From The (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) Coventry-Record:
Former Coventry Town Clerk Recalls Encounter With Sandra Day O'Connor
BY SCOTT WHEELER, Special To The Caledonian-Record
Saturday July 2, 2005
Thelma Wilcox, the town clerk of Coventry between 1974 and 1994, will never forget the visitor who walked into her office one day.
"I was doing some work when somebody walked in," she recalled Friday. "I looked up and there was Sandra Day O'Connor. She didn't introduce herself. I just knew who she was."
The Supreme Court justice was visiting the area to research some of her family's history.
[snip]
Much has been written about the fact that Judge Rehnquist is a part-time resident of Greensboro, but little has been written about O'Connor's connection to the region.
Her ancestral roots are in Coventry. The Day Cemetery on the Pine Hill Road in that community is named after her ancestors, and she has a number of distant relatives still living in the region.
In 2002 O'Connor and her brother H. Alan Day published a book called "Lazy B" about their lives growing up on the family's ranch in Texas. In the book they mention their family's connection to Vermont and how their grandfather, H.C. Day, risked everything by abandoning the stability of his boyhood community for the adventures and risks of the Wild West.
[snip]
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