Hugo Fox

Hugo Fox was born in South Whitley, Indiana, on February 2, 1897. He began to play the saxophone while still in high school in South Whitley and was asked to play in a community band in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was while playing the bassoon parts on his saxophone that his interest in studying the bassoon was sparked. After graduating high school, Hugo traveled to Chicago every two weeks to study the bassoon with Adolph Weiss, a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and then with J. Walter Guetter, the principal bassoonist for the same orchestra. He eventually decided to move to Chicago to study bassoon.

In 1917, during World War I, Hugo enlisted in the military. He was sent to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center and was a member of the bassoon section of its band. He was eventually transferred to the Naval Yard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he served until his discharge in 1919.

After his discharge from the Navy, he played in various musical ensembles in Indiana and Ohio, including the B.F. Goodrich band in Akron, Ohio. In 1921, he moved back to Chicago to again study with Walter Guetter. When Guetter left the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1922, he recommended Hugo Fox to replace him as the principal bassoon. He accepted the position and remained the principal bassoonist for the next 27 years.

In 1930, he married May Richter. They had two children, Alan and Susan. He taught part-time at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois from 1936-1950. He also gave private lessons in Chicago and in South Whitley, when he and his family stayed there during the summer. In the 1930s, he started making reeds out of the family's Chicago apartment and he also studied the mechanics of the bassoon by assisting in their repair.

Upon leaving the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1949, he and his family moved back to South Whitley. Using his reed making business and his aforementioned study of the instrument, he almost immediately began to build his own bassoon eventually founding Fox Products Corporation. The company's original manufacturing facility was a chicken coop and a barn on the Fox property.

Hugo Fox fell into ill health in the late 1950s and after struggling through a series of strokes eventually passed away in 1969?