Ed Littlefield posed with his mother, Marguerite Wattis Hanke, and his stepfather, Joe Hanke, on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California. Courtesy of the Edmund W. and Jeannik Littlefield Foundation The summer he was 15, Ed got a job as a water boy with Utah Construction, which was building the Red Butte Dam, east of Salt Lake City. "My job was to fill two desert water bags at the base of the hill and carry them up the spillway that was under construction," Littlefield related. "For a 15-year-old youth, those water bags were wet and heavy, and the hemp rope bit through my cotton shirt and caused sores on my shoulders.... After the first day I had never been so tired in my life. My father put me in a tub of hot water and gave me a massage. I got used to the task after a couple of weeks. "Then the superintendent came to me and said, 'Son, you're slowing the whole job down by giving these fellows water to drink too often. Take it easy!' I then dared to suggest to him that it would make a lot more sense to fill the water bags at the bottom of the hill, then ride on one of the frequent trucks going to the top of the hill, and then carry the bags downhill, getting rid of the weight as I went. He agreed to this, and this made the job easier." The beginning of the Great Depression changed Hanke's plan for his stepson to attend private schools. The Littlefields moved to Beverly Hills, and Ed enrolled at the Beverly Hills High School. "Suddenly I was in a school with 1,800 students.... For the first time in my life I had to really meet people. I found it hard to start up conversations with strangers. "Until that time in my life, I had been called by my middle name, 'Wattis.' While I made some minor effort to change it at Tamalpais, it didn't survive my mother's corrections. Wattis was a fine name when you lived in Utah because everybody knew the name. But when I got to California, people didn't know whether it was Watts or Wallace. 1 [enrolled as] Edmund W. Littlefield [andl ... the teachers started to call me Ed. By the time my mother caught up with this, everybody I knew called me Ed. She finally let it stand." Ed graduated in 1932 as valedictorian of his class.