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The oldest of three children (her sister, Ann Day, would serve in the Arizona legislature), Sandra was a self-sufficient child, learning how to shoot rabbits with a .22-caliber rifle and to

change an automobile tire (she started driving as soon as she could see over the dashboard). But at age 6, she was packed off for El Paso, where she lived with her maternal grandmother, to

attend private school. She would return to the ranch in Arizona for holidays and summer breaks. At 16, she enrolled at Stanford University in California, eventually majoring in economics and

graduating magna cum laude in 1950. She continued on at Stanford for law school, where she finished third in her class, and earned her degree in two years. While working on the Stanford Law

Review, she met John, her future husband. One night, after checking a law review article together, “He said, ‘Well, why don’t we take this down the highway to Dinah’s Shack over a beer,’”

she told _Parade_ magazine in 2012. “So that’s what we did, and … that continued for 40 nights in a row.” She knew that he was the one when she took him home to the ranch. He proved a match

for her gruff father, who was branding and castrating calves, and throwing testicles in a bucket. “[My father],” she told political analyst David Gergen in 2012, “put [a few] on some baling

wire and put ’em in the branding fire, and he said, ‘I’ll just fix a few of these for you, John.’ John, to his credit, took the things off the wire, popped ’em in his mouth, and said, ‘Very

good, Mr. Day. Very good.’ ... John was one of the funniest people I have ever known. He made us laugh every single day.”   President Ronald Reagan and his nominee for the U.S. Supreme

Court, jurist Sandra Day O'Connor, in the rose garden of the White House. Keystone/CNP/Getty Images Despite being one of the top students in her class (along with future Chief Justice

William Rehnquist, who had once courted and also proposed marriage to her), no law firm would give her an interview. Finally, the father of a friend, a partner in an Los Angeles firm, told

her that clients wouldn’t stand for a woman lawyer, and he offered her a job as a secretary. “That isn’t the job that I want to find,” she replied. She finally told a county attorney in San

Mateo, California, that she would work without a salary until he was in a position to pay her, and to “put my desk in with his secretary.” In 1959, she opened a law firm in Arizona and

became assistant attorney general of the state in 1965. Four years later, she was appointed to a vacant seat in the Arizona Senate. As majority leader, she once confronted the chairman of a

committee for chronic drunkenness. “If you were a man, I’d punch you in the nose,” he snarled. “If you were a man,” she retorted, “you could.”