But it was Thomas Kay, Bishop's great-grandfather, who left the mills of Yorkshire and made his way to America, where he worked in the large East Coast textile mills before heading west in 1863. Family lore has it he traveled down the Atlantic seaboard, made his way across the Isthmus of Panama on a burro and endured a grueling four-month sea voyage up the Pacific coast to Oregon, America's newest state. His skills were needed there, for sheep abounded in the Pacific Northwest and the cost of shipping raw materials back to Boston, the nation's textile capital, was exorbitant.

Kay worked for Oregon mill-owners and years later opened his own mill in Salem, where he was assisted by his daughter, Fannie. Eventually, Fannie married a haberdasher named C.P. Bishop. In 1909, Bishop family members used their combined expertise to put together a new venture in Pendleton, Ore., on the site of a failed mill. They named it the Pendleton Woolen Mills. In time, the company went beyond mere spinning and weaving to manufacture American Indian trade blankets, menswear and most recently womenswear.

Brot's earliest memories are of "family conversations about the wool business with Grandmother and Grandfather Bishop." When he was 13, he began working summers in the mill along with his brother, Clarence "Mort" Bishop Jr. '43.

"We did menial jobs at the start," he recalls, "like cleaning machines, moving sacks of wool around, even making lemonade for the gals working in the shirt factory in very hot weather. That was before air conditioning."

There was no parental pressure on the Bishop brothers to enter the wool business. The parents were determined, however, that their sons would each get a fine education-and to them, that meant going east. Their mother had attended Smith College, and their great-grandmother was a Mount Holyoke graduate. On one of his frequent business trips to the great mills of Massachusetts' Merrimack Valley, Clarence Bishop Sr. heard from a wool dealer about a top-notch high school called Phillips Academy. The boys were enrolled, sight unseen.

Because of World War II, Mort left school early to join the Marine Corps. Brot, however, stayed on to graduate, then earned a bachelor's degree in industrial organization at Yale. Next he went to the Philadelphia Textile School to learn design, fabric analysis, dyeing, yarn manufacturing, weaving and weaving design before returning to Pendleton to launch his career in mill administration and textile design.

Traveling often to New York to collect fabric samples and to keep an eye on trends, Bishop developed a flair for putting together appealing fabric designs. Sales boomed, and today the company, with Brot as chairman and CEO, employs more than 2,000 people. You'd be hard-pressed to find a well-provisioned wardrobe in middle-class America where there is not at least one plaid woolen Pendleton shirt hanging.

Has the career brought him satisfaction?

Bishop answers indirectly. "I'm 71 years old, and I'm still at it full-time. My brother Mort is 73, and he is still very active in the business. Mary and I have five children, of whom three work for Pendleton. One of Mort's sons is in the business. I guess you could say we've found it an interesting profession."

One of its more interesting aspects, but one that may be less familiar to people than Pendleton's ubiquitous plaid shirt-especially in the eastern United States-is considered in Blanket Statements: A Brief History of American Indian Trade Blankets, an exhibition that continues through July 1999 at PA's Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology.

From the 16th century on, manufactured woolen blankets were a staple of trade between European explorers and settlers and native people across North America. Near the opening of the 20th century, settlers used colorful blankets made by Pendleton and four other small mills, now defunct, that were traded with the Indians for pelts and other items. Over the decades, Native American artisans have collaborated closely with the mills on their design and manufacture. Today, more than half of Pendleton's blanket sales are to Native Americans, who use them within their communities, sometimes for ceremonial purposes, and as a way of producing revenue for cultural institutions.

Some blankets in Pendleton's collection reflect traditional designs. But, perhaps surprisingly, new blankets continue to be generated on Native American themes. The Peabody show features, for example, the Circle of Life blanket, designed in 1992 to honor tribal elders, wisdom keepers who hand down the teachings and spiritual direction to the children.

Bishop says he is grateful to the Peabody for initiating the exhibition and proud to have been able to offer Pendleton's generous assistance.

"It's an area of the business," Bishop says, "that historically and sentimentally is very important to us-particularly to Mort, who is very involved in that aspect of Pendleton. We hope it will continue long into the future."