Hello my babies. Sit back and relax, as we go on a journey through time… all the way back to Friday.

A few weeks ago (sorry, we have to go even further back to begin this story… just think of it as sometime after the dinosaurs ruled the Earth, but before Hillary mopped the floor with Obama in PA), I got an e-mail from the J-School director here at UT, asking if I would attend the “College of Communication Advisory Council breakfast.” Having no idea what this was, but understanding that free food was involved, I immediately said yes.

I later came to find out that it was a gathering of many influential (note: $$$$) people who have ties, in one way or another, to UT’s College of Communication. It’s a group of businessmen and women from all over the country—click here for a Web site that has the bios of the council members.

One of the men on this list is none other than former-CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather. Now, Dan never attended UT—he’s a gradute of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. But apparently the requirements for being on the council go something like “successful + from ‘The Great State’ = membership.”

So I walked into the Campus Club where they were hosting the breakfast and didn’t recognize a single face—student or supposed “VIP.” Turns out I handed my coat to George H.W. Bush. I’m told this was a faux pas, and that just because he was standing by the cloak room, it does not mean he was working there. Is there a handbook for this kind of thing? How am I supposed to know?

So I headed over to the table where they were serving coffee and asked for a syringe. Again, I got stares. Apparently these upper crust types don’t shoot the caffeinated beverage straight into their veins like the rest of working-class America. So I’m standing there, pouring three-quarters of a carafe of half and half into my cup (I asked the girl next to me to say “when,” since my depth perception is off just after waking up. Guess who thought I was kidding.), and lo-and-behold, who should appear directly to my right but Dan “Kenneth, what is the frequency” Rather.

At this point, I’m terrified. If my central nervous system had been operating that early in the morning, I’m sure I would have had some violent reaction. Instead, I just put my head down and ran to the other side of the room, hoping Tom Brokow wasn’t going to block my exit.

So the rest of the breakfast proceeded mostly without incident. I hob-nobbed and rubbed elbows with “important people.” None of them offered me jobs, so I don’t know how important they actually could be. Anyway, after breakfast there was a pretty decent-sized crowd around Dan-the-Man. So I waited around with a couple friends of mine like a wolf pack waiting to strike. After a couple photos and handshakes, we made our move. He had nowhere to hide.

We shook hands and I said it was a pleasure to meet him, yada yada yada. He was really very nice. We asked him, “What story sticks out as the most memorable for whatever reason?”, to which he responded with the Hurricane Carla story in Galveston in 1961. CBS noticed the young reporter in the eye of the storm—something rarely done in those days—and hired him because of it. The other story or event that stuck out to him was the civil rights coverage of the ’60s, which he said was a set of stories that changed him as a person.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad day. We exchanged addresses and are now pen-pals. He has teddy-bear stationary. I still can’t decide if I should bring up the “60 Minutes II” debacle that dethroned him from the prestigious #3 spot in nightly news. I’ll let you know how that goes when I work up the… courage.