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[DOOR SHUTS] SPEAKER 1: This is our little jail cell here we have. This is what we would call the drunk tank cell.

SPEAKER 2: This is John Light's 18th year as the Sheriff of Cook County. Light is 61 years old. He's 6 feet 3 and goes about 240. People here pay more attention to his size than his color. He says being Black in a countryside full of Scandinavians is easy enough if you want it to be.

SPEAKER 1: If you look for problems, you can always find problems. So I'm the type of person that I am very alert and seeing trouble ahead of time before it reaches me, and I can always walk around it.

SPEAKER 2: Part of Light's easygoing attitude comes from spending his whole life in Cook County. His parents homesteaded here back in 1913 and raised 15 kids in what at that time was mostly wilderness. Eventually, his brothers and sisters all moved away to Minneapolis and Detroit and Canada. But he stayed and says he's glad of it.

SPEAKER 1: I've learned a lot from being out here like this, and you learn how to get along with different types of people. It's a clean lifestyle here.

[KEYS JINGLING]

[CAR BEEPS]

SPEAKER 2: It's a clean lifestyle, partly because Light keeps it that way. He says it's not always easy to keep track of people in a county that fluctuates between 4,000 residents in the winter and 30,000 in the summer tourism season.

But otherwise, sheriffing here tends to be pretty much the same as anywhere else. You get regular drunks, some domestic violence, the rare killing, and increasingly, even here, drugs.

SPEAKER 1: Well, this is one of my little druggy houses right here. We know they're selling out of it, but trying to pinpoint it down and trying to get enough evidence for a search warrant to go in there and bust them at the right time is pretty hard.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 2: It's mid-afternoon at the Blue Water Cafe in downtown Grand Marais, the County seat. If there's a headquarters in town, this is it. The tables and booths are crammed with people and smoke and coffee.

Bob Altrichter is here along with County Commissioner Russ Broberg. They say John Light, like the proverbial Sheriff, always gets his man.

SPEAKER 3: I think he's been an exceptionally good Sheriff, absolutely.

SPEAKER 4: He was born and raised here. He went to school here. He knows every soul in the County.

And the thing that will amaze you, go up and ask him for somebody's telephone number. He don't even look in the book. He tells it to you. [LAUGHS] He's got a memory-- you can't believe it. You'll never believe it.

SPEAKER 3: I think the only people that will ever voice a complaint about John Light are the ones who have lost after he's hauled them into court. In plain English, I think he just scares the hell out of them.

[LAUGHTER]

I have never, never heard anyone complain about John because he was Black, never, never. No, no, that doesn't enter into it at all.

SPEAKER 2: Not many people have voted against him for that reason, either. In fact, not many have voted against him at all. In his 18 years as Sheriff, Light has never had a close election. He usually gets more than 90% of the vote.

He says there's some notoriety attached to being Black in a white tourism area like Cook County. You stay long enough, you get to be something of a tourist attraction yourself.

SPEAKER 1: Everybody you talk to, no matter where you are, California or the East Coast, they all talk about Cook County.

SPEAKER 5: (ON RADIO) 36.

SPEAKER 1: And I guess not to be bragging too much about it, but a lot of people know about me, and they seem to have a good word for me up here. Yes, they do.

SPEAKER 2: Cook County Sheriff John Light. In Grand Marais, this is Leif Enger.