"All men who have accomplished anything worthwhile should set down the story of their lives with their own hands. But they should wait before undertaking so delicate an enterprise until they have passed the age of forty."
The quotation above was what Benvenuto Cellini, the renowned Italian goldsmith and sculptor and contemporary of Michelangelo, wrote in the opening chapter of his autobiography. Well, I'm now sixty-three and I supposed it's high time for me to write mine. My artistic achievements, I know, cannot equal those of Cellini and other notable foreign artists past and present, nor even of dozens upon dozens of Filipino artists active today and in the past. But no matter. There is no tragedy more tragic for an artist than to die and afterwards be forgotten for good Leaving a mark is what art making is all about. Artworks - visual, literary, musical, etc. - are the footprints artists leave on this Earth. They are proofs, beautiful proofs, that they, once upon a time, existed.
AMIRASOLO
I was called that by my USTHS classmate Paterno Mendoza. Fernando Amorsolo was the most popular painter in the Philippines at that time, and perhaps even up to today - the one most known to the public, art-lovers and non-art lovers alike. I don't recall exactly what prompted Pat to call me Amirasolo, but I guess it was because he wanted to get on my good side. He was perhaps flattering me because he had an art project to do and submit and he wanted me to do it for him. Not one to turn down a request "laced" with praise, I'm sure I readily did it for him. Anyway, he was not the only classmate who'd requested me that. There were several. I only remember Pat because of that memorable utterance of his, which I confessed truly flattered me.
I remember another classmate, Reynaldo Catiis, who prodded me to draw Batman in my notebook. We were in grade four then at Holy Child Catholic School. No problem with that request. But the trouble was he made that while we were seated at front row, and our teacher Miss Lolita Flores had already began her lecture. And being a bit of a show-off that I was who can't resist an opportunity to display my talent, I readily gave in to Rey's request. And Miss Flores, of course, saw what we're up to.
She got hold of my notebook and when she saw my Batman drawing there, she ordered me to ask my mother to sign it, as a way of telling her what I was busy with while her class was in progress. I was afraid of the scolding I'll get, so, I just signed the drawing myself with my mother's signature. Miss Flores readily saw my attempt at forgery. She asked me to go outside the classroom, and while we were there, she pulled my right "patilya" upwards saying, "Ang bata-bata mo pa, sinungaling ka na." ("So young, and you're a liar already.")
She got hold of my notebook and when she saw my Batman drawing there, she ordered me to ask my mother to sign it, as a way of telling her what I was busy with while her class was in progress. I was afraid of the scolding I'll get, so, I just signed the drawing myself with my mother's signature. Miss Flores readily saw my attempt at forgery. She asked me to go outside the classroom, and while we were there, she pulled my right "patilya" upwards saying, "Ang bata-bata mo pa, sinungaling ka na." ("So young, and you're a liar already.")
Drawing was a compulsion since my early childhood. My earliest memory of being fascinated by an artwork was when I saw a pen and ink cartoon by Jose Rizal in an old Reading textbook. That cartoon was of the monkey and the tortoise. I haven't entered school at that time, and I remember myself afterwards trying to do a similar drawing which, of course, was still beyond me. The drawings I religiously did with a measure of competence were images of fire engines with firemen on board and war jeeps. No surface was safe from me. If I ran out of paper, I drew on the wooden walls of our house.
My artistic talent was sort of discovered when I was in grade one. Our teacher, Miss Mercy Ramos, asked us her pupils to draw, as our art project, an animal on a whole sheet of cartolina. I drew a blue bird. Miss Ramos was impressed. She couldn't believe that a boy so young could draw a bird so convincingly. I was sent with my drawing to the office of the Assistant Principal, Mrs. Manuel, to receive encouraging words and praise - which were given me. I was told to, "Keep it up." - which were words of high praise to a boy of seven like me.
It was in the class of our art and workshop teacher and scoutmaster Mr. Joe that my artistic skill was thoroughly honed. I learned from him the basics of perspective and isometric drawings, which were being taught us boys to prepare us for an engineering or architecture course in college. We were also trained in woodworking, especially in the use of coping saw. Other crafts-projects taught us were parol (Christmas lantern)-making, the fashioning of flower vases and ladles using bamboo and coconut shells - and even soap carving!
