Jane Hope

Jane Hope Hastings, born Katherine Kelenen on April 16, 1902, in Budapest, Hungary, was a stage actress who performed on Broadway and later became a long-serving director with the USO. She died on September 10, 2006, in Hamden, Connecticut, at the age of 104.

Kelenen's family emigrated from Hungary to the United States in the early twentieth century and settled in St. Louis, Missouri. Upon completing high school, she relocated to New York City to pursue a career in acting, adopting the stage name Jane Hope during the auditioning process. In New York she became affiliated with the Columbia Laboratory Players, the drama program associated with Columbia University, where she appeared in multiple productions. She also worked as an understudy for productions staged by director David Belasco. Her Broadway career included an appearance in 1923 in the play Pride.

In 1941, Kelenen began a fourteen-year association with the USO, serving as a director until 1955. Her first posting was in Falmouth, Massachusetts, where she directed operations for Camp Edwards. Among the initiatives she undertook there was the establishment of the Service Wives' Kitchen, a facility that provided a gathering place for the wives of servicemen stationed at the base, allowing them to cook meals for their husbands during leave. Over the course of her USO career, her work took her to locations spanning Cape Cod, Alaska, Brazil, Puerto Rico, California, and New York City.

Following her retirement from the USO in 1955, Kelenen married Harold J. Barrett that same year; he died in 1964. In 1980 she married George Sands Hastings, a former vice president of the American Machine and Foundry company, whom she had met at a Quaker meeting. He died on March 16, 1990.