1 post tagged “sandra day o'connor”

On Monday, I was down in San Mateo waiting for Caltrain in the sweltering heat of an 80+ degree afternoon. While I waited, I thought I'd catch a flavor of the local community by reading the Daily Journal, their freebie tabloid-sized paper.

It's said that you can find out all you need to know about a country you are visiting by walking down the main shopping street in its biggest city and watching one evening of television. What you see in those respective windows is what the society values most. More importantly, what *isn't* there tells you volumes about who is and isn't valued.

But a freebie local daily paper is just as good at a pinch, so I started at the back with the classifieds and worked my way frontwards. Then an article by Joan Levy caught my eye. It is about how Sandra Day O'Connor, fresh out of Stanford Law School, found it difficult to find a job in private practice because she was a woman, and so started out her career in the San Mateo District Attorney's office.

Suddenly, I was transported back two years to a 100+ degree August afternoon in Fort Worth, Texas, where I'm standing in the coolness of a museum looking at some artifacts. They are the pen and scissors of the 102nd Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and I am in the National Cowgirl Museum. O'Connor was inducted into the museum's Hall of Fame in 2002.

Now, it happens that Sandra Day O'Connor actually did grow up on a ranch and so can lay claim to being a cowgirl in the occupational sense of the word. But the museum is really about pioneering in every sense of the word. If you ever go to Fort Worth, Texas, don't miss it.

It boasts stunning glass murals that change as you walk by them, jukeboxes loaded with cowgirl-written songs, a Dixie Chick's cactus-shaped bass guitar, a bronco for children to ride and be filmed for a Western they can later download at home, and a beautiful little cinema with leather seats. Just the ticket for a hot summer's day in Texas.

And for a reminiscence on a hot summer's day in the Bayosphere.

(First posted at Bayosphere on 7/28/2005.)