But I wasn't interested in those. I'm only interested in drawing - not the technical kind of drawing, but fine art drawing. So, what excited me most was the album we were required to compile of colored pencil drawings of different flowers, fruits, trees, fishes, and mammals. For our final artwork, we were allowed to choose the subject matter and the medium we'll use. I chose to copy an image of Christ the King printed on a calendar (below), and used watercolor to paint it. Although it was my first time to use watercolor in painting a subject as complicated as Christ the King, I believe I painted a convincing likeness of the image because the grade I got for it was 99%, which Mr. Joe said was the highest grade he gives. It would've been great if I still have that album for me to show around. But unfortunately, it was lost in a fire that burned down our neighborhood in April 1969, just a month after our graduation from grade seven. That was tragic - losing a year-long effort for good in just a few hours.
My mother bought me my first oil paint set when I was thirteen. Before that, the coloring tools I used were crayons, colored pencils, and watercolors. I can't wait to use those tubes of oil paint that I hastened forthwith, without thinking, and by force of habit, to thin the paint with water - to no avail of course. I realized my mistake when I saw that the water won't dissolve the paint. Because it was oil paint, I concluded that what I need to do the job of thinning the paint was oil. So, I got what was at hand and used edible oil which thinned the paint all right. Never mind the durability issue - I didn't know yet what linseed oil is.
We had a new house then, the one that replaced the burnt one. This new house had a room, a small third storey room from which I can slip easily into the second storey roof. It was on this roof that I did my first oil painting which I painted directly on raw plywood (without latex or gesso primer). My subject matter, the mountains of Bataan which can be seen beyond Manila Bay from the roof.
We had a new house then, the one that replaced the burnt one. This new house had a room, a small third storey room from which I can slip easily into the second storey roof. It was on this roof that I did my first oil painting which I painted directly on raw plywood (without latex or gesso primer). My subject matter, the mountains of Bataan which can be seen beyond Manila Bay from the roof.
But doing easel-sized paintings wasn't my ambition when I was young. My dream then was to be a painter of "cartelon" or giant movie posters or billboards. A relative of my father, Noy Mancio, was the one who encourage me to aspire to become a cartelon painter. Noy Mancio was movie star Fernando Poe jr.'s personal driver, and he promised that he'll introduce me to him the moment I am ready to do professional painting jobs. The idea was for me to work directly for him as cartelon painter for his movies.
That dream was boosted further when I was in high school. The bus I used to take in going to UST High School regularly passed by the Sagmit Advertising Studio at the corner of Antonio Rivera and Bambang Streets in Tondo. I could see from the window of the bus the giant white cloths spread on giant wood frames, and the painters all busy working on the billboards which were in varying degrees of completion. I used to think to myself how marvelously skilled those cartelon painters were. I marveled at how easy it was for them to copy pictures magnified dozens of times over when I had the most difficulty doing portraits which were just life-sized.
That dream was boosted further when I was in high school. The bus I used to take in going to UST High School regularly passed by the Sagmit Advertising Studio at the corner of Antonio Rivera and Bambang Streets in Tondo. I could see from the window of the bus the giant white cloths spread on giant wood frames, and the painters all busy working on the billboards which were in varying degrees of completion. I used to think to myself how marvelously skilled those cartelon painters were. I marveled at how easy it was for them to copy pictures magnified dozens of times over when I had the most difficulty doing portraits which were just life-sized.
My dream of being a full-pledged painter of giant cartelons didn't materialized. I was "reduced" instead to being an illustrator of textbooks and picture books, for which I did early in my career illustrations that were almost miniaturist in scale. My painting style also was not of the Amorsolo school. Idyllic rural landscapes were not for me. And I'm not really good in portraiture for which Amorsolo is considered as one of if not its best practitioner. My brushwork too - with its smooth luminist quality and absence of visible brushworks and impasto - is the polar opposite of Amorsolo's looser bravura strokes, a style so dear to the magnificent Cebuano masters like Romulo Galicano and Orley Ypon. Amorsolo doesn't top my list of the greatest Filipino painters of all time - Botong Francisco does. But he is a close second.
