Sandra Day O’Connor, the Mom Next Door—And So Much More
We were neighbors when I was growing up in Phoenix, Arizona. She was always the adult I looked up to.
To me, she was always Mrs. O’Connor, the mom next door. Yet she was always—even then, in the mid-1960s in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona—the person who would be Justice O’Connor. Long before her breakthrough appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court made her one of America’s most renowned jurists, Sandra Day O’Connor showed the qualities of pragmatism, wisdom, and patience with human frailty that marked her time on the Court—and make her legacy more precious than ever today.
When I was 6, my family moved into a brand-new house in Phoenix. Before the construction was finished, I encountered a boy my age playing amid the studs, wires, and boxes of nails. (Boys could do such things, Jon Rauch!”
