NEWPORT BEACH : Man Covers All Counties in Country

There’s an old saying among New Englanders advising travelers that “you can’t get there from here.” Try telling that to John W. Black.

When Black, a professor at Western State University College of Law in Fullerton, crossed the line from Sheboygan County to Ozaukee County a mile south of Cedar Grove, Wis., “precisely at 12 noon Central Standard Time” on Saturday, he became, it is believed, the first man to have set foot in every one of the 3,104 counties in the 50 states.

How long did it take?

“Sixty-five years,” Black, 65, said Monday after returning to his Newport Beach home.

“People keep asking me what was my first county, and I say Spokane (Wash.) because that’s where I was born,” he said.

Actually, his lifelong quest to tour the nation began in earnest in 1986, when Black--who had been to every state by 1965--realized that he had missed about 1,000 counties, mostly in the central states. On one trip, he said, he flew to Minneapolis, rented a car and “cleaned up” every county in the Dakotas, Nebraska and Minnesota.

While Black has accomplished a big chunk of his county-to-county travels in the last four years, he started his journeys as a teen-ager.

“Travel has been my love every since I was a little kid,” Black said. “In high school, a friend and I biked from Seattle to Salt Lake City, and the next summer we biked from Seattle to San Francisco.”

Black parlayed his love of travel into a long career, starting as an intern with the U.S. State Department and later becoming a foreign service officer in Germany and Haiti. In 1961, he was named deputy director of the United States Travel Service, an arm of the U.S. Commerce Department, which promotes travel in the United States to foreigners. In 1965, he was named the service’s director.

While serving with the Commerce Department, Black attended law school at night, establishing a law practice in Orange County in 1968 after leaving Washington. In 1972 he was the Democratic nominee in the race for the 39th Congressional District seat, but lost to Republican nominee Andrew Hinshaw. Black made another run for the Democratic nomination in that district this year, but failed in the primary.

Although he has been busy with government service, political campaigns, Democratic Party work and the full-time teaching job he has held at Western State since 1973--all of which earned him a place in Who’s Who in America--he still managed to complete his nationwide trek, which he said has included “at least 20” cross-country drives.

“I like to drive,” Black said. “Each time I drove cross-country I’d try to go a different way.”

Black said one of those coast-to-coast forays, in 1988, cost him his beloved 1985 Toyota, “the nicest car I had in my life.”

“I was cleaning up Oklahoma,” he said. “We came back through the south from Toronto. We got to the last county in Oklahoma, and my car gave out right as I crossed that last county line.”

The toughest leg of his years-long tour, Black said, was in the frozen north country of Alaska, which he visited last year.

“You have to be fairly hearty to go there,” Black said. “You have to be willing to fly over the Arctic Ocean in a single-engine plane. It’s also damned expensive. Going to Dutch Harbor and Barrow and Nome, the total cost was a little over $5,000. And that’s where most people give up. There are several people who have gotten to every county in the lower 48 states.”

Black completed the final leg of his trip over the Thanksgiving weekend, when he drove through 12 counties in Wisconsin with his wife, Iryne, a deputy county counsel and a former Municipal Court judge in Santa Ana, and their son, a law school student.

“The fun of doing this is not seeing the country, it’s seeing the people,” Black said. “That’s what made it an adventure.”