Booknotes

JUSTICE SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR, AUTHOR, "LAZY B": Basically, because my brother and I grew up on the Lazy B Ranch, and it ended up being sold in the late 1980s, and it broke my heart. Something that I thought would always be part of me and part of our family and always there for my children and grandchildren and their children was gone, and there wasn't any other way to preserve it, I guess, except to sit down and see if we can write up some of those memories and make it real.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, about three years ago. For a long time, it was so painful that the ranch was gone that I couldn't let myself think about it. It would depress me if I did. I don't know if you're like that, but if there's a place that I really loved and cared about, if it's gone, I'm afraid to go back because it might not look the same or be the same, and I want it the way I knew it and remembered it. And maybe this book was the only way I could achieve that.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Where is the ranch? It's on the Arizona-New Mexico border. The ranch was half in each state, along the Gila River--to the south side of the Gila River and to the top of the Peloncillo mountain range. It's a high desert area. It's rather arid and sparse. There are some oak trees and mesquite trees on the higher elevations. And it's high desert; it's about 5,000 feet high, even on the flat part. But it's--it has a fairly decent climate: rarely gets below freezing in the winter; it gets fairly hot in the summer, but not unbearably so.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I live on it from childhood until I went away to school and eventually got married. My brother, who wrote it with me, lived on it always, until it was sold. And my father ran it until his death--lived on it. And it was started in 1880 by his father. So it had been in the family 113 years by the time it was sold.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: It was very large. It was close to 300 square miles. That's a large area. But, of course, you have to realize that grass is very sparse in that area. It's not like having that amount of land that is well watered and that produces a lot of grass. It had very little grass.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: No--oh, heavens no. It was primarily public land. When my grandfather started it in 1880, that area was part of the New Mexico territory. It was in the area acquired by the United States in the Gadsden Purchase, just before the Civil War, and that ha--had belonged to Mexico. The Southern Pacific Railroad wanted to put a line through from New Orleans all the way to Los Angeles, and the best route went through that area, south of the Gila River. And Congress eventually a--approved the Gadsden Purchase. Mr. Gadsden had been sent down to negotiate it. And so in 1880, the land was basically unoccupied, except for the railroad, and if somebody wanted to acquire livestock and put out there and develop water, then it was possible to homestead a certain amount of land around the water that was developed, and the rest of the land could be basically just used.

And Arizona became a state--When?--in 1914, something like that, and at that point, coming into the Union, the state was given a certain amount of state land and the same with New Mexico. New Mexico had a certain amount of state land eventually when it was no longer a territory. The federal government kept a large amount of land in Arizona and New Mexico, and, of course, a great deal of the land is owned by Indian tribes. So the land that is actually available, in Arizona and New Mexico anyway, for private ownership is less than 15 percent of the land overall.

And what happened in time was that leases were negotiated for the state land with the state of Arizona a--and New Mexico--with the state of New Mexico, and the federal lands were administered by the Bureau of Land Management under the Department of Interior. And an elaborate system of provisions for parceling out that federal land evolved over time, initially with the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act. And that required sorting out who got what. In the days when my grandfather went, anyone could put cattle on, and many people did, so there might be joint use of a lot of the land. And after the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act, the objective was to sort out who should be using what part and not have multiple use, at least grazing rights, going to more than one person for a particular acre of land.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yeah. My earliest recollection is of sound, or the absence of sound. I don't know how many people who live in urban areas today are even aware of how much noise is going on around us all the time--all the time, from vehicular traffic or airplanes or the sounds of heating and cooling systems working or of computer systems operating or telephones ringing. I mean, there's just a lot of sound--or people talking in urban areas.

And at the Lazy B, there was none of that. There were no--we didn't have electricity for years, so there--there were no motors running, and there was no vehicular traffic to hear. Now the sounds you did hear were of the cattle perhaps walking or mooing, making sounds that cattle make, or occasionally birds, at night the coyotes or the windmills. We had to get our water from deep underground, and in order to power the withdrawal of the water, we used windmills. And when the wind came up, they would turn and they would creek, and you would hear all the sounds of the machinery of the windmill going. And the wells at the ranch by the house were 800 feet deep, and suck rods had to go all the way down the 800 feet, and as they moved up and down, you could hear them, and so I got used to that. But now if the wind wasn't blowing and the cattle weren't making any noise, there was no sound. None. And it's almost a deafening silence.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, just before it was sold. I haven't been able to go back since it was.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: It's being ranched, and in the last few years, it's been acquired by apparently a very fine couple from the state of Utah. And they don't live there full-time, but they have full-time management, and they're doing a good job of preserving the structures there, I'm told.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes. Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: He lives in Tucson now.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Until the ke--keys were turned over on the last day when it was sold. And I can't even imagine how hard it must have been for Alan to get in his car and to drive out all those miles on that dirt road and know that that was his last journey out...

