Our Humble Servant

On Sandra Day O'Connor's first official day of retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court, she returned to her beloved home state to talk about growing up on a Southeastern Arizona cattle ranch. She was 75 years old on that day in February 2006, and looked entirely urbane in her black suit, her trademark neck scarf and her large clasp earrings. Her hair was white, thick, styled in a modern variant of the classic short 1950s pageboy she'd worn as a girl. She exuded strength and self-assurance, even when she admitted it was a “very strange feeling” to know that no more Supreme Court briefs awaited her attention.

And then O'Connor went on to talk about the Lazy B Ranch, her childhood home near Duncan, a town on the Gila River near the Arizona-New Mexico border. “A far cry from the Supreme Court was the Lazy B,” O'Connor began in a voice spiced with a slight Southwestern twang.

Most in the audience at the Kerr Cultural Center in Scottsdale had likely read her 2002 best-selling memoir, Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest, which she wrote with her brother, H. Alan Day. Nevertheless, it was a treat to hear O'Connor tell stories about growing up in the harsh Chihuahuan Desert, living an Arizona ranch life that has now all but vanished. She spoke of her first pet, a bobcat named Bob; of her first nannies, rugged cowboys in dirty jeans; of her first mount, a good-natured mustang named Chico.

She'd given this type of lighthearted talk many times before, but on this particular day, I was concerned for the woman who's been my role model and the role model of countless others. How did she really feel about retiring after 25 years on the Supreme Court? And how would the Supreme Court survive without her ranch-style common sense?

“Do you worry about how the Supreme Court will change?” one woman in the audience blurted out during a question-and-answer session following the talk.

“Well, it isn't up to me,” O'Connor replied.

That answer was classic O'Connor; welling up from her practical, ranch-bred sense of self. She grew up on immense expanses of rocky, yucca-strewn desert flatlands, and in this big country she learned to scale herself against the land, a lesson that has kept her humble. People, she has so often said, are mere “specks.” Still, growing up in a ranch community taught her that each person's labors were a necessary part of survival — even a “speck” can make a difference in the world. That clear-headed perspective has guided O'Connor through five decades of BY TERRY GREENE STERLING | PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID ZICKL epic battles to open gender barricades. The gritty Arizona ranch girl graduated with distinction from Stanford Law School, for instance, only to be offered secretarial jobs by all-male law firms. She didn't let that hold her back; she whittled out a law career by becoming a deputy county attorney, after which she became a private attorney for the U.S. Army. By the time her three children were born, O'Connor was pracA picture of old cowboys eating beans and beef off tin plates as the chuck-wagon cook looked on. The chuck wagon was a portable kitchen pulled by a hefty truck known as a "power wagon" that followed the cowboys around the ranch during the spring and fall roundups. In the photo, the mostly middle-aged, grizzled, unshaven cowboys in their dirty jeans and even dirtier shirts squatted on their haunches or stood with backs against the wind as they ate. The landscape behind them was big and flat and flecked with volcanic rocks. The setting was the ranch in Yavapai County where I grew up. The photograph was taken in the early

Practicing law in a little firm she opened with a friend. It was housed in a small strip mall in Maryvale, a now-tough neighborhood in West Phoenix. Next, O'Connor became an assistant Arizona attorney general, a state senator, a Maricopa County Judge and a state appellate judge. She made history in 1981 when Ronald Reagan appointed her as the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Twenty-five years later, she retired in part to spend more time with her husband, John O'Connor, a prominent Arizona attorney who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. One of the most powerful women in the world gave up her power to care for her husband.

A few weeks after her speech in Scottsdale, O'Connor invited me to her suburban Phoenix home. We had a common background: I, too, had grown up on an Arizona ranch and belonged to an old Arizona ranching family. But our adult post-ranch-girl lives could not have been more different - she became a famous no-nonsense Supreme Court justice, and I became a daydreaming, introverted journalist. O'Connor's house is neither large nor pretentious. An oversized dining-room table speaks of the importance of family gatherings, and photographs of the Lazy B hang in the den. We settled on a comfortable couch in her white-carpeted living room that looks out onto Camelback Mountain. A pillow resting near her on the couch announced: I'm not bossy, I just have better ideas. She wore a scarlet neck scarf, a white blouse, loose gray slacks, slip-on black shoes. I'd brought some photographs of my childhood home with me, and she stared at one particular snapshot for a few seconds. It was 1950s, when I was a preschooler and O'Connor was a young law school student. "Oh, yes," O'Connor said as she held the snapshot. "That's just the way it was." In the old days, cowboys stayed on ranches until they died, or got close to it. Besides toiling every day from sunrise to sunset on the ranches, the cowboys were mentors, babysitters, philosophers and storytellers to the ranch kids who loved them. I still smile when I think about the cowboys who took time out of their busy days to spend time with me. In her memoir, O'Connor borrowed a quote from Wallace Stegner, her writing teacher at Stanford, to describe her admiration for a Lazy B cowboy named Jim Brister: "... invincibly strong, indefinitely enduring, uncompromisingly self-reliant." I asked her if the description might also fit her. "Oh, dear, no," she answered. Why not? "I do not like to self-evaluate," she said. That's the way she is. She's not particularly introspective, and doesn't second-guess her past decisions, either in or out of the courtroom. What's done is done, and there is no point selfaggrandizing or offering up excuses. She learned that lesson on the Lazy B.

Her father was Harry Day, known as D.A. (pronounced dee-ay) to Sandra, her brother, Alan, and sister, Ann. Just like my father, D.A. ran the ranch and expected everyone to follow the rules. "It was like having our own kingdom all to ourselves,"

O'Connor recalled. “My father was king and magistrate, and he established the rules.” Rule Number One: NO EXCUSES ACCEPTED.

