I had my 15 minutes in the front half of the 1990s, when Bill Clinton burst on the national scene and I covered the journey for his home town newspaper. Today, I found out that C-SPAN has digitized every program it has aired since 1987 — that’s more than 160,000 hours of television. My 15 minutes are in there, of course.

Here I am in early 1993 at a journalists’ roundtable, in what I believe is my first television appearance since my Cub Scout troop appeared on KRCG-TV‘s “Showtime” in, oh, 1968 or so. Notice the sheer terror I radiate, especially in contrast to my much-better-known, much-more-TV-friendly co-panelists:

Here I am a few weeks later, in March 1993, doing my best to throw a fastball past Clinton at his first news conference. Of course, he hit it right past my ear and back up the box:

In 1994, I went back on the journalists’ roundtable, doing a little better but paling in comparison to the then-not-famous Craig Crawford and a producer from the then-well-known “Inside Washington:”

By ’97, I had been on television numerous times, had been on various panels and basically was accustomed to speaking in public. I had gotten a lot better (although still not good by TV standards).

During this whole era, I was present while a lot of Zelig-like things happened around me. Like: the Gennifer Flowers news conference of 1992 where she claimed she had a 12-year affair with Clinton. I was in the front row, where I promptly was bowled over by the paparazzi who rushed the stage. There also was Clinton’s 1993 inaugural address, where I sat in the third row at the base of the Capitol steps, then scrambled back to my apartment, six blocks away, to write the story for the Little Rock paper. After that, I took a nap, slipped on a tux, hit a few inaugural balls, then hooked up with a few campaign reporters and stayed up until the wee small hours.

Once I became an editor again (I had been an editor for several years before moving to Washington), my C-SPAN appearances drifted away. However, I still made a mark on the network in small ways. Consider this elaborate practical joke:

When I was an editor at Congressional Quarterly in the back half of the 1990s, I was part of a conspiracy to steal an ugly green Tupperware bowl that sat on another colleague’s desk. We then sent the bowl all over the world for months, occasionally making sure that a postcard or photo of the bowl would be sent to my colleague from some remote location.

On Election Night 1998, C-SPAN set up a live remote from CQ so a political reporter could provide commentary all night. Watch this clip very carefully and at one point, you’ll see someone walk by…with a green bowl:

We did this several times that night. Eventually we got bored and just left it in camera range (you’ll have to wait just a bit for C-SPAN to cut back to CQ headquarters):

My TV and C-SPAN days are over. I appeared elsewhere Back In The Day — I got berated by Helen Thomas on the Today Show once, showed up on the PBS NewsHour, made several Fox appearances back before there was a Fox News Network, did a couple of weekend show panels for CNN. Fortunately for me, C-SPAN is the only network (so far) that has offered such vast digital resources to the public.