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Sandra Day O'Connor, Writing Her History
Justice's New Book Recalls Life on the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona
 Listen to Susan Stamberg's conversation with Justice O'Connor.
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Sandra Day O'Connor in her chambers.
Photo: David Banks, NPR News
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March 13, 2002 -- The first woman to be named to the U.S. Supreme Court works in a sunny office filled with family photographs, relics and reminders of an earlier life spent on the wild, wide-open spaces of her family's ranch in Arizona. The ranch, named the Lazy B, is now the focus of a joint memoir Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote with her brother, Alan Day.
In an interview on All Things Considered, guest host Susan Stamberg and O'Connor discuss the new book, Lazy B: Growing Up On A Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest.
It's clear from the things O'Connor chooses to surround herself with in her private chambers that the Lazy B is a touchstone for her. And her description of daily life on the ranch is a lot different from the hushed granite corridors and somber black robes that have defined her life for the past two decades.
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Highlights of O'Connor's Life:
• Born March 26,1930, to Harry A. Day and Ada Mae Wilkey Day in El Paso, Texas.
• Graduated high school at 16 and enrolled at Stanford University, earning an economics degree in 1950. Two years later, she earned her law degree, also from Stanford.
• In 1952, married John O'Connor, a fellow Stanford law student. She could not find a law firm that hired women -- except one, as a legal secretary -- and became a deputy county attorney in the Northern California city of San Mateo.
• Husband joined the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps, and the couple spent three years in Frankfurt, Germany. While overseas, Sandra Day O'Connor worked as a civilian lawyer for the Quartermaster Corps. They returned to the U.S. in 1957 and settled in Arizona.
• In 1965, O'Connor became an assistant state attorney general. Four years later, she was appointed to the Arizona state Senate.
• In 1974 O'Connor was elected to be a Maricopa County Superior Court judge, and five years later was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals.
• In August 1981, President Ronald Reagan nominated O'Connor to fill a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court vacated by Justice Potter Stewart. The full Senate confirmed her appointment 99-0, and O'Connor took her oath of office Sept. 26, 1981.
Source: Supreme Court Historical Society
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Still, some Supreme Court analysts would say O'Connor's decisions reflect the core values she learned as a child on a working ranch: responsibility and self-reliance.
The ranch was huge -- 198,000 acres with more than 2,000 cattle, 25 miles from the town of Duncan along the Arizona-New Mexico border. It was founded by O'Connor's grandfather, Henry Clay Day, in the early 1880s before Arizona was a state. Until O'Connor was 7, there was no running water or electricity.
O'Connor tells Stamberg that despite the hardships, the Lazy B was a haven of sorts, where the system of values "was simple and unsophisticated and the product of necessity." O'Connor and Alan Day write: "We belonged to the Lazy B, and it belonged to each of us."
O'Connor was an only child until she was 8 -- so her earliest childhood friends were her parents, some ranch hands and a few wild javelina hogs. She was given responsibility early in life, out of necessity -- mending fences, riding with the cowboys, firing her own rifle and driving a truck.
O'Connor and her brother grew to have very different lives. She earned her law degree and eventually became a judge and Republican Party political activist in Arizona.
Alan Day stayed on and ultimately came to run the ranch for 30 years until it was sold in 1986. The book makes it clear that for both siblings, the ranch played a pivotal role in defining their identities and the paths they took in life.
Other Resources
• O'Connor's memoir is being published by Random House, which also created a special Web site for the book. ISBN: 0375507248.
• U.S. Supreme Court official Web site.
• The Arizona Republic newspaper has a special section devoted to news about Justice O'Connor.
• Supreme Court Historical Society.
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