Mother Inspired Her Children

Bringing Out the Best in People

“helping other people grow can become life’s greatest joy.” –Alan Loy McGinnis-

How to enjoy helping other excel

The Friendship Factor

How One Mother Inspired Her Children

The Lazy B Ranch is comprised of 260 squire miles of scrub brush on the New Mexico and Arizona border and has been in the Day family since 1881. when Harry and Ada Mae were ready to have their first child, they traveled 200 miles to El Paso for the delivery, and Ada Mae brough her baby, Sandra, home to a difficult life. The four-room adobe house had no running water and no electricity. There was no school within driving distance. One would have thought that with such limited resources, Sandra’s intellectual future was slim.

            But Harry and Ada Mae were dreamers who did not allow themselves to be limited by their surroundings. Harry had been forced by his father’s death to take over the ranch rather than enter Stanford University, but he never gave up hope that his daughter would someday study there. And Ada Mae continued to subscribe to metropolitan newspapers and to magazines such as Vogue and The New Yorker. When Sandra was four, her mother started her on the Calvert method of home instruction and later saw that she went to the best boarding schools possible. Sandra’s brother Alan says that one summer their parents packed them in the car and they drove to all the state capitols west of the Mississippi. “We climbed to the dome of every building until finally we had to come home,” he said.

            Sandra did go to Stanford, then on to law school, and eventually on to become the first woman Supreme Court justice in the United States. On the day of her swearing in, the Day family was there, of course. During the ceremony Alan watched her closely as she put on her robe, then walked to her seat among the justices. “She looked around, saw the family and locked her eyes right into ours,” said Alan. “That’s when the tears started falling.”

            What causes a woman like Sandra Day O’Connor to go so far? Intelligence, of course. And lots of inner drive. But much of the credit goes to a determined little ranch woman sitting in her adobe house at night, reading to her children hour after hour, and to parents scampering up the stairways of capitol domes, their children in tow.