I had a strange feeling I selected the wrong job.  This was a position with the Branch of Oil and Gas Resources I had been waiting to snag for 18 months while the wheels of government turned ever so slowly in my direction.  One new colleague ate lunch so slowly that the term lunch hour lost its meaning.  Another temporarily stored banana peels, apple cores, and coffee grounds in open cans on his desk for future transport to his home mulcher.  Yet another stacked papers, charts, and maps so neatly on his work table that piles were perfectly rectilinear.  Absolutely no one was allowed to touch them.

Then I met, Franny, the Branch cartographic specialist, a guru in the world of maps and map making.  She asked me to be responsible for the Gilbert J. Garcia Memorial Pencil Nubbins Jar, a small glass receptacle filled with a dozen one-inch-long severely sharpened pencils.  Apparently, Gilbert, a former employee had been honored for extracting maximum efficiency from his government issued writing instruments.  Franny was very sociable in that Midwestern casual way, 30ish with streaks of gray hair, definitely the motherly type.  She apparently wanted this new staffer to feel at home and was passing on an important item of Branch memorabilia.  Franny laughed a lot, and her cup was always half full.  I told Franny I felt fortunate to be given so much responsibility so early in my career, and I would guard the jar with my life.  Forty years later the jar still sits proudly on a bookshelf in my office.

A few weeks later, Franny matter-of-factly asked me if I collected counties.  I pleaded ignorance, guessing that it had something to do with maps and geography.  She presented me with a rolled map of the U.S., a base overlay with state and county outlines and major cities.  She briefly explained what it was all about, emphasizing that many of my colleagues collected counties when they traveled to meetings and to do field work, so collecting was a logical option.

“Hmmm”, I said to myself.  “What would a psychiatrist say about this?  I’ll give it a shot”.   I blurted it out, still trying to be cordial.  Franny sat me down in the library and explained the rules and responsibilities of an ethical county collector.

“To collect means to be there, on the ground in a county (parishes in Louisiana or quads in Alaska).  On the ground means on the ground, not in the air over the county or just near the county.  The boundary must be precisely known, and one must be standing, sitting, or lying entirely in a county to collect it, although arrival can be by air or any form of ground transportation.  A new collector can be retroactive, even starting in childhood on family trips as long as the route is documented.”

Franny and I were sitting at a table in the USGS library at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood, Colorado in Jefferson County.  “Interesting” I said trying to sound enthusiastic without revealing the hint of sarcasm I was feeling about this weird county collecting business.  Franny was happy I seemed interested, but she cautioned that I couldn’t fudge because I would be cheating myself.  I stared at my map but just as I looked up, Franny anticipated my thoughts.  “It’s not as easy as it looks”, she said.  “It’s a life’s work to get all 3,041. [At the time, in 1976, there were 3041 identified counties in the U.S.]

At home that evening I stared at my map again and pondered Franny’s challenge.  That’s right, it was a challenge and a way to fit into this weird world of scientists.  So I decided to be a retroactive collector.  I found my Venus colored pencils and opted for using different colors for the various family trips as a child.  A few calls home and a Rand McNalley Road Atlas helped.

“Was that US-30 or old Alternate US-30 through Sandusky, Ohio back in 1956 when you bought that new Chevy?” I asked my father.

I was gratified to learn that I had already collected several hundred counties.  College in South Dakota and New York and teaching in Wisconsin helped, and of course different routes to New Jersey with my parents as a child bagged even more.  “Wow, only about 3,000 more to go” I said to myself as I put my pencils away one evening.  I do have a sarcastic side, but I found this new hobby interesting because I was a confirmed road warrior and always waxed nostalgic about trips from the past.

And so it went.  My collection multiplied as my career and personal life moved forward in the 1970s and 1980s.  As new cities and towns were visited, as geologic meetings were attended, as fieldwork was accomplished, and as vacations were taken, my map acquired some serious color, a collage resembling the life history of a homeless wanderer, like a hobo on the move in the 1930’s.