FROM PAANG BUNDOK TO TUNDO
Paang Bundok is not some remote barrio nestled at the foot of some remote mountain. It is a barangay in La Loma, Quezon City bounded on the North and South by Gen.Tinio and Blumentritt Streets respectively, and on the East and West by Amoranto Street and Bonifacio Avenue. My father and mother met there.
Paang Bundok was where my mother Mama Ninay grew up, in a house at Isarog Street. Although the house no longer looked good in the 1950s, it must have been a nice house before the war, maybe the only big and sturdily built house in the area. The other houses there may have been just nipa huts. That's perhaps the reason their house was used as garrison by the Japanese soldiers during World War 2.
The house had a small door near the side of the stairs which I learned later led to a bomb-shelter dug by the Japanese. I never saw that shelter because its door was always locked, and we kids were never invited to see it. We never wanted to see it anyway because we were told that there might be snakes lurking down there. According to my mother, my Lola Berta and Lolo Nano bought their land from the Araneta family for only 1000 pesos. That land was part of the vast Araneta estate that extended then from Malabon to Cubao.
My father Papa Nene was born in Iloilo City. But my Lolo Elpidio and Lola Angela were truly from Oslob, Cebu. They only happened to be in Iloilo in the late 1920s because Lolo Elpid worked there for a time as telegraph cable installer. My father was twelve years old when the war broke out in 1941. He took refuge on a mountain barrio of Oslob with his Tia Pacia who looked after him for the duration of the war. Tia Pacia was the younger sister of my Lola Angela who stayed with the USAFFE unit Lolo Elpidio was attached to. Lolo Elpidio was the radioman of that unit, which operated on the same mountain where my father and her Tia Pacia and other relatives were hiding. Lola Angela and Lolo Elpidio therefore had the chance to check on my father frequently.
After the war, seeing that the opportunities for a better life were concentrated in Manila, Lolo Elpidio and Lola Angela decided to migrate here. They rented a room at Isarog, just a few houses away from where my mother lived. My grandparents and my father later on moved to Tondo because a relative's company that was located there needed a bookkeeper. My father applied for and was hired for the job. My mother left Isarog when she married my father and lived with him in Tondo, where I and all of my siblings were born.
I was given the name Arnaldo. They considered naming me Arnold at first, but my father said the name didn't suit me, because I don't looked like a fair-skinned mestizo. Hindi raw bagay. Hahaha.... But why Arnaldo? My mother explained that they planned to have five children, the initials of whose names will spell EARTH. The oldest among us is Esterlina. The second was Augusto, because he was born in August. But he died. It's not clear to me if my mother had a miscarriage, or if Augusto died right after birth. Anyway, since I followed Augusto and thus became the second child, the letter A initial was assigned to me and I was named Arnaldo. Rodolfo followed, and then Teresa. But my mother stopped giving birth after Teresa, so the EARTH acronym for their children wasn't completed. The fifth child who would have been named Helen failed to be born. My sons joked once that had not their Uncle Augusto died, I their father would have taken on the name Rodolfo, and their Uncle Rudy will therefore not be Rodolfo anymore but Tereso.
I have no quarrel with my name. I like it. My affection for my name became especially strong when I learned what it meant. The dictionary says Arnaldo means power of the eagle, an attribute that is, though imaginary, truly likeable. But my family tried during my toddler years to call me, in jest perhaps, by a nickname I didn't like - Anot. That is a despicable name. I expressed my displeasure of that name very early on. Everytime they call me Anot I showed my irritation at once by emitting snarl-like sounds. So, they just called me Arnel for short - a name I also like.
