Justice O’Connor’s days in Charlottesville ‘idyllic’

Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court’s first woman justice, and her husband, John J. O’Connor, lived in a towered Victorian house in Charlottesville for about 90 “idyllic” days in 1954. Justice O’Connor last week described the time she spent between February and May of that year in Charlottesville while her husband was a student at the U.S. Army Judge Advcate General’s School. • “We thoroughly enjoyed the three months we spent there in the spring,” she said. Mr. O’Connor, contacted in Phoenix, Ariz., where he is presently an attorney, said that he and his wife had lived in the solarium apartment of a large house at 620 Park Street, while he was a U.S. Army lieutenant in the basic class at JAG School. “We had only been married since Dec. 20, 1952; and neither of us had ever been East, so for us it was a very, very happy interlude. We loved Charlottesville, and we established some friendships at the JAG School which have lasted all these years,” Mr. O’Connor said. He recalled that a friend who had been in the previous JAG class was vacating the apartment on the comer of Park Street and Park Lane and recommended that they take it. He said he car-pooled to school with six other JAG students so their wives could always have a car. “We all got together and played charades – people don’t play that much anymore – and we went with friends to Williamsburg and Washington, D.C., never dreaming that someday that would be our ~anent.home. It was an ~e time in our lives,and 1 we developed