In 1925, doctors at Lafayette’s Home Hospital weren’t overly optimistic when Marjorie Frantzreb was born weighing slightly more than a memory.

When you tipped the scales at just over 3 pounds in those days, the parents would get little more than a “We did the best we could” from the doctors. Technology was a prayer.

But what Marjorie had that other low-birthweight babies did not, what kept her alive, was a guardian angel of a father named Truman E. Hienton, a Purdue faculty member from 1924 to 1946 (on military leave 1941-45).

Hienton was one of Purdue Agriculture’s pioneering Extension specialists. He taught farmers how to keep better records of fieldwork, control erosion, maintain machinery during winter months, even how to clear farm ground of unwanted tree stumps by blasting them out of the ground using dynamite left over from World War I.

And as leader of the Farm Electrification Project in the ’20s and ’30s, Hienton helped electrify the state of Indiana, one farm at a time.

“One of his jobs with Extension was to make electricity look good to farmers,” Marjorie says.

He was good at it.

When Hienton started at Purdue, records indicate that about 3,000 Indiana farms were electrified. By the time World War II concluded, owners of 130,000 Hoosier farms could see the light because of electricity.

For his work, Hienton received an honorary doctorate from Purdue in 1950. He was elected a fellow by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers in 1938 and received their Cyrus Hall McCormick Medal for exceptional and meritorious engineering achievement in agriculture in 1967.

But Hienton paid a price for a career spent traveling from one Hoosier farmstead to the next.

“It sure seemed like he wasn’t home very often,” Marjorie recalls. As much as she loved her dad, his absence forced young Marjorie to make a promise to herself: “I vowed I would never marry an agricultural engineer because they were always working.”

Hienton spent a lot of time teaching hog farmers how to use electricity to heat small incubators to keep low-birthweight pigs alive. It’s what kept Marjorie alive, too.

“Doctors didn’t give me much of a chance back then,” Marjorie says, “since I was so small. My dad took one look at me at that hospital and he knew exactly what to do.”

Hienton took one of his pig incubators, cleaned it, dressed it up with a little white bonnet, and placed his newborn daughter inside. The thermostatically controlled heat pad gave Marjorie the strength she needed to fight for her life.

A life she reflects on 80 years later with but one regret.

“I never got to tell him how proud I was of him,” she says. “How proud I was of the work he had done. But had he not been an agricultural engineer back then, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”
Fifty-six years ago, Marjorie broke her vow and married Walter Frantzreb, BS ’48, a member of Purdue Agriculture’s first graduating class in agricultural engineering. They live comfortably in Westfield, Ind.

Truman Hienton would be just as proud of his daughter as she is of him.

Contact Frantzreb at frantzrebm@mail.gotown.net