Growing up, Sally loved working at her cotton field in San Francisco, California. Working at this field, Sally learned how to spin and weave cotton. During her early years, she loved the feeling of cotton and was always curious. While going to school she even spent time spinning. If she didn’t have much time, Sally made time on the way to school or during her breaks. This was usually what Fox was doing every chance she got. She was incredibly smart and interested in spinning cotton. Sally Fox was an inspiring woman to a lot of people. There was determination for her to find a way to lengthen colored cotton. Sally invented colored cotton and we still use it today on our commercial spinners. She would dream of opening up her own cotton business one day.
This took up a lot of her time and so did her part-time babysitting job. Colored cotton was around in the early 1980′s but it had to be hand-spun. This cotton couldn’t handle the big commercial spinners. This was a huge problem because companies could not make enough textiles. No one tried to actually fix the problem, until Sally Fox. Sally soon saved up enough money and that went towards her first spindle, a device used to spin fibers into threads. On her 13th birthday, she got everything she hoped for, a brand new floor-model spinning wheel. She was a very hard worker and enjoyed sharing her work with others later in life. Sally would teach classes on how to use this spindles with cotton. Cotton was her passion and she wanted to experiment. She was never was trying or planning to be an inventor. This simply happened because she was curious and kept trying out new ideas. Ms. Fox was a very hard worker and had a lot of motivation (Davidson).
During the Vietnam War time, there were bad effects of Agent Orange, which is the code name for one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the U.S. military. These pesticides were apart of the military herbicidal warfare program. This was around her early adolescence and she knew something had to be done about pesticides. At a young age, she knew there had to be some way of reducing the use of pesticides and started brain storming ideas.
In 1981, Sally attended California Polytechnic State University and got a Bachelors degree in biology. After that, her Masters in entomology with a minor in integrated pest management from the University of California. During this time Sally found a bag of brown cotton seeds and began thinking. She decided to grow some of the seeds in her backyard but there wasn’t a lot of space in this apartment complex yard. Fox loved to crossbreed and was always trying new ideas. These attempts of colored cotton were her passion and she enjoyed testing out new ideas. This eventually was too small and she needed to buy land for more experiments. This hobby soon turned into reality and Sally Fox wanted to open up her own business someday. A lot of people she knew would never try to fix the problem. Everyone just assumed it could never work with colored cotton and didn’t try (Davidson).
Sally’s college degree really helped pursue her in the right direction. It was very helpful for exploring all of her fascinating ideas. Without this degree, she would not understand everything and the process of cross breeding cotton. Everything made her strive to achieve her goal of organic colored cotton and help the environment. That was one of the main reasons for her curiosity, making sure this was safe and not harmful.
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