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: ...as a part owner and as manager.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, you know, Brian, that's a little like asking how much money did he have in the bank. You don't ask that of a rancher.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: And ranchers don't answer that question. There were a lot of cattle, and the numbers, of course, were controlled by--eventually by the permit system from the federal government because they would evaluate the land and the conditions and determine that you could have no more than X number of cattle on a particular part of the land.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, because cattle are sold, of course, by the pound, and you know what kind of cattle they are and you know how many there are and you precisely how much they're worth, and so that's how much money is available, in effect.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: My parents were living at the ranch. My father had taken over management when his father died in order to try to settle the estate, and he never left. And he ended up meeting and marrying my mother, who had the courage to say, `All right, yes, let's go live on the ranch.' And it was very primitive in those days for her. And when she had her first child, me, she wanted to go to a hospital. Her parents, by then, were living in El Paso, Texas, so she chose to go to El Paso, some 200-plus miles away, for my birth. And we returned to the ranch as--as quickly as she was able to travel.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: I--I don't even know. My first memory is sounds, sounds of the windmill probably, coyotes at night, the cattle.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, the people at the ranch. Living there was like living on an island, you might say. We were away from everything. We had no neighbors close at hand, and there were my parents and the cowboys who helped run the ranch. And in those days, cowboys tended to be single men. They seldom had a wife or family. And a number of the cowboys at the Lazy B spent their entire lives there. They really were part of our family, part of the working team.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, Jim was one of those cowboys, who spent most of his life at the ranch. He came there when he was about 18 years old. He was from Oklahoma originally. And he was a huge redhead with massive shoulders, strong fellow, and he had married a little woman, who was not 5' tall, named May, and May said that she wasn't more than 13 years old when they got married. And he had worked as a--in the Wild West show. He learned to ride horses early on, and he was quite a--quite a skillful rider and a fantastic roper. He could just handle a rope like nobody else. And he worked in the Wild West shows that were going around the country. And he and May would follow the Wild West shows, and that's what he did.

And I think it must have been when movies started, silent films or something, people stopped going to the Wild West shows, and then Jim started working on different ranches around the country. And, typically, he would ride the--the wild string of horses, the--the tough ones that hadn't been broken, and he would basically come onto a ranch and he'd break the horses that needed breaking and get them shaped up, and then he might move on to the next ranch after he'd worked on the rough string. And he came to the Lazy B that way. He was still very young. He and May showed up, and he went to work and he never left.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: He did.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, he was the toughest man I have ever seen in my life and probably the most coordinated man I've ever seen. And he could stand pain better than anyone I've seen. During the years at the ranch--you can't ride horses all the time and not end up having some broken bones because the horse will fall or you get thrown or something goes wrong. He had all kinds of injuries, but he never let it stop him. I don't think he ever missed a day of work, no matter whether it was his collar bone broken or what.

And one day he came in and he said he had this heck of a toothache; he just couldn't stand it anymore, just couldn't stand it. Well, we didn't have dentists within 150 miles of the Lazy B. And he got a piece of baling wire--you know, the hay that you feed the horses was tied with bailing wire, some kind of steel wire. And we'd take that off the hay bales--and my father never threw anything away, so he always had some wraps of baling wire around. And--and he got a pretty clean, recent piece of baling wire and heated it up on the stove, till it was red hot, and he jabbed it in his tooth where the root thing was rotten. He just put it in there. My brother was standing right there. And you could smell the burning flesh and the--I--it was unbelievable. And he never winced, and he solved his problem. I mean, I j--I don't know how people can be that tough. I really don't.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Rastice was another of the wonderful cowboys that lived his whole life at the Lazy B. And he had been born and lived in a little town near Silver City, New Mexico. I think his father probably was a--a miner, but his father died when Rastice was very young, about five. His mother remarried. His real name was Raphael Estrada. His mother remarried, and Rastice, as he was called, didn't like his stepfather at all, and he ran away when he was seven.

