What I'm Reading This Month
By Nadine Holder
July 2007
Lazy B, Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest by Sandra Day O’Connor and H. Alan Day. Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York, 2003.
I chose this book for three reasons: (1) The Lazy Ranch is just directly north of us across the Cochise County Line in Greenlee County so should reflect our climate and lifestyle, (2) Sandra Day O’Connor’s record as a federal judge had always interested me as I couldn’t quite really read her politics, and (3) I was curious after reading Smart Girls how another girl born about the time I was, and raised in about the way I was, wound up on career tracks so different in a time when careers for women of any kind were difficult to come by.
#1 The Lazy B Ranch is in a section of Arizona that seems considerably drier and less verdant than our area and required many more acres to make a working cattle ranch than did the early ranches in our part of Cochise County. The tremendous distances involved made for a lot of difficulties for the family.
#2 Ms. O’Connor doesn’t get into her politics at all in the book and only makes brief mention of being appointed to the bench by President Reagan. I took a little side jaunt into Wikipedia for more information and learned that she was actually a conservative during the Burger Court and later was considered as occupying the ideological center. She was criticized for a case-by-case approach to justice that allowed her to make arbitrary decisions and shift principles according to political expediency. She put in a tiny bit of background in the book re attending Stanford Law School so it surprised me a bit that she was ever considered a conservative.
#3 She was only a bit older than I and our life styles differed little. A minor difference was the size of the Lazy B ranch - while my parents operated a cattle ranch by themselves, the Lazy B was a large operation with many cowboys and both Sandra and Alan Day were working cowboys from a very young age. My father shielded me from the hard chores of the ranch and I spent more time on typical cleaning, cooking women’s chores. I say the difference was minor however as a couple of my uncles ran large cattle ranches near us and during my high school years I was often at the ranches during the heavy work of branding and calving. In addition, my cousins and I dodged our school work by sneaking out in the night to drive out to the ranch and play poker with the cowboys ‘til the wee hours of the morning so I was pretty familiar with the hard work part of a large ranch too. Another difference in our growing up was my mother worked with my father as a ranch hand while Mrs. Day was a very feminine sort who dressed well and kept to the house and out of the ranch work. Our schooling was almost exactly alike with it being done by living away from home with whatever relative would take us in somewhere where there was an operating school. I even came within a whisker of choosing law school and political science instead of the physical sciences that I actually studied.
As in my home there was never a comment on religion of any kind at the Day home as well. I had the Bible as a book and had read it several times over by the time I was nine but it didn‘t mean much to me other than interesting history. I then grew up an agnostic knowing some great intelligence had created all that outdoor beauty and life but that whoever that intelligence was he had no time for silly children and women and was not a personal God.
The book itself is a joy to read - the Days have a way with words that presents beautiful and sometimes heart wrenching pictures of an outdoor way of life that is long gone from the West. There are old photos from the 1930’s with each chapter. She makes each and every cowboy come alive as a person, as hard and grizzled as they come, but loyal to the children and animals on the ranch. It is a gripping history of the Old West lifestyle and very close to the history of the area here in Cochise County. It is a small book and not long to read and I would highly recommend it as a fascinating bit of history.
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