Nearly 56 years ago, during the Summer of Love, Sally Fox inadvertently laid the seeds for her career as a groundbreaking cotton breeder. A then-11-year-old Fox, accompanied by her older sister, went to Northern California’s first-ever Renaissance Faire and spent her babysitting money on a drop spindle from “these cool people.” From there, she was hooked on weaving.
So Fox decided, in her free time, to improve the fiber of the disease- and pest-resistant and colored cotton. She began cross-pollinating by hand, breeding just a few strains her first year, 1982. Fox eventually moved onto other jobs, but her cotton plants always came with her. “I had this old car all filled up with my pots and hardly any space for my clothes and stuff,” she says. “I would use my money to rent land to grow my plants up and learn, make crosses, grow more out.