And he went down a mountain from Silver City and ended up somehow in Lordsburg, New Mexico. And he asked around town, asking if anybody could use some help; said he'd like to work on a ranch or something. And people in Lordsburg said, `Well, you ought to ask at the Lazy B. They can probably give you something to do.' And he hitched a ride somehow out to the Lazy B Ranch, and sure enough, they said `Yeah, you can do some chores if you want to stay here for a while,' and he did. And he never left until he died in his late '70s.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Once. Once.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Mad at my father.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: DA. I guess that started when my sister was born. My brother and sister arrived about nine and 10 years after I did. My sister was little, and she was learning her letters and how to spell, and she learned daddy was spelled D-A-D-D-Y. So she started calling DA, which was short for the spelling of `daddy,' and it stuck. Even the cowboys started calling him DA.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: MO, short for M-O-T-H-E-R. So they were MO and DA, until they died. Isn't that the greatest...

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: We all did, even their friends. It was funny.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, they were out one day on a roundup, and if you don't have corrals, you have to hold the herd of cattle together by having people on horseback surrounding them and keeping them all in and preventing them from running off. And anytime you're working the cattle, you're also sorting out ones that you want to keep and ones that you want to sell and ones that need to go here and ones that need to go there. And they were in the process of trying to--to match a cow with a calf, and Rastice ran out a particular calf that he said belonged to a cow that had already been put out in a herd to be sent somewhere, and he said that was the match and he ran the calf out.

And after a while, my father had a conversation with him and said, `Rastice, that calf doesn't belong to that cow. Why'd you run that one out? That's--they're not a pair.' And Rastice said, `Well, they are, too. Well, I know that calf, and I know that cow, and of course they're a pair.' And my father insisted that that wasn't the case, and Rastice grew so angry that he went home that evening and he packed up and he went to Duncan and he said, `I'm through. I'm through. If you can't trust what I say around here, I'm finished with this outfit.'

And he didn't come back, and we couldn't believe it; that he was gone. And I think a week went by, and he didn't come back, and another week. And we just couldn't stand it because he was part of the family. So, finally, my father went in to Duncan to try to locate Rastice, and he asked around town and finally found him and had a conversation with him and persuaded him to come back and give the Lazy B another try. But my father never challenged anything Rastice said again, I can tell you that.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: To nurse, to accept the calf.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Right.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I saw him do it a lot of times. Rastice was amazing in his ability to work with the cattle, and we raised our cattle to look alike--to look exactly alike. Cow buyers wanted uniform appearance. And I tell you, I think Rastice knew every cow and every calf on the place, the thousands of them. He just wasn't wrong about them. And if a mother cow is nursing a calf--the calf is still dependent on the mother's milk--if something happens to the calf, the mother cow won't accept other calves that aren't hers, usually, and yet her udder will be badly swollen and in need of milking, and she has enough milk to support another calf, but she won't accept one, normally. I mean, it's something about the inherent nature of the cow.

And so there were several occasions actually, although I think I mentioned only one in the book, when a particular calf would have been killed, probably by a coyote. Coyotes would often take small calves and start eating them from the back end forward and kill them. And it left the mother cow without a calf. And we had some dogie calves at the corral, the calves whose mothers had been killed or died for some reason, and we'd try to raise the little calves. You'd have to feed them milk with a bottle if you didn't have another cow that would take them.

