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Jay King, Hometown News 
If anything can be said to characterize Jimmy Littlefield’s career in education, it must surely be Divine Providence that created circumstances that led almost inexorably into administration.
The product of District One schools and 1965 graduate of Chapman High School attended Wofford College for four years on a basketball scholarship and graduated from the ROTC program in 1969 almost certainly headed to Vietnam.
His first set of orders had him reporting for service in July of 1970. Returning to District One, he approached Superintendent H.E. Hipp for a job in teaching until he had to report. With a degree in social studies, Littlefield was hired to teach world geography for a year.
“I thoroughly enjoyed that year,” Littlefield recalls.
With the approach of his time to report for active service, Littlefield was sent to Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis to attend administrative school. It looked certain at that point that he would be ordered to Fort Bliss, Texas and thence on to Vietnam, but timing and Providence intervened.
The war was winding down – or at least America’s involvement in it – and Littlefield was chosen to leave the service and go into the reserves. This opened the door for him to return to District One and re-enter education.
In October of 1970 he assumed the duties of a teacher who had fallen ill with cancer and was asked to teach the remainder of the year. He signed a contract to come back in 1971 to teach geography, but in the interim the death of Roy Johnson at the district office created an opening that Hipp asked Littlefield to fill,
“Here I am, 24 years old and Mr. Hipp wants to see me in his office,” Littlefield recalls. “He wanted me to take Mr. Johnson’s place.”
And so Littlefield’s career spanning decades and momentous changes in education began. Starting out as the Federal Projects Coordinator, Littlefield would spend the next 39 years in the same building.
For the rest of the story, see this week’s Inman Times.
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