SANDRA DAY O CONNOR FOR KIDS HOW TO

Even though she finished fast, Sandra made the most of her years in law school. She would go on to complete law school there, graduating in just two years, instead of the usual three. Sandra was a very good student–so good that she finished high school at 16 and enrolled at Stanford University in California. She went back to live with her family for eighth grade, but the hours-long daily commute to get to the closest school was very difficult, so she went back to El Paso the next year. She loved her private girl’s school, and made many lifelong friends there, but she also missed the ranch and family dearly. So Sandra went to live with her grandmother in El Paso. When it came time for Sandra to go to school, her parents thought she would get a better education in a bigger town. The children all learned to help each other and themselves. On birthdays, their mother would make angel food cake, and the children would spend hours taking turns churning fresh cream into homemade ice cream. She also learned to love reading, and books kept company. But Sandra liked to care for small and injured animals, like mice, crippled birds, and stray kittens. There were no neighbors nearby, and therefore no other children to play with, for miles around. The family house didn’t have running water or electricity until Sandra was seven years old. The nearest paved road was 9 miles away, and the nearest doctors were over 200 miles away. Plus, the Lazy B Ranch was far away from any towns. You could fall from a horse, come face-to-face with a rattlesnake, or have a brush with a cactus. There were many jobs to do on the ranch, and many dangers in the desert. Sandra and her siblings had to learn to take care of themselves and help out on the ranch. As soon as she could sit up as a baby, a ranch hand would balance Sandra in front of him on the saddle and take her for horseback rides around the Lazy B. Sometimes the cowboys who worked on the ranch would babysit Sandra. She had to, because the Lazy B was pretty far from anywhere, and her parents and their ranch hands had a lot of work to do running a cattle ranch. The ranch where the family lived was called the Lazy B, and Sandra became a part of ranch life from the very start. Sandra was the first of three children, and the oldest by far. She would become a lawyer, politician, and finally the first female justice, or judge, on the United States Supreme Court. Though her family had lived there for generations and she always considered Arizona home, Sandra would live and work in California, Germany, and Washington DC.

SANDRA DAY O CONNOR FOR KIDS HOW TO

Sandra would learn early how to handle the dangers, but her life was also full of possibilities that, with a little hard work on her part, would take her to places far beyond that seemingly endless desert. It’s a quiet, remote place that holds both possibilities and danger. This is the kind of scene that Sandra Day O’Connor would have looked out on from her childhood home in Arizona, near the Gila River. You can see cactus plants, brush, and the dark figures of cattle moving on the plains, and a few distant mountains on the horizon. The desert landscape also seems to go on and on, with no houses or other buildings, not even a road as far as the eye can see, but hardly empty. Imagine the sky, stretching out clear and blue above you for what seems like forever.

Sandra day o connor for kids