County collecting like fishing or other human endeavors can be done in different ways. First, there is the deliberate or serious collector, the individual willing to go to great ends, to drive miles out of the way, or to plan a 3,000 mile trip that in reality should only be 1,000 miles in length.  I’ll offer an example of such a collector shortly.  In contrast, the casual collector may have started a collecting career as a serious guy but got bored or realized the futility of serious collecting.  A casual collector maintains a current map but doesn’t plan trips around his or her hobby or even discusses this aberrant behavior with friends.  Finally, there is the former collector, the one who was given a map and a lecture, usually by a serious collector, but who has quietly discarded the map or has closeted it with the fear that his collector friend may make inquiries.  I have several friends in this category, but I’ve ceased asking about updates.

I’m currently a casual collector.  I started my collecting seriously to Franny’s delight but had an eye-opening experience on a planned trip east to Chicago sometime in the late 1970s.  I recall exiting I-80 in western Nebraska and driving south a few miles to collect a county.  I then retraced my short route back to the interstate.  After about 10 of these planned maneuvers, and serious consternation from my travelling companion (a former spouse), I had a sudden realization of the level of depravity I had reached, not to mention the awful waste of fuel.  I immediately became a casual collector.  Recollecting great counties with mountains and deserts was more fun than driving in the Texas Panhandle.  I decided to collect only when my planned route obliged, and I never planned future trips around my hobby.

One of my colleagues fit the serious collector category.  Lennie became very serious indeed.  He was a computer specialist working for a company that built and maintained geologic databases when mainframe and microcomputers were still in vogue.  Lennie was in his mid 30s, a geographer with a computer degree, a tall, handsome guy who looked like a 25-year old with a receding hairline, outgoing and well liked by clients.   His well organized style helped in getting the cooperation I needed from state and Federal agencies to create a large gas-shales database.  We socialized occasionally with wives and mutual friends and traveled together on numerous trips to points east.  Lennie was also an avid beer can collector and threw serious beer tasting parties.  His collection included cans from around the world, all parked in neat rows on hardwood shelves in his newly remodeled basement.  He designed scoring sheets for his beer blasts and developed a quantitative scale to rate the brews based on multiple taste qualities.  I thought this was a bit overdone since scoring became rather subjective after an hour of tasting.  An oddity of these events was the unusual level of inebriation exhibited by the participants who actually tasted small quantities of each beer, but after several tastings a change in the general behavior was duly noted.

At either the Caribbean or Asian beer tasting event—each party had a regional theme—I introduced Lennie to county collecting.  I recall having our conversation early in the evening.  Since Lennie loved to see his guests drunk and out of control, serious talk was dispensed with soon after the festivities started.  Lennie always seemed sober to me at these parties, a characteristic of his that I never understood.  I had a fairly high tolerance for alcohol myself, but Lennie could literally drink me (and everyone else) under the table.  My wife, Jenni, vowed never to attend another party after a personally embarrassing episode.

Lennie seemed so enthusiastic about this new collecting opportunity that he recommended collecting cities over 100,000, national parks and monuments, and highway segments.  I whole heartedly agreed, a natural reaction based on my inebriated condition.  When beer tasting was finally finished and Lennie brought out the liquors, I thought I had a convert, but in reality I had created a monster.

Soon after receiving his map, Lennie started collecting with minimal fanfare, but the seriousness of his efforts become clear to me when we met in Morgantown, West Virginia several months later to attend a meeting with the Department of Energy, the primary funding agent for my project.  Lennie met me at the Morgantown airport and enthusiastically described our itinerary for the next day.  It was a Sunday and we had many hours to kill until our first meeting the next morning, and counties were waiting to be collected.  I didn’t mind at the time because I was still a serious collector anyway and we could make final preparations for our meeting enroute.  We wound our way over state and county roads in remote western and central West Virginia, over mountains and through decaying hamlets, some of the poorest in the country.

I recall stopping for gas in some dilapidated country convenience store in the middle of Ramshackle, West Virginia.  Lennie pulled up to a gas pump and waited for the attendant, a 20-something, 260 pound monster of a fellow who had reached his maximum performance level.  The guy starred at me from the front of our rental car as I sat in the passenger seat and attempted to smile.  He refused to fill the tank.  Lennie, who was wearing dark slacks, a collared shirt, and sporting a short haircut opened the driver’s door and tried to convince the attendant that I was an OK guy. My hair was somewhat long by the standards of the day, but I was reasonably well dressed, clean shaven with good jeans and a polo shirt, not slovenly, especially in comparison to the fellow facing me outside the front windshield.  Lennie finally convinced the guy that I wasn’t a psychopath, no small task, considering the time involved in their discussion.  We finally got a fill up but the windshield remained bug infested as we drove away to collect yet more counties.