And Rastice went out and he took the skin that was left from

the dead calf that the coyote had killed, and he tied it around one of the dogie calves, tied it on, so that the mother cow would smell the skin of her own dead calf and accept it. Cows have very poor eyes; they have terrible eyesight, and cows don't recognize their calves by appearance. They identify them by smell. And so when Rastice succeeded in tying the skin on of the dead calf, then the cow got used to this new calf, and gradually he could take the old, dead skin off and she accepted the new calf. But things like that went on a lot.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: He did. I guess when I was very small and learning to speak, I tried to pronounce my own name, and it came out as Tanny instead of Sandra, and so he called me that.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, you--I'm not sure. I suppose I was nine or 10 years old when that picture was taken.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Chico. And Chico was a wonderful horse. He was one that came out of a string of wild horses. There were a lot of mustangs in the Southwest in those days, horses that were wild and just roamed around, and Chico came out of one of those strings. He was a perfect little horse, but very small, and that was ideal for a child. And he ended up being the gentlest, kindest, most wonderful horse I've ever known. He just was fabulous. And he lived to be a very old age. He died in his mid-30s, I think, which for a horse is pretty old.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: I know.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Terrible names.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, just whatever some cowboy would think of. My brother really enjoyed working with young horses, and if he had a horse he liked, he--he'd give the horse a very nice name, like Candy or Hermosa or something pleasant. But we had another old-time cowboy, who lived at the ranch all his life, named Claude, and Claude was a believer that it was very dangerous to give a horse a good name; that something bad would go wrong if you did. And so over the--the years, he persuaded my brother that we ought to give the horses some of these less-pleasant-sounding names.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, life at that age meant having to go away to school, and that was a very painful time for me, actually. It's hard for ranch families who have children because when it's time for a child to go to school, many ranchers send their wives into town to rent or buy a house and to live with the children during the school year, and that means the--the husband and wife are separated. And my father and mother were really deeply in love with each other, and they didn't want to be separated. They didn't want to do that.

And so my mother's parents were living in El Paso, and my Grandmother Wilke in El Paso was very young for a grandmother. She had married at age 16 herself. She was very young, had plenty of energy. And she said she would just be delighted to keep me in El Paso for school, and so that was the arrangement that was made. And I went away to school. I would come home at Christmas and over Easter break and in the summers, but other than that, I was staying in El Paso. And that was all right, except I was homesick. I really loved the ranch and loved being with my parents, and I didn't want to be away. So I remember those years with considerable pain, actually.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I was very shocked.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, I don't remember. I was a student in El Paso, and I remember one of the children I knew saying, `I know something about you.' `No, you don't.' `Yes, I do. I know something about you and your mother.' `No, you don't. What is it?' `Well, your mother was married before. She had another husband.' And I said, `Oh, that's not true. I know you're wrong.' And when I went home to my grandmother's that evening, I asked her about it. I said, `Now somebody at school told me that MO had been married before. That's not true.' And my grandmother said, `Well, actually, it is. She--she had a brief marriage before she met and married your father.' And I guess that was something that, in those days, divorce wasn't encouraged and probably looked down upon a little bit, I don't know. Anyway, it had never been mentioned to me, and I was very shocked.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Finally, I did. And she couldn't believe that I had heard that, but she said, `Well, yes, it's true. Now that's that. Let's go on.'

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: I did, yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: I was--no, I was close to 22 when I was...

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: ...out of law school.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I finished my major in three years, but I needed some additional credits to count for the undergraduate degree. And I applied to the law school for early admission at the law school, and to my great surprise, they took me. So my first year of law school counted as credits for my undergraduate degree, and so then I had two additional years of law school.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Ignorant and naive.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, about what life for a woman lawyer might be like, for one thing. It never occurred to me that there weren't women lawyers out there and that it might be hard to get a job as one. I never thought about that.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Right.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I learned that women could do all right and be accepted if they could do the job. I guess that's why I assumed when I went to law school that I wouldn't have any trouble getting a job...

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: ...but I did.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: And they bought books constantly, kept a library. And when they ran out of space, they would sometimes give some books to the local library. And they were both readers. And they loved to subscribe to magazines--Time and The Saturday Evening Post and the National Geographic and so on and--we only went to town once a week, and we'd get the mail and get the groceries. And when we'd came back with the mail, there'd be a big battle in the family about who got which magazine first because we were kind of starved for news, and we loved to read everything we could put our hands on. So there was a big race for the mail to see who got what first.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, goodness, it was probably after I was out of college. We got elec--we had an electric generator by the time I was in college, and that ran on some kind of natural gas. And my father could start it up at night and run it for a while at night, and we'd have lights in the evening. But then the REA, the Rural Electrification Act, had been passed during the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the whole purpose of that was to try to bring electricity to rural areas that didn't have it. And in those days, there were many rural areas in America that didn't have electricity.

