This is William Sessions, the former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. At one point his signature would have probably ended up on Mulder and Scully's paychecks... and it's also on this drawing.

In October of 1994 - my Junior year of High School - I got a letter from a program called the Washington Journalism Conference, a seminar-style workshop put on by the Congressional Youth Leadership Council. To this day, I still don't know how I was nominated; none of my teachers fessed up to it.

I went to the conference in April of 1995. It was a really cool week, where we learned how reporters work in the field, attended a real press conference at the National Press Club, wrote articles, took photos, and published a daily newspaper... it was amazing. Very quickly I realized that as much as I liked to write, doing articles for this just wasn't my thing, so I asked if I could draw political cartoons. They said yes, and I was all set.

On April 20, a terrorist bomb was exploded in downtown Oklahoma City, destroying a federal building. During the afternoon, details were still scarce, but every terrorist group in the world was a suspect. That night, I did a cartoon featuring an Arab guy, turban and all, crumbling up a map of the Midwest while saying "Oklahoma City? What is an Oklahoma City?" While all my friends there felt it was a fine cartoon, the editor struck it down. I protested for a while, but yielded and produced a more reflective cartoon in its place. In hindsight I'm glad I did; the next day, authorities already had leads on two American guys named McVeigh and Nichols.

That same day, William Sessions came to talk to us about the bombing and the methods the FBI, among others, would use to investigate such a thing. The presentation lasted about an hour. I didn't want or need to take notes, so I instead drew the best caricature of him that I could. One of the kids I was sitting with happened to glance over and pointed out, "Dude, you should ask him to sign it!" It wasn't a bad idea, so once Sessions was done and people were filing out of the room, some of us went to speak with him. Many just wanted to ask him a last question or two in the hopes that they'd have something special for their articles (it was kind of a competition there - five or six kids would get assigned the same topic, but only the best article would get printed). I approached him and asked him if he would sign the drawing. He looked at it and smiled, said "This is quite good, really," then signed and dated it. He handed it back and asked me to send him a copy, then walked away.

Proud of myself, I stood there for a few minutes and then it occured to me - how the hell was I going to send him a copy? You can't just call up the FBI and ask for the address of the man who used to run it, after all.

Anyway, I never did send him a copy of the picture. There's probably a file on me now.