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Remembering longtime neighborhood leader Joyce Littlefield
Joyce Littlefield died April 24 at the age of 85. The longtime neighborhood activist and leader was profiled by former West End Word editor Eileen Duggan when Littlefield retired in 1990 from Maryland Plaza Redevelopment Corp. That article is reprinted below. But as many of us know, “retirement” just meant extra time for Littlefield to devote to many causes, from protecting Forest Park to “getting out the vote” to helping organize church functions at the Cathedral Basilica.
But for myself and for many others, Littlefield was also a neighbor and a friend. She loved kids and always had a treat for my own children when they would walk over to visit her. My kids would stay for a while, but then she’d get a phone call…someone else needing her to help save this, organize that or fight for something.
A memorial mass for Littlefield was held May 5 at the Cathedral Basilica. Memorial donations may be made to St. Louis Cathedral School, 4430 Maryland Ave., St. Louis, Mo. 63108.
—Jeff Fister
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After 16 years with Maryland Plaza Redevelopment Corp. and many more years of serving the city, Joyce Littlefield is retiring to relax and pursue her own interests.
Littlefield, 66, retired June 30 as executive vice president of MPRC, exactly 16 years after she helped start the organization with former Mayor Alfonso J. Cervantes on July 1, 1974.
“I don’t know how good they were, but they’ve been fun,” Littlefield says of the many deeds she’s done for the city.
In addition to her work in revitalizing the Central West End with MPRC, she was a founding member of the group that later became the St. Louis Visitors Center. She has worked on the campaigns of two mayors and several bond issues, served on the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council and has been a part of several neighborhood groups and projects.
A St. Louis native, Littlefield attended local schools as a child. “I have had a love affair with St. Louis for a long time,” she says.
She turned down, however, a four-year scholarship to a local college because at that time she wanted to leave town. She went instead to Miss Hickey’s Secretarial School, now The Hickey School, and got a job in St. Louis right away.
Her idea to leave town was put to rest when she married Arthur “Pete” Littlefield on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1948. From 1942 to 1948 she worked as a legal secretary for a prestigious law firm, then moved into part-time work while she raised five children, now aged 26 to 39. One of her jobs — a far cry from legal work — was teaching ice skating.
The Littlefields became active in neighborhood work in 1955 when Pete became the second president of the Rosedale Skinker Improvement Association. Later Joyce became the fourth president of the organization and her career as a neighborhood activist was off and running. She was also chairman of the citywide Inter-Association of Neighborhood Organizations, a name she was always embarrassed to recite.
“The name was bigger than I was,” says Littlefield, whose petite frame reaches to little more than five feet tall. As chairman of that organization, she says she managed to get an extra $1 million from the city for neighborhood rehabs.
In 1965, Littlefield chaired the Women’s Committee of the Bicentennial Festival Committee, which decided to feature city neighborhoods in their portion of the festival and put on a 10-day party featuring 10 hours per day of entertainment, including family picnics, bus tours and fireworks. The festival also included the first Hill Day.
“The people of St. Louis really put their neighborhoods on display,” Littlefield says. “Everybody was willing to do really nice things for us.”
The event was such a success that it was repeated the next year. The group later did several special events and evolved into the St. Louis Visitors Center, which recently had its 25th birthday.
Another thing that came out of the women’s Bicentennial Festival Committee was Littlefield’s meeting in 1965 with the new mayor, Alfonso J. Cervantes.
Because she had been a part of the campaign committee for former Mayor Raymond L. Tucker, just defeated by Cervantes, she wasn’t sure of the reception she would get when she was required to meet Cervantes as chairman of the bicentennial group.
It was, in fact, a good reception and “the beginning of a long, long friendship,” Littlefield says. “I care about A.J. like the brother I never had.”
She worked for Cervantes for the next eight years as assistant to his campaign manager, as a bond issue proponent and as campaign manager for the Convention Center bond issue in the fall of 1972.
After leaving office in 1973, Cervantes formed the Maryland Plaza Redevelopment Corp. with Littlefield and investor Harold Koplar, for the purpose of reversing a trend of deteriorating conditions in the Central West End. MPRC negotiated a redevelopment contract with city officials, which gave MPRC the right of eminent domain to acquire property around Maryland and Euclid avenues and renovate it.
One of the first projects of MPRC was Cervantes’ purchase of the Fairmont Hotel on the northwest corner of Maryland Plaza and Euclid Avenue. Cervantes informed new MPRC executive director Littlefield that she was going to manage the hotel; she replied that she didn’t know anything about it. “‘You’ll learn’ he told me. So the next day, I started managing a 99-room hotel,” she says.
In the beginning MPRC was “a full-time job and more,” Littlefield says. “I didn’t have a day off for two months when it first started.” In 1970, before becoming the nucleus of MPRC, Littlefield had organized with Del McClellan a group of CWE women concerned about the neighborhood, calling themselves Women For City Living.
“We can’t claim full credit for the turnaround [of the neighborhood], but it was at the same time as the turnaround,” Littlefield says. “We had enormous support and people would send us all this money.”
Women For City Living lasted about four years until McClellan turned her energies to another organization she had started with Salees Seddon, Women’s Crusade Against Crime. By then, Littlefield was becoming involved in her MPRC work.
Littlefield might have continued her work with MPRC, despite vague plans to cut down on her workload or retire, if the issue had not been forced by a heart attack in early June. After undergoing angioplasty and medication treatment, her recovery is progressing well, but she has found the health crisis a good impetus for joining her husband in retirement. Her family is in favor of the retirement, she says, admitting “it’s a little bit past due.”
“I don’t know when I’m going to find time to do all the things that I’m going to do,” she says. Her first major project is to “tackle the third floor” of the house and she has already issued a dictate that her children take their “stuff” that they left behind when they moved out on their own.
Littlefield’s management duties at MPRC will be taken over by June Kaeser, an MPRC staff member who has worked with the Koplar family for many years. The Koplar family owns 51 percent of MPRC, Kaiser says. Harold Koplar died in 1985 and Cervantes died in 1984; much of the MPRC property has passed on to their heirs.
“I’ve known Joyce for quite some time,” says Kaeser. “She has been a jewel to work with and has done a wonderful job as far as I’m concerned.
“We’re going to miss her, there’s no doubt about it.”
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