Dr. Janet
Hubly Noever
November 22, 1937 ~ February 20, 2020 (age 82)
Dr.
Janet Hubly Noever passed away peacefully on February 20, 2020, at the age of
82 following a stroke. After three decades of teaching, she retired as an
American history professor at Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma,
where she also served as a departmental chair and college dean for several
years. Her courses in American and Women’s History, which she pioneered in
Oklahoma, touched the lives of thousands of students. In retirement, she
followed her three great passions: family genealogy, doll collecting and quilting.
Janet
was born the second of four children in Houston, Texas to Anton and Genevieve
(Black) Hubly. At Lamar High School, she became a skilled competitive debater
and traveled nationally to speech tournaments. She earned her bachelor’s degree
in history from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where she was a member
of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. At SMU, she met and eventually married her
late husband, Robert, a seminary student. At the University of Oklahoma, Janet
earned her two master’s degrees and Doctorate in American history, while also
teaching and raising her two children, Nancy and David. She started her first
graduate history courses when her children entered grade school and earned her
Ph.D. the year her daughter graduated from college. In her published research,
she highlighted the historical struggle for fairness and equal representation:
“Perle
Mesta: An Ardent Feminist” - a biographical study of the Truman-era
diplomat
“Passionate Rebel: Mary Gove Nichols 1810-1884” - her doctoral thesis on the
nineteenth-century advocate for health reform, hydrotherapy, and women’s
wellness.
“Women in Oklahoma Territory: 1889-1907.” – a massive bibliography of the
contributions of Oklahoma pioneer women.
“Votes for Women, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution: A Researcher's
Notebook,” - documenting her research into the figures and events important to
women’s suffrage.
She
looked forward to celebrating the centennial anniversary of women’s right to
vote in August 2020.
As
a college administrator at Rose State College, she chaired the social science
division from 1990-1991 and served as its dean from 1991-1992 during a period
when the fifty-year old college expanded rapidly to its large current
enrollment of 7500 students. While a departmental dean, Marquis “Who's
Who” listed her as a noteworthy college administrator. Her first loves
were always research and teaching, so she returned to the classroom and the
world’s great libraries in 1992. During her academic career, she earned numerous
research grants, including seminars at UCLA (1973), Princeton (1977), Duke
(1983), Harvard-Radcliffe College (1985) and New York University (1988).
Inspired
by the gift of an orange-covered biography (as part of the Childhood of Famous
Americans series popular in the 1940s) Janet began exploring American history
as an eight-year-old child while honing her keen eye for the social context of
historical events. In retirement, that love of biography transformed into a
focus on curating the stories from her own family tree. A skilled researcher,
she, along with her sister, Bonnie, traced her family’s roots through their
three-century journey from the early 1700s. She compiled an extensive
chronology and essays interweaving historical context with personal stories documenting
her family’s migration to and across the US.
Janet
loved to sew. She learned to sew to make doll clothes as a child. As a teenager
with dreams of being a fashion designer, she would design and make gowns of
taffeta and satin for dances. Through most of her life, she made many of her
own clothes. As a mother, she made some of her children’s clothes. Her daughter
fondly remembers a childhood dress covered in pockets where treasures were
hidden and elegant prom dresses for her high school and college dances. An avid
doll collector, one of her hobbies was to make historically accurate doll
clothes depicting the changes in women’s fashion.
In
retirement, Janet focused on quilting. She made multiple quilts for her family
members, often themed around important events in their lives. Through the
Edmond Quilt Guild and as independent projects, she also made several hundred
donation quilts for the elderly, wheelchair-bound, children and babies in
foster care. Through a grant from the Central Oklahoma Quilters’ Guild,
Dr. Noever combined her love of history with her love of quilting when she
studied Seminole Patchwork. The Seminole Indians’ patchwork technique was one
of the factors leading to quick quilt making and the growing popularity of
quilting in the late twentieth-century. She gave several public talks outlining
what she had discovered from her latest research. She was active in
multiple Oklahoma quilting guilds and the community offered a generous circle
of new friends when she moved to Huntsville, AL.
In
a note left for her children, she expressed what quilting meant to her.
“Remember that I loved the process. It was the planning of the quilt, the
fabric shopping, the looking for patterns, the possibilities of it all, the
sewing of it, the nice women and friendships that developed, the trips I took
centered around the quilt world. All of this that I enjoyed. The whole quilt
world creativity itself that I so enjoyed.” Her fabric stash was one of her
life’s great treasures. She wrote in an email to her daughter, “Don’t bemoan my
excesses. Just know the joy it brought me in my ‘later years’. It is hard to
imagine my life without quilting.” The day before her death, the syndicated
television program “The Quilt Show” celebrated her stunning blue and white
quilt called “Halo Medallion” shown here. Janet remarked that the quilt’s
intricate pattern tested all the skills she had learned over a lifetime of
sewing.
She
credited a desire to keep busy as her secret to maintaining her independence
while driving and living at home into her eighties. Over the practical
ups and downs of a full life, she is remembered for her wit, passionate
research interests, and loving creativity. She is survived by her two children,
Nancy Noever of Los Angeles, CA, and David Noever of Huntsville, AL, her
daughter-in-law Samantha, two grandchildren, Chloe’ and Maxwell, and her
sister, Bonnie Lou Hubly of Houston, TX. In lieu of flowers, donations can be
made to the Huntsville Hospital Foundation - Neonatal ICU (NICU) Donor Tree at https://www.huntsvillehospitalfoundation.org/get-involved/give-now.
At the time of her death, she was working on 60 NICU covers for them and had
just completed the first 30 quilt tops.
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