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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with RetroPod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Earlier this fall, Sandra Day O'Connor, the nation's first female Supreme Court justice, announced in a public letter that she was withdrawing from public life.

Like her late husband, O'Connor is suffering from dementia, a sad decline for a towering

legal mind. Her letter struck a wistful tone. O'Connor marveled at how a cowgirl from

the Arizona desert could reach the

highest court in the land. My greatest thanks, she wrote, to our nation, to my family, to my former

colleagues, and to all the wonderful people I have had the opportunity to engage with over the years.

But it turns out that wouldn't be her last moment in the news.

A week after O'Connor issued the letter,

the country was gobsmacked to learn something truly extraordinary

about her relationship with one of those

former colleagues, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist. For almost all of O'Connor's

tenure on the court, Renquist was, as justices like to call their leader, her chief.

But decades earlier, he was her beau.

We know that from Joan Biscupac's 2005 biography of O'Connor.

In the early 1950s, Renquist and Sandra Day, as she was known then, attended Stanford Law School

together. They shared notes. They studied together. You know where this is going. The future

chief justice of the Supreme Court and the future first female justice fell in love.

...