Frances Hutner

Frances “Frankie” Hutner, 95, formerly of Princeton, died on April 18, 2014 at her home in Ripton, Vermont after a brief illness.

Frankie was born in Middlebury, Vermont to the late Ellsworth B. and Louise Mix Cornwall. She attended a one-room schoolhouse on Route 7, Middlebury High School, and Middlebury College where she majored in economics and was Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year. An accomplished tennis player and skier, she was captain of the first Middlebury College Women’s Ski Team. She received a scholarship to Columbia University where she earned a PhD in economics in the late 1940s and was one of the only women in her program.

On graduating from Columbia, Frankie taught economics at Smith College. While teaching at Smith, she met her future husband, Simeon Hutner, on a visit with a friend to an army base in Dover, Delaware, where he was the quartermaster. After their initial blind date and only a few more visits, Sim asked Frankie to marry him. She initially declined, but while driving her back from Dover to Northampton, Massachusetts, he won her over just outside of New Haven, Connecticut, where they were married that afternoon, on November 15, 1943, by a justice of the peace.

After the war, both Frankie and Sim taught at Smith and then at Kenyon College in Ohio before settling in Princeton, New Jersey, where Sim earned his PhD, also in economics, shortly after Frankie earned hers — a point of amusement that she enjoyed reminding him of periodically.

They spent the next four decades in Princeton where they raised five children, and where Frankie had roots in the previous two generations. Her grandfather, Henry B. Cornwall, was a chemist who came to Princeton University as a professor of mineralogy in the late 1870s/early 1880s. In 1904, when the department of geology was formally established, he was one of six founding members of the department.

Henry’s son, and Frankie’s father, Ellsworth B. Cornwall, was born and raised in Princeton in a house next to the Nassau Presbyterian Church, where Holder Hall now sits. The house was moved long ago to Boudinot Street. Several family members attended Princeton University, including Frankie’s father, brother, husband, nephew, and her two daughters.

Frankie continued teaching economics at Rider University, Rutgers University, and Stevens Institute of Technology. She was one of the founders of the Princeton Research Forum, a community of independent scholars in the Princeton area. She was a member of the board of the Princeton Recreation Department during the time when facilities such as Community Park were established. She was a close friend and supporter of Eve Kraft and the Princeton Community Tennis Program. She was a member of the Pretty Brook Tennis Club and a Friend of the Institute for Advanced Study. She was a decades-long member of the AAUW. She was also on the boards of directors of Central Vermont Public Service and Green Mountain College.

She wrote two books: Equal Pay for Comparable Worth, and Our Vision and Values: Women Shaping the 21st Century.

In 1990 Frankie and Sim moved to Ripton, where she remained after Sim’s death in 2003. She was a member of the Unitarian Church, the AAUW, and the Vermont Women’s Fund. She continued to play tennis and ski almost until her death. She is survived by four of her five children, Dan, Nat, Louise, and Simeon, and nine grandchildren. She was predeceased by her daughter, Liz, and her grandson, Sam.

Burial will be private. The family will have a memorial service, to which all are welcome, in Mead Chapel at Middlebury College on Saturday, May 31, 2014 at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Middlebury College and the Vermont Women’s Fund.