Lazy B

By Sandra Day O'Connor and H. Alan Day
Random House, $24.95
ISBN 0375507248

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A Supreme Court justice recalls childhood on the ranch

You would expect a book bearing the subtitle Growing Up On a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest to be heavy on cowboy lore. And it is. But you might also think a memoir written by the first woman justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would provide at least some account of how the ranch upbringing helped form her judicial values and temperament. This one doesn't. And there is another oddity in Sandra Day O'Connor's book worth noting: although her younger brother, Alan, is co-author and primary source of remembered details, his stories are all told in her voice. He never speaks to the reader in first person.

Apart from these anomalies, Lazy B is a graphic, episodic and absorbing description of the day-to-day workings of a remote Arizona spread during the 1930s and '40s. A huge property -- "approximately one-fifth the size of the state of Rhode Island" -- the Lazy B was established in 1880 by O'Connor's grandfather. It remained in the family for the next 113 years. In 1986, the heirs decided to divide and dispose of the ranch, since none of their children wanted to manage it. The last portion was sold in 1993.

The most intimately drawn personalities in this joint remembrance are the authors' parents, Harry and Ada Mae Day, who presided over this demanding agricultural and social enterprise. O'Connor went off to school in El Paso when she was six, returning mainly thereafter for summers and holidays, but her brother enmeshed himself in ranch operations while still a boy and eventually succeeded his father as manager.

Instead of presenting a purely chronological history of the Lazy B, O'Connor and Day explain what the daily chores and seasonal tasks were like. They introduce us to an array of colorful, strong-willed cowboys who spent much or all of their working lives on the ranch. We get to know a handful of horses -- what they looked like, how they were named and what their eccentricities were. We ride along with the crew on dusty roundups and cattle drives and look over the cowboys' shoulders as they rope, tie, brand, earmark, castrate and vaccinate bawling calves, each in a matter of seconds.

Missing from the memoir is any sense that the Day family was very much interested in what was going on in the outside world. To be sure, there are brief mentions of the Depression, World War II and the ranchers' resentment of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his big-government schemes. And O'Connor says the family routinely talked about public affairs. Still, she gives us little insight into the political and cultural issues which surely must have been a substantial part of her growing up.

O'Connor took her law degree from Stanford in the early '50s. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan nominated her to the Supreme Court, and both her parents were on hand for her swearing in. She passes over all these momentous occurrences, however, within the space of the final few pages. Like the cowboys she admired, O'Connor remains on these matters strong and silent to the end.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.