Growing up, we weren`t exactly destitute like many of our neighbors, because my father was already working overseas as a marine mechanic. That is why my siblings and I were all able to go to college. I and my two sisters studied at the University of Santo Tomas, while our brother went to the University of Manila. Our eldest, Esterlina, finished Commerce, my younger brother Rodolfo, Industrial Engineering, and our youngest, Teresa, Nursing. I took up Fine Arts. We kids were lucky, because unlike our father, we don`t have to struggle hard for our education.
My father came here to Manila with his parents to study. Being poor, he had to work as janitor and later on as clerk at Feati University, where he finished high school and took up mechanical engineering. Although he reached only third year in engineering, my father managed, seven years after he got married, to get hired by an international shipping company as engine crew. That shipping company was Eastern Shipping Lines and the first ocean-going ship he rode was Eastern Planet. That was in 1960. Those were lax times, and crewing agencies then didn`t required diplomas from seaman applicants. He rose to the rank of chief engineer.
Paang Bundok is not some remote barrio nestled at the foot of some remote mountain. It is a barangay in La Loma, Quezon City bounded on the North and South by Gen.Tinio and Blumentritt Streets respectively, and on the East and West by Amoranto Street and Bonifacio Avenue. My father and mother met there.
Paang Bundok was where my mother Mama Ninay grew up, in a house at Isarog Street. Although the house no longer looked good in the 1950s, it must have been a nice house before the war, maybe the only big and sturdily built house in the area. The other houses there may have been just nipa huts. That's perhaps the reason their house was used as garrison by the Japanese soldiers during World War 2.
The house had a small door near the side of the stairs which I learned later led to a bomb-shelter dug by the Japanese. I never saw that shelter because its door was always locked, and we kids were never invited to see it. We never wanted to see it anyway because we were told that there might be snakes lurking down there. According to my mother, my Lola Berta and Lolo Nano bought their land from the Araneta family for only 1000 pesos. That land was part of the vast Araneta estate that extended then from Malabon to Cubao.
My father Papa Nene was born in Iloilo City. But my Lolo Elpidio and Lola Angela were truly from Oslob, Cebu. They only happened to be in Iloilo in the late 1920s because Lolo Elpid worked there for a time as telegraph cable installer. My father was twelve years old when the war broke out in 1941. He took refuge on a mountain barrio of Oslob with his Tia Pacia who looked after him for the duration of the war. Tia Pacia was the younger sister of my Lola Angela who stayed with the USAFFE unit Lolo Elpidio was attached to. Lolo Elpidio was the radioman of that unit, which operated on the same mountain where my father and her Tia Pacia and other relatives were hiding. Lola Angela and Lolo Elpidio therefore had the chance to check on my father frequently.
After the war, seeing that the opportunities for a better life were concentrated in Manila, Lolo Elpidio and Lola Angela decided to migrate here. They rented a room at Isarog, just a few houses away from where my mother lived. My grandparents and my father later on moved to Tondo because a relative's company that was located there needed a bookkeeper. My father applied for and was hired for the job. My mother left Isarog when she married my father and lived with him in Tondo, where I and all of my siblings were born.
I was given the name Arnaldo. They considered naming me Arnold at first, but my father said the name didn't suit me, because I don't looked like a fair-skinned mestizo. Hindi raw bagay. Hahaha.... But why Arnaldo? My mother explained that they planned to have five children, the initials of whose names will spell EARTH. The oldest among us is Esterlina. The second was Augusto, because he was born in August. But he died. It's not clear to me if my mother had a miscarriage, or if Augusto died right after birth. Anyway, since I followed Augusto and thus became the second child, the letter A initial was assigned to me and I was named Arnaldo. Rodolfo followed, and then Teresa. But my mother stopped giving birth after Teresa, so the EARTH acronym for their children wasn't completed. The fifth child who would have been named Helen failed to be born. My sons joked once that had not their Uncle Augusto died, I their father would have taken on the name Rodolfo, and their Uncle Rudy will therefore not be Rodolfo anymore but Tereso.
I have no quarrel with my name. I like it. My affection for my name became especially strong when I learned what it meant. The dictionary says Arnaldo means power of the eagle, an attribute that is, though imaginary, truly likeable. But my family tried during my toddler years to call me, in jest perhaps, by a nickname I didn't like - Anot. That is a despicable name. I expressed my displeasure of that name very early on. Everytime they call me Anot I showed my irritation at once by emitting snarl-like sounds. So, they just called me Arnel for short - a name I also like.
