A roulette chip from Monte Carlo, a goat skin from Greece, a beer glass from Denmark. At the time, I had to have them, the better to remember my college graduation trip to Europe. I proudly unpacked them on the couch in my mother’s Visalia home. I wondered if life would ever again be as exciting as that summer of ‘68.

My friend Don Cox and I, both journalism graduates, had gone our separate ways after the trip, he to the Air Force, and me to become a VISTA Volunteer, a soldier in the War on Poverty. It was hard to adjust to life after Europe. By night, I would cruise Visalia’s main street in my mother‘s car; by day, watch television — all you’d expect of a Renaissance man.

The high point of my home stay was a toe infection I got at a Lyndon Johnson for President Headquarters. Stuffing envelopes, I’d stepped on a rusty tack, ending my political activism forever. Back on my mother’s couch watching soap operas, my swollen toe wrapped in gauze, I wondered if I would ever make a mark on life.

Talk show host Dick Cavett made me want it all the more. With a Nebraska twang and a coat and tie, he brought such rebels as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix to midday TV. He liked them and they enjoyed talking to him, a certain sign that the world holds promise for an open mind and a good listener. I wanted his job, and I would have traded my good foot for it.

In his reply to my fan letter, Cavett wrote that good jobs don’t just happen, even with a Yale degree. They come with patience and hard work. He’d been a copy boy at Time Magazine and, later, an unsung writer. He told me to take whatever media job I could find. Get inside the door at all costs. Sooner or later, things would break my way.

I kept the letter in a frame at my first radio news job two years later, and my first TV job two years later. Wading through Northern Maine snowdrifts to deliver the Six O’clock News, I wondered if things had “broken my way” yet — or if they ever would.

One night, I went to visit an old country fiddler, his farmhouse a single burst of light in the darkness of a winter night. By oil lamp, he showed me the remnants of his music career: postcards from his listeners. They’d requested simple country songs, and every Saturday night during his broadcast, he would play them. With live radio obsolete and his music no longer popular, he’d sit alone, read the old cards and fiddle.

Thirty-five years later, I still think about him and the peace I found there. Giving him voice, I found my own voice as well. It had come not with big stars and the glare of network lights, but an old fiddler and the soft glow of lantern flame. It happens that way. Those with a few years behind them know what I mean, but the restless young have to be ready.

Television news is only the semblance of real work. Once, I was sent to do a live report of a bank robbery. We couldn’t park our truck anywhere near the bank, and as I waited for my cue, heavy rain began falling. “The robbery happened over there,” I said authoritatively, pointing to nothing in particular. “The man escaped with an undisclosed amount of cash.” There is nothing like telling the world what it needs to know.

I’ve since collected many proud moments, riding an elephant in a circus parade, “brooding a mare,” visiting with a pregnant moose in a forest, and, of course, my dance with a Dominican rooster. I could go on, but you get the point. Life doesn’t always happen the way one expects.

My College of the Redwoods journalism students often tell me they want my job, and a point-and-click method of getting it. That’s why, instead of teaching them the history of the cathode ray TV tube, I show them what you can do with a cheap camcorder and how easy it is to get your work on television, witness the Access Humboldt channels.

When two of my students, Corsairs football players, volunteered to help televise CR sports over a public access channel, I told them how much it means to people they will never meet. Among them is a Pelican Bay State Prison inmate who says watching Hoopa Valley players for CR has made him proud of his Native American heritage. A small flame, perhaps, but that’s all it takes.

The goat skin, the roulette chip, the beer glass — I still have them. But I no longer need them.

Dave Silverbrand, a Eureka Reporter columnist, is a well-known local television personality.