I really can’t remember our route except for snippets of geography, brief images of hardwood forests, river valleys, and strip mining operations as we breezed by.  I recall scooping up about 20 counties in that long session and celebrating our accomplishment by stopping at a rural county bar late in the afternoon on some bumpy back road south of Charleston.  We pulled in front of an unmarked frame building amid several old pickups and walked up a few rickety wooden steps and, to my dismay, into a bar to the gaze of some young men, all similar in size and shape to the gas attendant I had briefly met earlier in the day.  These fellows were huge and may have been at the bottom of the economic ladder, but were well fed with liquid bread.  They shot good pool.  They had been playing for some time it seemed, and in the local custom, were drinking quart bottles of beer, Bud and Rolling Rock, I think.  As the game resumed, we ordered a couple of shorties, as 12-ounce long-neck bottles were called by the locals, and watched the festivities.  We were soon asked to participate and actually played a few games for the price of a beer (quart size), fortunately losing each one with some purposely missed shots before we cordially excused ourselves.

By now the sun was setting, and since we were ecstatic at surviving cocktail hour in rural West Virginia, we decided that more celebrating was necessary since Lennie had gotten the name of a steakhouse in Charleston with a multi star reputation.  After a remarkably good dinner, we ended the evening at a nearby Holiday Inn where a local five-piece country group was noisily twanging away.  Shortly before closing, I somehow managed to get on stage with the band and played bass guitar to the distinctive smell of cannabis.  I watched from the stage as some joints were passed around the tables of remaining inebriants.  This was to become the high point (and end) of my musical career.  Thankfully, Lennie drove us back to Morgantown (he still seemed sober to me) where we checked into our motel, arriving at about 4:00 am, with just enough time for a few hours of sleep before our 9 am meeting.

Sometime in the early 1980s, Lennie told me he had joined the Extra Miler Club, a national organization of county collectors started by two WW-II vets with time on their hands.  A true Extra Miler was an aging white guy with the sole ambition of collecting every county in the U.S.  The quarterly newsletter, The Extra Miler, described the exploits of various collectors with photographs of graying and balding men (and a few women too) standing next to county signs in some far off place.  Articles explained the best routes to reach hard-to-access counties, or how to best collect Alaska quads by seaplane, or even the best restaurants in some counties.  Only a few elite members had become true Extra Milers by the early 80s.  An occasional obituary would describe the odd life of county collecting, a fellow’s life cut short, snubbed out before all 3,041 were bagged.  Well…I’ll be honest.  I joined, paid my dues, and started receiving newsletters in the mail.

Lennie and I occasionally met after he left his job, but our visits were less frequent, and soon we rarely communicated.  One day, sometime in the mid 1990s I checked my answering machine.  I had received a message from Lennie informing me that he had collected his last 30 or so counties on a recent trip and was now an Extra Miler.  He wanted me to be the first to know!

As the years passed I continued my hobby as a casual collector, although on occasion I became serious, like the time I had a work trip to Reston, Virginia and extended my car rental for 36 hours on a weekend (at my own expense) in order to drive south along the Appalachian Front on I-85 to grab 40 counties in the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia.  Most of my other large acquisitions were tied to specific goals like taking Amtrak from Spokane to Chicago for Christmas, or visiting my parents numerous times in Illinois using different routes, or by driving from Seattle to the Mexican border on a camping trip.  Clearly, living in different states (Texas, New York, Washington, South Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wisconsin) during my life added significantly to my county collection.  Oddly, I grew up in Illinois but I’ve collected only about half of the 102 counties there.  Southern Illinois is part of the Deep South.

I’ve always had an aversion to travelling in the south, and my map reflects this void.  The area south of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi is more sparsely shaded.  My son, Ken, has lived in New Orleans and Miami in recent years and I’ve travelled the I-10 corridor and blue highways through Louisiana and Mississippi, but my enthusiasm for the deep south is lacking.  The western half of my map, however, is a color collage.  The few uncolored counties stand out in a sea of pastel shades.  I’ve completed Colorado, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming, and I’m missing only a handful in other western states.  So, maybe I can call myself a casual repeat collector of western counties.