Growing up, we weren`t exactly destitute like many of our neighbors, because my father was already working overseas as a marine mechanic. That is why my siblings and I were all able to go to college. I and my two sisters studied at the University of Santo Tomas, while our brother went to the University of Manila. Our eldest, Esterlina, finished Commerce, my younger brother Rodolfo, Industrial Engineering, and our youngest, Teresa, Nursing. I took up Fine Arts. We kids were lucky, because unlike our father, we don`t have to struggle hard for our education.
My father came here to Manila with his parents to study. Being poor, he had to work as janitor and later on as clerk at Feati University, where he finished high school and took up mechanical engineering. Although he reached only third year in engineering, my father managed, seven years after he got married, to get hired by an international shipping company as engine crew. That shipping company was Eastern Shipping Lines and the first ocean-going ship he rode was Eastern Planet. That was in 1960. Those were lax times, and crewing agencies then didn`t required diplomas from seaman applicants. He rose to the rank of chief engineer.
LOS TONDEÑOS
The Tondo of my childhood was well-known all right, but not for things law-abiding Tondeños can be proud of. Many people from other places in Manila and elsewhere would think twice first before going to Tondo because of the perceived peace and order problem here. Taxi drivers especially, who always hesitate to take on passengers whose destination was Tondo. What the taxi drivers feared then were the holduppers, which they assumed Tondo had plenty of.
Their attitude haven't changed. Today, what prevents taxi drivers from taking on Tondo-bound passengers cheerfully, aside from their fear of holduppers, is their perception of the roads here as chaotic and congested. That is true, but only of streets in the Divisoria and North Harbor area, where tricycles, pedicabs, cars, and humans jostle for what space remains on the narrow streets. I supposed no other place in the Philippines, with approximately the same land area as Tondo could "boast" of a bigger population. Tondo is so densely packed with people, that it needs two congressmen to represent its residents in Congress - the same number as the whole of Makati City.
On that rumor about Tondo being a haven of holduppers, there is some truth to it, but only a bit. Most Tondeños are decent and law-abiding. It's just that the notorious elements were the ones who were high-profile and got to land in the news - and in the movies. Law-breakers can thrive anywhere. If Tondo had its Asiong Salonga, Cavite had its Nardong Putik, and Malabon its Ben Tumbling. The formula is simple. All the law-breaker has to do, if he is a big-time thief, is just spread the loot around, to the poor mainly, and voila! - the dreaded character who was formerly tagged as notorious is no longer notorious. He is now famous. A folk hero, even. A modern-day Robinhood.
But those were the big-timers. There were petty ones too, like those bad boys of long ago of Isla Puting Bato. My group of friends, my barkada, once went swimming at that breakwater fronting the North Harbor. That was in the late 1970s I think, when I was in my early twenties. I was not with them for some reason. When they came back, all of them looked amused. They narrated what happened in between laughter. They said that when they were through swimming and were about to dress up to go home, they discovered some of their clothing missing, including the short pants of Freddie Adina who was my age. Also missing was the wallet of Rodie Hamor, another friend my age, who was into rock music, yoga, and the martial arts. The thieves showed themselves up, with one of them holding the wallet.
"Kanino, to? (Who owns this?)" The one holding the wallet asked.
"Akin yan. (That's mine.)" Rodie answered.
The thief opened the wallet and inside it was a picture of Rodie in karate pose and attire. "Ikaw ba 'to? Karatista ka ba? (Is this you? Are you a karate expert?)"
"Hindi ah. Hindi ako yan. (Ah, no. That's not me.)" Rodie again answered, while rapidly and vigorously shaking his head.
Ramir Dela Cruz, who was with them, told me that they wanted to laugh at Rodie's reaction and blanched face, but could not, because those thieves, aside from out-numbering them, were also holding mean-looking knives. And they were in their territory. Ramir added that the thieves were also teen-agers like him - aged from around 13 to 18 years old - a commonplace thing in that neighborhood, where boys are taught to be tough and bad, and started young on a life of crime.
