Sally W. Swartzmiller was born on February 1, 1927, in Detroit, Michigan. She grew up in the Hudson Valley area of upstate New York, and graduated from Cornell University with a major in Agricultural Economics. Sally received a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from New York University, and a Fulbright Scholarship to Denmark, where she spent a year working on the organization of agricultural cooperatives.
After graduating from college, she worked as a research assistant in the Division of Municipal Affairs in the New York State Department of Audit and Control for several years. Later, Sally became an editor of college publications for Cornell University in Ithaca. She then moved to Albany to take a position with the New York State Division of the Budget. Sally specialized in analyzing the impact of changes in federal legislation and federal financial aid on New York State programs.
After her retirement in 1997, she moved to Topsham. She passed away on July 17, 2009, in Topsham, Maine. In her will, she bequeathed funds for student scholarships to BASAF.