The Gene Pruitt Legacy is a paperback biography of Gene Pruitt, a 73 year-old Indiana farmer with a unique approach to farming. He grew up on a true tenant farm, where he learned to love draft horses and farm animals. After high school graduation, he worked for a number of years on the original Lilly Pharmaceutical Experimental Farm helping test new animal drugs. His years with Lilly were interrupted briefly for a tour of duty with the U.S. Army's Corporal Missile Unit in Italy. Later, on his own farm, Gene Pruitt ventured into a rare specialty hog operation--the Specific Pathogen Free (SPF) program, in which he raised purebred Yorkshire hogs guaranteed free of devastating diseases for the purpose of repopulating and enlarging other farmer's herds. The book details how the medical profession has come to rely on SPF pig parts for use as implants in humans. It also examines the Corporal Missile program that Mr. Pruitt was involved in, and it explores the Lilly Experimental Farm pursuits and the Elanco corporate history near Greenfield, Indiana. The book is 230 pages long, contains over 100 illustrations and is underwritten in part by corporate grants. The Gene Pruitt Legacy is the third book in the Legacy Tree Books Indiana Biography Project. The Cecil Westerhouse Legacy and The David and Connie Stevenson Legacy preceded it, and are sold out. Grantors and the publisher hope that more sponsors will participate so that additional books in the project can be distributed in high school libraries, Indiana rooms of public libraries and historical societies throughout Indiana.
About the Author: Larry Kaiser grew up on a farm east of Arcadia, Indiana. As a boy driving his father's tractor for long hours back and forth across the fields, he wrote stories in his head to combat tedium. Off the tractor, the chores done for that one day, he taught himself oil painting in the evenings, setting up his canvas and paint on the family dining table and then clearing it all away before going to bed. At Pan American University in Texas in 1957, he majored in art and English, after which he taught in public schools for six years. Then, in the Army in the mid-1960s, the Defense Department trained him as an Information Officer, essentially a publicist for the Army. Those duties-in addition to the normal infantry officer's jungle and mud responsibilities-put his writing and art abilities to work, taking him to David's Island off the coast of New York, to Hawaii and to Vietnam. In addition to leading a platoon in Vietnam, he helped write speeches for General Officers, supervised the publication of the weekly 25th Infantry newspaper and contributed articles updating the archives of the 25th Infantry Division's military history. Eight years later, the public interest in his paintings took charge of his life. He then fashioned an art career creating gallery paintings for art dealers around the world for over thirty years. Art dealers have published more than 100 of his paintings as limited and open edition prints, and over his art career Larry has sold over 10,000 original oils and another 100,000-plus prints. He began the novel Joseph's Easel in 1998, and work on it continues through the present with occasional interruptions to fulfill an order for a portrait.