Sally Ann Faggan Memorial Scholarship

Sally Ann Faggan was born in Columbia, Missouri, in December 1947, while her father was a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri. She and her parents spent her early childhood living in World War II Quonset huts that served as married housing on the campus.

After her family relocated to the Detroit area, Sally entered the Detroit Public School system where, even from the earliest grades, she was recognized as being singularly creative in the visual and musical arts, as well as possessing an original and highly intelligent mind. Sally was painting in oils at an age where most children were just learning to color within the lines. Sally was also a natural, almost compulsive, writer, writing poetry and essays that received many accolades from teachers throughout her entire public school education. For the rest of her life, writing, reading and drawing were as natural to her as breathing. Her school notes, notebooks, even the box of family’s Scrabble game, bore her signature renditions of people, small comic strips she drew with herself as the main character, clothes she designed and later made, and animals (most of all, horses).

Despite her natural artistic gifts, her true passion was for horses and horseback riding. During her adolescent years, in a time when being “different” was not socially acceptable for girls; she maintained her own fiercely independent spirit and her own unswerving and absolute dedication to her equestrian fantasies. Though her intelligence and her artistic gifts could have taken her anywhere in the academic “creative” communities, and to the consternation of her parents, all she wanted to do was ride horses.

Sally briefly attended Michigan State University, where she blossomed from high school outsider to the center of a large, diverse and devoted coterie of friends. Ignoring the conventional roads to “success” that grades and achievements can provide, she continued through a series of “basically uninspiring” jobs, to keep her dedication to her own path. Eventually, at a time when most single young women were safely connected to some secure and “appropriate” future, she realized her dream: she became the owner of a small, slightly dilapidated houses with some scruffy acreage in Laingsburg, Michigan, northeast of East Lansing, with plenty of room for horses.

Sally became a fixture in the rural Laingsburg community. As an avid reader, she spent almost as much time at the local public library as she did the feed and grain stores; she befriended the librarians, the local farmers, the people at the lunch counters, and the fellow hour fanatics. They still remember her, even those who did not know her well but only knew of her.

As her only sister wrote after Sally’s death, “Personal crises were her specialty. One phone call and the cavalry charged in, she came galloping to the rescue. And she was the cavalry. And she was a good soldier.”