And while electricity did come then to the Duncan Valley and to Verden and to Lordsburg, it did not come out to the ranches. And my father made some arrangement with the local REA that he would build the line, put the poles in--in to their specifications and string the wire to their specs, if he could get hooked up. And when I was away at Stanford, I think, we finally got hooked up with the REA. And that was very helpful because, at that point, it was possible then to eventually put an electric pump down in the wells and get our water pumped out with that electric energy. And my mother could have a refrigerator in the kitchen and run a--a--a vacuum cleaner and a washing machine and all those things that hadn't been easy to do before.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: He never went to college. He went to high school in Pasadena. His father had found someone to manage the ranch, eventually, and the family had moved to Pasadena.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: California.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: And my father went through high school in Pasadena. And he had wanted to go to Stanford, and it was at the time of World War I, and two things happened. My father was drafted briefly before the end of World War I, although he never saw military action because it ended. And his father died. And my father was sent out to the ranch to try to keep the lid on things...

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: ...while the estate was settled.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: My mother had a degree from the University of Arizona, and she had taught school, grade school, I think, for a while in El Paso.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, not till I went off to Stanford, I suppose. I mean, I read a lot of things, but I don't think that I had a cohesive philosophy of life at that point. I was basically very uneducated, and I went to high school, as you know, in El Paso. And in those days, it wasn't fashionable to get good grades, so I did have good grades, but I tried not to have anybody know about it. And I don't think I learned much. And when I went off to Stanford, I was really astounded at the depth of knowledge of my classmates, and many of them were, really, remarkably well-educated compared to me. And I just thought I was very deficient, and I'm sure I was.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes, that's right.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, I know.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, it--it was funny. John grew up in San Francisco. He was a city boy. He knew nothing about ranch life. I mean, that had just--he had never lived in the country. And I was a little concerned about having him get along well with my family, since he knew so little about ranch life. And I didn't know whether he'd be accepted by the cowboys either. I didn't know if he could ride a horse well or, you know, anything.

So we made a trip out to the ranch and drove out to the ranch and drove up one afternoon. You could see the dust cloud way off. They knew we were coming because you can see the car dust for five miles out. And we got up to the house, and my mother, of course, rushed out of the door to greet us and be so happy to see us and to see John. And I said, `Well, where's DA?' And she said, `Well, he and the men are down in the corral branding some calves. Maybe you'd better go down there and tell him hello.'

So after a while, John and I walked down to the corrals, and there was a lot of activity down there. They were branding that day right at the headquarters and had some cattle in the corrals. And there was a lot of dust and swirling around and bawling of the cattle. And they had a branding fire in the middle of one of the corrals. And I knew that my father knew we were there. He had seen the car coming, and he knew we were there, but he never looked over and acknowledged us.

And then, finally, he kind of reached up and touched the brim of his hat. And that's kind of the universal sign out in that part of the country that, `Yeah, I know you're there.' So, finally, he said `Come on over. This must be John.' And so he stuck out his hand, and, of course, it was the hand of a working man. It was tough. You shook his hand, it was a little like shaking hands with Justice Byron White. You knew you'd had a handshake. And it was dirty because he'd been branding and probably a lot of blood all over it and no telling what else. And so he said, `Glad to meet you, John.'

And then my father went over to the fence, and he pulled down a piece of baling wire, and he straightened it out and he put two or three strands together and made what--you know, a skewer about this long. And there was a bucket down near where they were branding the calves, where the cowboys who were castrating the bull calves just threw the testicles. I mean, they just cut them off and threw them in the bucket. And my father reached down in the bucket, and he pulled a couple out, and he took his pocketknife out of his pocket and trimmed them up a little bit. I mean, they were just a bloody, dirty mess down there. And he stuck some on this skewer that he'd made, and he put it in the branding fire and cooked the things down in the branding fire for a while.

And then after he thought they were done, he pulled a skewer out and held it out to John. `Here, John, try these.' And I think John was pretty astonished. I would have been. But he was great. He plucked them off the end of this baling wire skewer and popped them in his mouth and chewed them up and sort of swallowed hard and said, `Oh, very good, Mr. Day.'