Here"s more. Since Freddie was only wearing his briefs, he forced Bobot Altar, who was just a boy, to take off his short pants so Freddie can use them. And the pants of course was ill-fitting, very tight. But no matter. Freddie was a thin guy anyway, and was able after much effort to get into the pants. And poor Bobot, blushing red with embarrassment, had to walk all the way home without briefs, and without pants. Hahaha....
Besides Rodie, Freddie, Bobot, and Ramir, also with them on that hilarious misadventure were my brother Rudy, Bobot's brothers Tony and Fede Altar, Rody Ollegue, Erning Lobaton, Ariel Doguiles, and Tandy Jimenez. I don't know if my retelling is accurate, but that's how I remember their story
Tondo wasn't crowded during my growing-up years. Vehicles, including wide garbage trucks can pass with ease even through the narrower streets then. There were lesser people, that's why there were lesser "istambays" or out-of-work men huddled on the streets. There were also lesser vehicles moving on the road and parked along the gutters.
Our place during the 1950s, looked rather rustic, with people from the provinces bringing their rural ways to the city. We have neighbors who raised not only the usual pets like dogs and cats, but also chickens, geese, pigs, and goats. I even remember seeing a turkey once. Plenty of edible plants can also be seen around. The third house we lived in was almost like a farmhouse. It's caretaker, who was from Palawan, turned the front yard into a vegetable garden, with rows of plots planted to pechay, lettuce, cabbage, eggplants, and tomatos. The backyard in turn had trelisses from which hanged upos, patolas, and ampalayas. The yard adjacent to ours was a kankungan. There was also a vacant lot covered entirely with grass, which the "zacateros" or grass-cutters gathered as feed for the horses pulling the calesas and caretelas.
I was born at the Mary Johnston Hospital, and raised on that bit of land that was originally sea called the Tondo Foreshore. An old-timer to our place said that the original Manila Bay shoreline was at Asuncion Street, which is three streets away from the Sto. Niño de Tondo Church, and just behind the Mary Johnston Hospital. The land from Asuncion up to the piers was land reclaimed from the sea. Its proximity to the original shore was the reason, some say, why the church is elevated - to keep out the seawater during high tides and typhoons. You need to climb up more than ten steps, I think, before you can enter the church.
We were truly squatters then because our properties don't have any titles. The land where our houses stood was all government property. But those old-timers who have the foresight to settle on that reclaimed land were lucky. Because, although they can't claim the property as truly their own, they were awarded the right to live on it, and decades later, to formally buy it from the government at a very low price. That's why our place today is no longer squatters area, and properties here can now sell for millions of pesos.
It was said that at that time, the migrants from the provinces only need to fence the vacant land they want for themselves, and that would be theirs. No one else could claim it, and they even have the option to sell even if it had no title yet. Many did sell the land. And that's how my grandparents Lolo Elpidio and Lola Angela (below) got to buy our first property.
The Tondo of my childhood was well-known all right, but not for things law-abiding Tondeños can be proud of. Many people from other places in Manila and elsewhere would think twice first before going to Tondo because of the perceived peace and order problem here. Taxi drivers especially, who always hesitate to take on passengers whose destination was Tondo. What the taxi drivers feared then were the holduppers, which they assumed Tondo had plenty of.
Their attitude haven't changed. Today, what prevents taxi drivers from taking on Tondo-bound passengers cheerfully, aside from their fear of holduppers, is their perception of the roads here as chaotic and congested. That is true, but only of streets in the Divisoria and North Harbor area, where tricycles, pedicabs, cars, and humans jostle for what space remains on the narrow streets. I supposed no other place in the Philippines, with approximately the same land area as Tondo could "boast" of a bigger population. Tondo is so densely packed with people, that it needs two congressmen to represent its residents in Congress - the same number as the whole of Makati City.
