My favorite editor, Bob Dubill, told me he liked this column I wrote 25 years ago so much he regularly reread it with his son.

I worked for Bob, who died Aug. 23 at 88, when I covered Hawaii’s congressional delegation for Gannett News Service. He was the finest journalist I’ve known, a charismatic optimist among many cynics.

He suffered fools by the busload in the early “happy face” days of USA Today before somebody grew a brain and made him executive editor, providing a harder tone that won the newspaper respect and made him a legend. On his promotion, all who ever worked for him thought, “There is a God.”

I associate Bob with airplanes; he was always dispatching us to chase stories on short notice.

He heard I was vacationing home in Hawaii and suggested since I was in the neighborhood, I should swing by Nauru to check a dispute between its president and our Guam newspaper.

I explained the Pacific is a big neighborhood and Hawaii is closer to San Francisco than Nauru. “OK,” he said, “then why don’t you visit Guam, too, and go to Nauru from there?”

I had to admit that while Hawaii is closer to Denver than Guam, Nauru is slightly closer to Guam than Hawaii is to San Francisco. So I went to Nauru. The president refused to see me, and I spent three days avoiding the island’s ubiquitous bird guano.

When another reporter couldn’t go to West Virginia for a governor’s debate, Bob sent me. He gave me her plane ticket, which was allowable then.

I spent the flight fretting about flying under someone else’s name. I worried the plane would crash and I’d die with a ticket in my pocket listing my name as Angela. A rescuer would say, “That’s the ugliest woman I ever saw.”

Bob sent me to Phoenix to cover for him on a speech he was supposed to give the next day at a nuclear power conference. He was unsure of the subject, which probably explained why he didn’t want to go. “You can wing it,” he said. “No sweat.”

I found myself on a panel with guys from The New York Times and Omni magazine to talk about nuclear energy advances. They announced I was subbing for Bob, but left his nameplate in front of me.

The Times guy delivered a 30-page paper that would have gotten him an Ivy League master’s degree. The Omni reporter put on a 45-minute multimedia spectacle.

Come my turn, it took me 38 seconds, speaking very slowly, to tell all I knew about advanced nuclear energy.

Most conferees shook their heads in pity when they saw me after the speech. Only a woman from a trade group addressed me. “That must have been really humiliating for you,” she said.

I was never happier to depart a town, but the trade lady was on the same plane, jabbering about my speech all the way back to Washington. When we finally parted at Dulles Airport, she said, “Mr. Dubill, someday you’ll be able to tell this story and laugh about it.”

There is a God.

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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.