Judge O’Connor’s Days in Bay Area

California friends and schoolmates remembered Sandra Day O’Connor yesterday as a woman whose ability to excel in previously male-only or male-dominated institutions came naturally because of her intelligence, intensity and outgoing personality. According to many acquaintances from college days, her brilliant record as a student at Stanford University during the tumultuous years following World War II was a clear indication of the things to come later in her life. O’Connor. first woman majority leader of the Arizona Senate in modern times and the only woman member of the Arizona Court of Appeals, was nominated yesterday to be the first woman justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. “The thing I remember most about her,” said San Francisco Attorney Atherton Phleger, a Stanford classmate in the late 1940’s, “aside from her brilliance. was that you never thought of her as a woman because she never isolated herself in that way. “She was a complete person. interested in everything and not cloistered.” O’Connor completed her undergraduate degree in economics and graduated third in her law school class in two years at the age of 22. Some years later, she said she had never considered going anywhere else but Stanford, because that was the university her father had hoped to attend before he was forced take over the family farm after the death of his father. In 1946, O’Connor. the only girl in her Arizona high school class who went to college, arrived at Stanford. at the time. the school was