On that rumor about Tondo being a haven of holduppers, there is some truth to it, but only a bit. Most Tondeños are decent and law-abiding. It's just that the notorious elements were the ones who were high-profile and got to land in the news - and in the movies. Law-breakers can thrive anywhere. If Tondo had its Asiong Salonga, Cavite had its Nardong Putik, and Malabon its Ben Tumbling. The formula is simple. All the law-breaker has to do, if he is a big-time thief, is just spread the loot around, to the poor mainly, and voila! - the dreaded character who was formerly tagged as notorious is no longer notorious. He is now famous. A folk hero, even. A modern-day Robinhood.
But those were the big-timers. There were petty ones too, like those bad boys of long ago of Isla Puting Bato. My group of friends, my barkada, once went swimming at that breakwater fronting the North Harbor. That was in the late 1970s I think, when I was in my early twenties. I was not with them for some reason. When they came back, all of them looked amused. They narrated what happened in between laughter. They said that when they were through swimming and were about to dress up to go home, they discovered some of their clothing missing, including the short pants of Freddie Adina who was my age. Also missing was the wallet of Rodie Hamor, another friend my age, who was into rock music, yoga, and the martial arts. The thieves showed themselves up, with one of them holding the wallet.
"Kanino, to? (Who owns this?)" The one holding the wallet asked.
"Akin yan. (That's mine.)" Rodie answered.
The thief opened the wallet and inside it was a picture of Rodie in karate pose and attire. "Ikaw ba 'to? Karatista ka ba? (Is this you? Are you a karate expert?)"
"Hindi ah. Hindi ako yan. (Ah, no. That's not me.)" Rodie again answered, while rapidly and vigorously shaking his head.
Ramir Dela Cruz, who was with them, told me that they wanted to laugh at Rodie's reaction and blanched face, but could not, because those thieves, aside from out-numbering them, were also holding mean-looking knives. And they were in their territory. Ramir added that the thieves were also teen-agers like him - aged from around 13 to 18 years old - a commonplace thing in that neighborhood, where boys are taught to be tough and bad, and started young on a life of crime.
Here"s more. Since Freddie was only wearing his briefs, he forced Bobot Altar, who was just a boy, to take off his short pants so Freddie can use them. And the pants of course was ill-fitting, very tight. But no matter. Freddie was a thin guy anyway, and was able after much effort to get into the pants. And poor Bobot, blushing red with embarrassment, had to walk all the way home without briefs, and without pants. Hahaha....
Besides Rodie, Freddie, Bobot, and Ramir, also with them on that hilarious misadventure were my brother Rudy, Bobot's brothers Tony and Fede Altar, Rody Ollegue, Erning Lobaton, Ariel Doguiles, and Tandy Jimenez. I don't know if my retelling is accurate, but that's how I remember their story
Tondo wasn't crowded during my growing-up years. Vehicles, including wide garbage trucks can pass with ease even through the narrower streets then. There were lesser people, that's why there were lesser "istambays" or out-of-work men huddled on the streets. There were also lesser vehicles moving on the road and parked along the gutters.
Our place during the 1950s, looked rather rustic, with people from the provinces bringing their rural ways to the city. We have neighbors who raised not only the usual pets like dogs and cats, but also chickens, geese, pigs, and goats. I even remember seeing a turkey once. Plenty of edible plants can also be seen around. The third house we lived in was almost like a farmhouse. It's caretaker, who was from Palawan, turned the front yard into a vegetable garden, with rows of plots planted to pechay, lettuce, cabbage, eggplants, and tomatos. The backyard in turn had trelisses from which hanged upos, patolas, and ampalayas. The yard adjacent to ours was a kankungan. There was also a vacant lot covered entirely with grass, which the "zacateros" or grass-cutters gathered as feed for the horses pulling the calesas and caretelas.
I was born at the Mary Johnston Hospital, and raised on that bit of land that was originally sea called the Tondo Foreshore. An old-timer to our place said that the original Manila Bay shoreline was at Asuncion Street, which is three streets away from the Sto. Niño de Tondo Church, and just behind the Mary Johnston Hospital. The land from Asuncion up to the piers was land reclaimed from the sea. Its proximity to the original shore was the reason, some say, why the church is elevated - to keep out the seawater during high tides and typhoons. You need to climb up more than ten steps, I think, before you can enter the church.