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, he di--well, of course.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, we used to have more than our share, I'm afraid. That was one of the things that cattlemen sort of thought were a delicacy. And, actually, my mother knew how to prepare them and cook them, and they weren't too bad. You know, when I grew up, everything was deep fried. You deep fried the steak. You could have a perfectly good T-bone steak, and any cowboy worth his salt would want it chicken fried. And you fried the chicken, too, and fried the bacon and fried the eggs and fried everything. And so you fried the mountain oysters, too, dipped in a little milk and egg and bread crumbs, and they weren't too bad served with some cocktail sauce.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, they're pretty old now. They're all in their--the youngest is about to become 40. And the oldest and the middle son live in the Phoenix area, Scott and Brian. And our son, Jay, the youngest, lives in Palo Alto. He went to Stanford.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, Scott and Brian are both in real estate-related ventures. And Jay is in the dot-com world, still hanging on.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: They were in the court on the day I was sworn in, in September of 1981.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, of course they did.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, they were thrilled, as parents, of course, would be. And what it meant for them was that the minute it was announced that I was nominated, everyone they had ever known contacted them to tell them how excited they were and to talk to my parents. And so here are these two, who had lived that life for so many years on that isolated ranch--were in contact with the world. And reporters came out to the ranch and wanted to talk to them and take their photographs, and the world came to their door. And it must have been interesting for them, really, to have all of that communication at that late stage in their lives. I know it was fun for them. And it was a great thrill when they came back here and sat in that courtroom.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I went on the court in 1981. My father died, I think, in '86--I can't--something like that. And my mother lived another five years.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, hard to say. Probably my father.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: A curiosity about how things work. His nature was to want to know how everything worked, and he liked people. He liked people, regardless of background or wealth or status, high or low. If they were interesting people to talk to, he liked to talk to them. And I think I share some of that, actually. He wanted to go to Stanford and never had a chance, and probably that's why that was the only university I wanted to go to. I don't know that that's the case, but we're often influenced by things we don't understand. That's probably the case.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: He was a strong believer in that. He thought he knew how to do things at the Lazy B. And if he wanted it done right, he would do it himself.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: First and foremost, I will be happy that family and friends and people who've known about the life that we lived out there will have a chance to see it, and people who have never experienced life in isolation or in the Southwest may be able to read it and have some feeling of how it looks, how it smells, how it sounds, how it feels. I thought my upbringing was perfectly normal at the time, but, of course, looking back, I know that it wasn't. And it was a special way of life and a way of life that is largely gone these days. You--you don't find those old cowboys who spend a lifetime on a ranch anymore.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, first, we had to agree we were going to, and I was worried that I didn't know how we'd have the time, how I would have the time. And I had Alan sit down and try to put down on paper things that he particularly remembered, and I tried to do the same. And we spent several days together about three years ago in the summer up in a little cabin we have out at Prescott, Arizona, and we just talked about the things that we thought ought to be included. And we agreed that it needed to tell the history of the ranch, it needed to describe it in ways that people could experience it, and we needed to talk about our parents and the cowboys and the cattle and the horses and what goes on, what it's like, what's ranch life all about, and probably end up trying to describe what we think the future of public lands ought to be and how it ought to be.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I didn't--we didn't have an agent, and I had talked to Jim and Kate Lehrer. Jim writes books all the time, and I asked him one time, `How in the world can you be so busy and write those books, one right after another?' And he said, `Well, I try to write at least two pages every day of my life.' And I said, `How can you do that?' He said, `Well, if I'm on an airplane, I do it on the airplane. If I'm at home, I do it there. If I'm at my office, I do it there.' And he said, `You can do that. You can--anybody can squeeze out time to do that.' And I took that to heart.

And then I talked to Kate. Kate has also published two or three books. And I said, `Well, Kate, who have you used as an editor? Who--who--what do you--do you recommend somebody?' And she said, `Yes, there's this woman at Random House that I think you'd like. Why don't you call her?' And I did. And it was Kate Medina. And she came to visit me, and we talked about the possibilities.

And, frankly, I wasn't sure that it would work. I wasn't sure that what emerged would be of sufficient quality that I would be proud of it. I--I just didn't know what I was getting into. And Kate Medina was very kind and very patient, and I didn't

want an advance because if I didn't like it, I didn't want anything to do with it. I wanted to see it before I knew that I wanted to go forward with this. I mean, if you put your name on something, you want to think, `Well, maybe it's OK.' And I was very concerned about that. But she was lovely to work with and encouraging, and so we just plugged along over a period of time, and we'd share things. And we got along perfectly in terms of what we wanted to do and cover.

