I’ve never done a whole lot to direct the trajectory of my life. Things just seem to have happened of their own accord as I’ve moved from one phase to another.

That’s why, to this day, I am amazed that I had a hand in affecting the trajectory of someone else’s life in a very substantial way.

To explain this means going way back to around 1980, give or take a year or so. I was a photo assignment editor for The National Enquirer, one of four persons on the photo desk responsible for not only illustrating the various stories brought in by reporters but also scouring the world and our own imaginations to come up with photos that were so good they could by themselves catch the attention of the reader.

It was a fun time. We had no limits on our ideas and no limits on money, as long as the ‘boss,’ Generoso Pope, approved of whatever ideas we came up with. GP, as he was referred to, owned the paper. It was selling millions of copies a week with a very popular, reader-friendly mix of celebrity and real-life stories, displayed with gee-whiz headlines and illustrated with eye-stopping photos.

A lot of the fun for me was coming up with ideas for amazing photos. For example, Cypress Gardens (now the site of Legoland) was then a major Florida tourist attraction (pre-Disney), with its beautiful gardens, lovely ladies in southern-belle costumes, and the famed, Florida-shaped Esther Williams swimming pool.

It was also home to a highly professional, world-class water ski show, often featured in Enquirer photo displays.  It was, in fact, where barefoot water skiing was first performed, in 1947.

I got the hairbrained idea one day of doing photos of someone water skiing on their head. So I called up the publicity person at Cypress Gardens: Do you think one of your folks can figure out how to do that? I asked. Sure, was the reply. GP approved the idea.

Weeks went by. I checked in every few days. “We’re working on it,” was the constant refrain. Finally, the word came back from Cypress Gardens: “We can do it using a helmet with a disc attached to the top, but not the bare head.”

I had a quick conference with GP. It’ll sort of look like he’s skiing on his bare head, but he won’t be, I said. Not good enough. Kill it, was the response.

You get the idea. The game was to come up with photos that would knock your socks off. If you couldn’t do that, the photo would not run.

So, to get back to the point of all this, on another day I was scrounging for ideas and found a small story from an Indiana newspaper about Eiffel Plasterer, a high school and college physics and chemistry teacher who for years had been working with bubbles, large and small soap bubbles.

Hmmm, I mused, I wonder if he can put a kid inside a bubble?   So I called him up and asked and he said sure, he could. So I got the necessary GP approval for the project and started arranging things.

I needed a photographer. Richard Faverty was a free-lancer in Chicago I had used often in the past. I knew from those previous assignments and my many chats on the phone with him that he was a great people person, had a good imagination, and would be interested and enthusiastic about this kind of off-beat assignment. He was indeed.

We set aside a weekend for it. Richard called me that Sunday night. Eiffel can’t do it, he reported. He couldn’t get a kid inside a bubble. I decided to pull the plug on the project. There was no sense keeping a photographer there if it just wasn’t going to happen.

Richard called me up the following week. “Ron, I can do it,” he said. This from a person who had no experience in blowing bubbles. OK, I replied, give it a go and let me know how it goes.

To cut to the chase, he did do it. And he photographed it. And the photos ran in The Enquirer.

That changed his life.

After the photos ran he started getting calls from around the world asking him to do bubble appearances. It started with a Japanese TV show, then a call from a Las Vegas promoter, a stint in Israel with the famed Fercos magic show and it snowballed from there. He was hooked. His career as Professor Bubble exploded and included shows in 37 countries; appearances on The David Letterman Show, the Mickey Mouse Club and Sesame Street; a book in 1987, Professor Bubble’s Official Bubble Hand-book, and the invention of many bubble toys and tools.

Where was I during all this? I kept track a bit, but Richard and I gradually lost contact. Our paths parted about the time his bubble career was really taking off, mainly because I left my job and spent a couple years at home with daughter Jennifer. I was no longer talking to photographers all over the world day in and day out.

When I returned to the business in 1984 it was as photo editor at Globe. The tabloid world had evolved to mostly a celebrity-driven publishing model and my days of enterprising photos and staying in constant contact with freelancers in places other than New York and Los Angeles were over. I remember calling him up in those early years at Globe to touch base and chat, but by then of course he was bubbling along full time. I remember us joking then about the role I’d played in the turn his life had taken.

Fast forwarding along, he moved on to corporate web design and digital photography and away from bubbles in the 1990s and in 2000 moved his photo studio from Chicago to Las Vegas  His exposure to the magic industry, computer skills and limitless imagination served him well and he carved out a nice niche helping acts from the Vegas strip and elsewhere come up with very effective promo shots.

So why dredge all this up now? Well, because I visited Richard last September. We had not stayed in close contact at all. I sort of kept up with him on Facebook. I didn’t think we’d ever met before, but he jogged my memory and I now vaguely recall him visiting the office in Florida one time.

Our relationship for me was like that I’ve had with a couple other photographers from the Enquirer era who I remain in contact with but rarely see. It is hard to explain why some of these relationships last: It’s a combination of a pretty good working telephone relationship, with enough leisurely chatting to know that we have some things in common and perhaps a mutual respect.

And the result of it is the feeling I have that yes, we will meet someday, and we will hit it off in person as well as we have on the phone.

It has worked that way for me with others and it was that way with Richard in Vegas.

We were together only a few hours, with lunch included, and what struck me about him today as it did years ago was the easy-going nature, ease of imagination and sense of humor. We hit it off as well as I had hoped. I was glad I stopped in.

Here’s the sequence of photos from the clipping above:

And here’s Richard in his office during our visit: