Wells Fargo Bank.
As a philanthropist, Littlefield built the Edmund W. Littlefield Center, which houses the Stanford Business School faculty and classrooms.