And we had only one area of substantive disagreement, and that was about how we should characterize our father. Alan never left the ranch. I mean, he went to the University of Arizona, and when he married, he came back to the ranch and worked there. And I think sometimes it's very hard for a father and a son to work together in the same business. My father thought that he knew how things ought to be done and that his way was the right way. And my brother, like many young people, sometimes thought he could see a better way and a different way, and that didn't sit well with my father. And so they had clashes over that, sometimes serious ones.

My father had spent his whole life trying to get a uniform, beautiful bunch of Hereford cattle that were pole. That means that they're born without horns. He didn't like having to dehorn the cattle. And my brother thought that Barzona cattle would be better and wanted to make that change. And can't you imagine how hard that would be for the two of them to work out? And it was. And other areas of disagreement, too. So my relations with my father were entirely different. We never clashed over things, because I wasn't working for him or trying to run things.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I'd rather not. But there are a few descriptions of people that aren't very flattering, as you might imagine, and I didn't want to use correct names, in some instances.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, very little, if any.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes, yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, actually, I am working now on a book, but it's a book about substantive things, some of--of the history of this court, a bit about the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and segments on some of the justices who've served the court in the past and just other substantive areas. I've been here--this is my 21st year now, and I've had to give a number of speeches through the years. And the best thing for a justice to talk about probably is something historical, and I've tended to do that. And maybe it's my naivety again, but I think there may be some things in there that might be of interest. And so I'm drawing on that wealth of research and material to try to put something together.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I can't put my finger on it. I guess growing up on a ranch gives you a certain amount of self-confidence in your ability to work things out and not be afraid to tackle something. You learn out there very much how you can't call somebody in to repair anything. You have to do it yourself. So maybe a little of that at least provided me the sense that I could do this job at all. I don't think my experience was such that would immediately suggest I could. I'd never been a federal court judge, so maybe I leaned a little bit on that experience as a ranch girl.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Mm-hmm. Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes. And assistant attorney general at one time.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: And I was on the trial court bench and then the Court of Appeals.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, it's such an interesting job, of course. I mean, think how privileged we are to serve here and to have the most interesting legal issues of our times come to this court. And to work with a group of colleagues who are so dedicated and intelligent and competent, and everybody on this court wants to try to do a good job and they work hard at it. It's--it's really wonderful. You know, when I was in the state Senate, like in any legislative body, there are times when somebody will say to you, `Well, I'll support your bill, if you'll support me on mine.' I think you call that vote trading. There isn't any of that here at this institution, and that's just wonderful. It's a place where everybody sincerely tries to do the best job he or she can with the issue before them and give it their best shot, and you're not trading for anybody else's view.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Right. Well, three is harder than two, and two is harder than one, isn't it? But it was very important that Alan do it, because unlike my sister and me, he had lived there the whole time, uninterrupted, and he had all that institutional memory that was so crucial.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Yes.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I think he's 10, and she's nine. They were close together.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Mm-hmm.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: She is the older--he's the--yeah--he--it was--I was first, then my sister, then my--my brother.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Alan lives in Tucson and so does my sister. And my sister served in the state Senate for eight or nine years until she was term-limited out, the very place where I had served before her. And she's now a county supervisor for Pima County, where Tucson is, so she also has had a life in politics, as it were.

JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Oh, my father and I did. We were rounding up cattle on the very date that the first atomic bomb exploded over in New Mexico, and we had gotten up about 3 AM--you know how you do for a roundup. And we were in the kitchen. We'd had some coffee and some breakfast in the kitchen. The kitchen window looked north. And I was rinsing off the dishes at the sink, and it must have been about--I don't know--4 AM, something like that, and we saw in the north and a little bit east this unbelievable explosion on the horizon and this huge cloud go up. And my father came over and we looked at it, and we couldn't figure it out. And I said, `What is that?' It was war years. And he said, `Well, I--I don't know.' He said, `Maybe it was some munitions dump that went up, something like that.' And it wasn't until some time later when it became public knowledge that the first atomic blomb--bomb had been exploded up at Los Alamos.