September 21, 1981: Sandra Day O'Connor is confirmed by a vote of the U.S. Senate for the Supreme Court of the United States. She becomes the Court's 1st female Justice.
Born in on March 26, 1930 in El Paso, Texas, she grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. Sandra entered Stanford University at only 16 years old, graduated at 20, and stayed there and got her law degree at 22. In 1969, she was elected to the Arizona State Senate, where she served until 1975, when she was appointed a Judge for Maricopa County, which includes the State capital of Phoenix. Her younger sister, Ann Day, would also be elected to the State Senate, serving from 1990 to 2000.
Sandra Day O'Connor served nearly 5 years as a County Judge, then nearly 2 years as a Judge of the Arizona Court of Appeals. She supported the Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan, whose pre-politics life as a handsome actor convinced many women, who wouldn't otherwise think of voting for a Republican, to do so.
Reagan had seemed hostile to women's rights in America, including opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. But he had promised to appoint the 1st female Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, something no other major-party nominee, Democratic or Republican, had ever said he would do. He kept his word: When Potter Stewart retired, Reagan appointed O'Connor on July 7.
In his diary for the day before, Reagan wrote the following: "Called Judge O'Connor and told her she was my nominee for supreme court. Already the flak is starting and from my own supporters. Right to Life people say she is pro abortion. She declares abortion is personally repugnant to her. I think she'll make a good justice." He believed she had sufficient judicial -- and conservative -- credentials.
Timing is often said to be everything, and Reagan would have appreciated that life was imitating art -- or, perhaps, the other way around. The film First Monday In October, the title based on the annual commencement of the term of the Supreme Court, had been finished before Reagan appointed O'Connor, and premiered on August 21.
Jill Clayburgh starred as Ruth Loomis, an archconservative judge from Orange County, California. In real life, it was the home County of former President Richard Nixon, and a stronghold for conservatives, to the point that the voters chose to name their airport after an actor even more conservative than Reagan: John Wayne.
In the film, Loomis is appointed and confirmed, and clashes with a liberal Justice, Daniel Snow, played by Walter Matthau, until a case comes up that suggests a conflict of interest between a case and the widowed Loomis' late husband. She offers to resign her seat, but Snow, having come to respect her, talks her out of it, because the legal ramifications of the case mean that both Justices' principles can be upheld.
If either O'Connor or Reagan was worried about the confirmation process, those worries soon dissolved. On September 12, the Senate's Committee on the Judiciary sent her nomination to the full Senate by a vote of 17-0, with 1 vote of "present." On September 21, she was confirmed by a vote of 99-0.
It is nearly impossible to get 99 U.S. Senators to agree on anything, but they agreed on her. The 1 Senator not voting for her was Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, who was unable to be present for the vote. When he got back to Washington, he personally apologized to her for not being able to vote for her.
O'Connor served 24 years, and was often a "swing vote" on the Court. Her vote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 upheld the right to reproductive freedom set forth in Roe v. Wade in 1973. But her vote in Bush v. Gore effectively canceled out every other vote in the 2000 Presidential election, and is a black mark on her record. She later wrote that she regretted that the Court heard the case at all, saying that it should have sent it back to the Supreme Court of the State of Florida, which had ruled the other way -- but she did not say that she regretted her final vote on the case.
Upon her retirement from the Court, President George W. Bush appointed Samuel Alito to her seat, which he still holds. She was named Chancellor of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, succeeding former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. She held this post until 2012. In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
As of September 21, 2022, Sandra Day O'Connor is still alive, but has lived in an assisted-living facility since 2018, due to back problems and Alzheimer's disease, which also afflicted her husband, John O'Connor, also a lawyer. They had 3 children, all sons, none of them lawyers like their parents: Scott and Brian work in commercial real estate, while Jay is a software industry executive.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the 2nd female Justice on the Supreme Court, serving from 1993 until her death in 2020. There are now 4 female Justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Comey Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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September 21, 1981 was a Monday. On ABC Monday Night Football, the Dallas Cowboys beat the New England Patriots, 35-21 at what was then named Schaefer Stadium in the Boston suburb of Foxborough, Massachusetts.
And these Major League Baseball games were played:
* The New York Yankees lost to the Cleveland Indians, 5-0 at Yankee Stadium. Rick Waits, a lefthander who always seemed to give the Yankees trouble, pitched a 6-hit shutout, beating Rudy May. Reggie Jackson went 0-for-3.
* The New York Mets beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-3 at Shea Stadium. With Brian Giles -- no relation to the later Pirates outfielder of the same name -- at bat, Mark Lee threw a wild pitch that allowed John Stearns to score the winning run in the bottom of the 13th inning. Willie Stargell appeared as a pinch-hitter, and drew a walk. And that wasn't even the longest game of the day:
* The Montreal Expos beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 1-0 in 17 innings at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. Mike Schmidt went 2-for-5 with 5 walks. Pete Rose went 0-for-6 for the Phillies, and Tim Wallach did the same for the Expos. Steve Carlton and Ray Burris each pitched 10 shutout innings, to no avail. Andre Dawson singled home Rodney Scott with the winning run off Jerry Reed, to make a winning pitcher out of Bryn Smith.
* The Detroit Tigers beat the Baltimore Orioles, 5-1 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Eddie Murray went 1-for-3 with a walk.
* The Boston Red Sox beat the Milwaukee Brewers, 9-3 at Fenway Park in Boston. Carl Yastrzemski of the Red Sox and Robin Yount of the Brewers each went 2-for-4 with an RBI. Paul Molitor was injured, and did not play for the Brewers.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat their arch-rivals, the Chicago Cubs, 2-0 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Joaquín Andújar pitched 8 innings of 3-hit shutout ball, and Bruce Sutter pitched a perfect 9th to end it.
* The Minnesota Twins beat the Kansas City Royals, 7-2 at Royals Stadium (now Kauffman Stadium) in Kansas City. George Brett went 1-for-5.
* The Texas Rangers beat the Seattle Mariners, 4-1 at Arlington Stadium in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, Texas.
* The San Diego Padres beat the Cincinnati Reds, 6-0 at Jack Murphy Stadium. Chris Welsh pitched a 3-hit shutout. Johnny Bench went 1-for-4.
* The California Angels beat the Chicago White Sox, 6-3 at Anaheim Stadium (now Angel Stadium of Anaheim). Rod Carew did not play.
* The Oakland Athletics and the Toronto Blue Jays got rained out at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader the next day. The A's swept, 3-2 and 4-2. In the opener, Keith Drumright singled home the winning run in the top of the 13th inning. Over the 2 games, Rickey Henderson went 2-for-7 with 4 walks, 4 stolen bases and an RBI, while Jim Spencer went 4-for-9 with a home run in the nightcap.
* And the Atlanta Braves, the Houston Astros, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, were not scheduled.
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