O'Connor's memoir recounts several instances of her father's refusal to accept excuses for tasks shoddily done, not done on time or not done at all. In her memoir, she recalls a day when she and her mother, Ada Mae, awakened early to make a hot lunch for D.A. and the cowboys, who were working cattle in a distant corner of the ranch. O'Connor loaded the food onto a pickup, and headed out with lunch. But then she got a flat tire. She was alone approvals, but instead he showed his affection for his children by spending time with them, taking them on little drives around the ranch to fix a windmill or repair a fence or just explore a canyon on the river where the cottonwoods grew. On such excursions, her father would point out interesting things to the children — a coyote, a javelina, a rattlesnake, a red-tailed hawk.

Many years later, after she retired from the Supreme Court, O'Connor told me she'd read a 1982 letter her father had written to a family friend. In the letter, D.A. expressed great pride in his daughter's accomplishments.

In the immense space, and the flat tire would not budge from the wheel. “The lug nuts,” she writes, “were too tightly attached to move. Probably the tire had not been changed for a couple of years ... I pushed with all my might, but the lug nuts would not loosen. Finally I stood on the lug wrench and tried to jump a little on it to create more force.” Using this unorthodox technique, she loosened all the lug nuts, replaced the heavy tire with an equally heavy spare, and finally RANCH KIDS LEARN A CERTAIN SELF-RELIANCE BORN OUT OF NECESSITY. YOU GET LOST ON THE RANCH; YOU FIND YOUR WAY HOME. YOU GET A FLAT TIRE; YOU FIX IT.

Arrived with lunch an hour-and-a-half late. She was hot, dirty and exhausted, but proud. She'd done it. She hadn't waited for help. She'd summoned the strength and the creativity to solve the problem. The men had their lunch, thanks to her. But her father greeted her with silence.

“I had expected a word of praise for changing the tire,” she wrote in her memoir, “but to the contrary, I realized that only one thing was expected: an on-time lunch. No excuses accepted.” From her early childhood, she'd yearned for her father's verbal “He said some very nice things about me,” O'Connor said. “I was moved to tears, because he never said such nice things to me when he was alive. It was very touching.” O'Connor's parents died on the Lazy B a few years after she'd been appointed to America's highest court. She and her siblings scattered their parents' ashes on a volcanic peak called Round Mountain.

Like many descendants of pioneer Arizona ranch families, they eventually were forced by economic necessity to sell the Lazy B. They sold it off in pieces, from 1986 to 1993. It was excruciating. The ranch had been in the family for 113 years.

I'd hoped O'Connor would take me to the Lazy B, but she told me she will not return to her childhood home because the visit might destroy her memories.

The new owners of the Lazy B don't want visitors nosing around O'Connor's childhood home. Trespassers are vigorously rebuffed.

One day not long ago, after several long telephone negotiations, the current ranch foreman allowed me on the Lazy B to see the place for myself.

The adobe house where O'Connor grew up still stands, along with the outbuildings and corrals and a large water tank where she swam as a child. They're dwarfed by the same ancient windmills that formerly piped water to the people and animals on the Lazy B. The windmills are silent now, but I stood beneath them and remembered what she'd told me, how the sucker rods would make “such a sound” as they pulled water from deep beneath the desert floor.

“It was a good noise, though, it meant water,” she'd said.

EYE TO THE FUTURE

O'Connor stands tall and clear-eyed in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve. She continues to offer her wisdom and service to the nation's courts and educational institutions.

I camped overnight on a windy, flat land. In rainy years, this land would explode with native grasses that fed dozens of cattle, but on this night the land was crusted, barren, dry. The night sky was like an ocean alive with stars, and I recalled O'Connor telling me about walking outside with her family as a child. "We watched the moon and we watched the stars," she'd said. "Sometimes the stars got so close I thought I could climb up on the roof and pluck one down."

In the morning, I'd expected a quick tour of the Lazy B, but the ranch foreman was not able to show me around because, he said, some cattle needed to be hauled to town.

I was alone in a place that was once O'Connor's childhood kingdom, a severely beautiful stretch of Chihuahuan Desert dotted with yuccas that would blossom white in the late spring. The immense landscape stretched for miles to indigo-hued mountains, where oaks and junipers sheltered the mule deer that were surely descendants of the creatures D.A. had pointed out to his little girl.

Where had she changed the flat tire?

I couldn't be sure. Crossing an arroyo lined with thorny acacias, I pictured her riding Chico over this same landscape to collect bits of brightly colored quartz, which her father had later polished. She'd told me she still treasures those pebbles, and keeps them in a bowl.

I left the Lazy B understanding O'Connor in a way that would not have been possible had I not seen the big country of her childhood. Like the ranch where I grew up, it's a land that scales humans down to their real size.

Ranch kids learn a certain self-reliance born out of necessity. Sometimes, they're the only ones around to pull themselves out of a scrape. You get lost on the ranch; you find your way home. You get a flat tire; you fix it. You resign from the Supreme Court; you build a new life.

Sandra Day O'Connor divides her time between Washington, D.C., where she maintains an office in the Supreme Court Building and serves as an appellate judge, and Phoenix, where she takes care of her husband, whose illness has progressed.

Despite the emotional drain of caregiving, she's remained engaged in life. She was the only woman named to the Iraq Study Group. She is chancellor of the College of William and Mary, a post so prestigious George Washington once held it. She sits on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. She works with various bar groups. She's the namesake of Arizona State University's College of Law. She is concerned about the future of the judiciary, and has worked to foster understanding on the necessity for "fair and impartial judges." And she's campaigned energetically to reintroduce the study of government and civics to public schools. She remains grounded, centered and humble. The Lazy B lives on in her heart, fortifying her, calming her, reminding her that she might be a speck, but even a speck can contribute to the world. Al