, May 2004. Littlefield was born on November 21, 1949, in
San Francisco,
California. He was the son of
Edmund Wattis Littlefield and Jeannik Méquet Littlefield. His father was
CEO of
Utah Construction Company, his mother is a strong supporter of the arts and a member of the Chairman's Council of the
San Francisco Opera. Littlefield's fascination with military vehicles started as a child, when he started building
plastic models of them. In college he built his first
remote control scale model tank. He obtained his first full-size military vehicle in 1975, a World War II era
M3 Scout Car. In 1998 he set up the
Military Vehicle Technology Foundation to manage his collection of over 150 vehicles and restore more. He grew up in
Burlingame and attended Norma Moore Grade School in Burlingame, the Carey School in
San Mateo, and the
Cate School in
Carpinteria before studying at
Stanford University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1971 and an MBA two years later. He worked for
Hewlett Packard for five years as a manufacturing
engineer before focusing solely on building his museum and restoration facility. Littlefield served on the boards of the
General George Patton Museum, the Cate School, the
Coyote Point Museum for Environmental Education, the
Hoover Institution, the
California Academy of Sciences, and the
Filoli Center. He was a member of the
Bohemian Club where he was a Captain of the
Sempervirens camp. Following a decade-long battle with
colon cancer, Littlefield died on January 7, 2009. On July 11 and 12, 2014, 160 vehicles of the Littlefield collection were auctioned off to fund the creation of a new museum to display the collection. The
American Heritage Museum at the
Collings Foundation headquarters in
Stow, Massachusetts, had its grand opening in May 2019 and displays over 85 vehicles of the Littlefield collection. ==References==