LIFE Magazine published my photo 58 years ago today!

I had taken the shot the previous summer while working for Operation Crossroads Africa, a Peace Corps-like, summer program for college students; I went to the landlocked nation of Niger for three months to help build a youth hostel.

One day, in the remote town of Maradi, I captured the black/white goat below with a 16 mm Minox spy camera, which my dad had loaned me for my trip so that I would “never be without a camera,” which eventually became my professional mantra.

I submitted the shot to LIFE and when the magazine published my image, on April 5, 1968, I used the $600 payment to buy my first premium camera, a 35 mm Nikkormat, an entry-level Nikon.

The rest, as they say, is history… I wound up having a career as a professional photographer (well, at least one of them was as a photographer…). I owe it all to the bifurcated goat.

As such, I commemorate April 5th each year as the date of my personal Rubicon — when I crossed into the land of “professionally published.” The date I sold my first photo to America’s leading, legendary, top news/photo magazine.

Today, to me, the image looks flat and grainy, and as it turns out, it truly was … but it was shot on a negative that was smaller than the nail of your pinky finger…. and blown up to the size of a full LIFE page…. which, at the time, was an impressive feat.

The photo may be of a GOAT, but for sure it isn’t a GOAT — Greatest Of All Time — image.