On this day in ...... 1923, Betty Cantrell was born in Arkansas City, Kansas, where she lived until age 6, when her father became paralyzed and the Cantrells moved to be close to Betty's mother's family in Texas. As a young wife she lived, attended college, and taught school in various places around the country. She divorced and remarried, and as Betty Roberts (right) began studying law at Lewis & Clark in Portland. Roberts was elected in 1964 to the Oregon legislature; a decade later she ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives and then for the Senate. In 1977 she was appointed to Oregon's intermediate appellate court, and in 1982 she became the 1st woman Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, retiring in 1986. Since then she's taught political science, received many awards, presided over her state's 1st same-sex marriage, served as a mediator, and temporary senior judge. As noted in Legal History Blog, in 2008 Roberts, by then in her mid-80s, published With Grit and by Grace: Breaking Trails in Law and Politics - A Memoir; it was the subject of this laudatory review by Albany Women's Studies Professor Julie Novkov.
