TAGS:<\/strong> Jane Bishop Hobgood, students, Pine Mountain Settlement School Association of Alumni & Friends, Mary Jane Bishop Hobgood, workers, English Country Dancing, PMSS Advisory Board, Birdena Bishop<\/p>\n Born\u00a0in December 1929, Mary Jane Bishop Hobgood spent her early adolescence at Pine Mountain where her widowed mother,\u00a0Birdena\u00a0Bishop,<\/strong><\/a> had taken a job in 1940 which over the years included teacher, dietician, community coordinator, and housemother. Birdena had come from Berea College where she had worked as an assistant cashier following her graduation from the college. Birdena, Jane, and Jane’s younger brother, James, moved into Far House<\/a> where the children mingled with the students housed in the small dormitory and had the advantages of the boarding school students.<\/p>\n Following her graduation from Pine Mountain Settlement School, Jane became a perpetual and active alumna of the Pine Mountain Settlement School (PMSS) for almost three decades. Her dedication to the School began\u00a0when she and her younger brother were boarding school students and continued as she grew her career, married, had three children and became an active force in guiding the School as an Advisory Board member.<\/p>\n During her high school years at Pine Mountain, Jane Bishop was involved in theater productions and English Country Dancing, interests that were to continue throughout her life. She, along with her brother, played parts in the School’s productions of\u00a0H.M.S. Pinafore<\/em> in 1940 and The Moonstone<\/em> in 1944. In a\u00a0resume she prepared for the PMSS Board of Trustees years later, she described her “lively” interest in folk arts which started at the Pine Mountain Settlement School and became a life-long passion.<\/p>\n After both Jane and James graduated in 1944, they attended Berea (KY) College, their mother’s alma mater. There, Jane earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Recreational Sociology, concentrating in Folk Arts, Dance, Music, Drama.<\/p>\n Jane then worked for two years, 1948-1950, as Director of Folk Arts and Recreation at the Hindman (Kentucky) Settlement School. It was a job that only deepened her appreciation and knowledge of Appalachian culture.<\/p>\n Furthering her education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Jane received her Master’s Degree in\u00a0Curriculum on Folklore with a focus on Folk Sociology and Cultural Anthology in 1952. This was followed by a two-year position with Berea College as\u00a0Itinerant Director of Recreation and Regional Arts with the Council of Southern Mountains.<\/p>\n When Jane Bishop married Burnet Mclean Hobgood in 1957, she continued to\u00a0teach dance and music and to direct a children’s theater workshop in Ithaca, New York,\u00a0on a part-time basis. After a move to Dallas, Texas, where Burnet became chairman of the theater program at Southern Methodist University School of Music, Jane continued her work in the field of education.<\/p>\n From the mid-1970s, Jane was actively involved with Pine Mountain School and its administration through her leadership in the PMSS Association of Alumni and Friends. She served as president, then vice-president, of the Alumni Association, and chaired various committees, as well as serving on the PMSS Advisory Board. For many years, she enjoyed attending the annual Pine Mountain Homecoming, as expressed in a February\u00a021, 1976, letter to John Deaton<\/a>, also an effective member of PMSS Alumni Association and former PMSS student in the 1940s:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Just seeing that many people from our own class, living breathing, coping, and back there for <\/span>one<\/span> day was a revelation\u2026. Very fundamental something-or-other there about \u201cSee? We all grew up and are reasonably good examples of what you, Pine Mountain, hoped we\u2019d be.”<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Jane’s contributions to the School were numerous and her dedication to the institution, fierce. She was particularly concerned about the future not only of the Alumni Association but the School itself. In her lengthy letters to John Deaton, she regretted the passivity of the then director and Board of Trustees, writing that<\/p>\n We believe that planning for Pine Mountain\u2019s future must rest with an administration attuned to the present and future — sensitive to history, but not hampered by it; leadership which is fully supported by an <\/span>active<\/span> Board.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Hobgood felt that an institution should preserve its culture at the same time it takes steps to move forward and stay vibrant. She describes a visit that she and her husband \u201cHob\u201d made to two isolated arts centers in rural England and one in Tennessee. They were impressed with how each center preserved \u201ca culture and its customs, its arts, its values — its parts that are worth saving.” But, she felt, preservation of such things depends upon the institution “having a <\/span>continuative life<\/span>!<\/span>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Hobgood also emphasized that the School’s programs should relate to the needs of the surrounding community. After attending a joint meeting of the\u00a0Advisory Council and Board of Trustees In July 1985, she summarized its findings to Deaton as “(a) the need for increased financial support for programs and facilities and (b) the need for significant educational programming and activities for the immediate community and region.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Her opinion of the newly installed environmental program, although she supported it, was that \u201cit has developed and operated as a separate entity and not as an integral part of the region in which it is located\u2026It must have value and meaning in the place where it exists.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Hobgood’s judgments of the School’s operations were manifestations of her devotion to Pine Mountain Settlement School and her belief in the School’s potential. After the 1990 Homecoming, Hobgood portrayed her time with Pine Mountain School friends to John and Faye Deaton<\/a> in a letter dated August 19, 1990:<\/p>\n It was a splendid time with all, the strange mixture of sorrow and simple joys, the almost intense poignancy of our times together, the on-goingness and certainty in our deep and abiding love of each other and that incredible place.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n In her later years, Jane contributed her life story to the PMSS archives through her\u00a0audio recording<\/a> of her singing Pine Mountain songs and through an oral history<\/a> that chronicles the boarding school years.<\/p>\n
\nJANE BISHOP HOBGOOD Student: Education and Experience<\/h3>\n
JANE BISHOP HOBGOOD Student:\u00a0Activities as PMSS Alumna<\/h3>\n
JANE BISHOP HOBGOOD Student:\u00a0Family<\/h3>\n