We were truly squatters then because our properties don't have any titles. The land where our houses stood was all government property. But those old-timers who have the foresight to settle on that reclaimed land were lucky. Because, although they can't claim the property as truly their own, they were awarded the right to live on it, and decades later, to formally buy it from the government at a very low price. That's why our place today is no longer squatters area, and properties here can now sell for millions of pesos.
It was said that at that time, the migrants from the provinces only need to fence the vacant land they want for themselves, and that would be theirs. No one else could claim it, and they even have the option to sell even if it had no title yet. Many did sell the land. And that's how my grandparents Lolo Elpidio and Lola Angela (below) got to buy our first property.
LITTLE PAMPANGA
The first house we owned was located at Kagitingan Street, which is just two streets away from North Harbor. Although my paternal relatives are Cebuano Visayans, we found ourselves residing in a street teeming with people from Pampanga - the Kapampangans. Kagitingan Street was truly Little Pampanga then, with almost all of our neighbors coming from that province. The only exception was the neighbor whose house was in front of ours. They we're from Bicol, and the head of their family, Mang Pulen Malayo, became my parents' compadre when my mother stood as sponsor during the baptism of Mang Pulen's youngest child Henry. The next street going to the piers, on the other hand, was Little Visayas, where the Visayans, Warays from Samar and Leyte mostly, chose to stay put. Their street is Tagumpay Street.
I have a little theory. It seems to me now that the very names of the streets - Kagitingan (courage) and Tagumpay (victory) - may have contributed to the arousing of ethnic pride and passion, so much so that the hotheads from each street often resorted to riots and raids to settle once and for all the question of which tribe truly was tougher. That's the time when criminal gangs sprouted. The Kapampangans had their Sigue-sigue Sputnik gang and the Visayans their Oxo gang. My father Papa Nene once told me of an incident where the Sigue-sigues of Kagitingan Street raided Tagumpay. It had dismal results apparently, because when the raiders came back, one of them was missing an arm which was chopped off by a bolo.
My Cebuano father got along very well with our Kapampangan neighbors. His Kapampangan friends embraced him as one of their own. One even became his compadre, my Ninong Guido Lalu of Candaba, Pampanga. He is my one and only ninong, because it wasn't customary then, in the 1950s, to name several godfathers and godmothers for a child's christening. Ninong Guido's youngest son Nilo (below left) later on became my compadre too, when he chose me to be one of the godfathers of his eldest daughter Shiela.
Those days were what I would call the Post-Asiong Salonga era, when the life of that murdered Tondo crime kingpin was made into a movie, which cleansed his image and turned him from a notorious gangster into a much-lamented folk hero. As a result, many criminally-inclined toughies sought to emulate him and organized their own gangs. One such character from our place was a certain Mario Cortez of Arayat, Pampanga. Seeing how friendly and humble my father was, Mario Cortez took a liking to him, and they became friends. One time, Mario Cortez, brought his group and my father to Cavite, to meet someone. My father said that he was handed a gun by Mario, in anticipation perhaps of some trouble that might ensue. My father wanted to refuse, but he rode along because he didn't want to antagonize Mario. Luckily, nothing untoward happened, and Mario Cortez later on was murdered too. It's good that he was, because if not, my father would have continued being a friend of that toughie, who'd surely be a bad influence on him.
Our all-wood house wasn't along the main road. It was located in the interior , in the so-called "looban" - whose only access was through an "eskinita". To go to our house, you have to walk on a wooden foot-bridge built on top of wet mud - or murky waters after a heavy rain. The surroundings are so, because Tondo Foreshore, being reclaimed land, was "swampy". Many houses were built on low stilt-posts, that's why those houses really have no ground floors. Underneath the houses' floorings were pools of dirty water, where water creatures like very small fish and daphnia (water fleas) thrived.
But growing up, I see nothing miserable in my surroundings. Compare to what our place is today, I won't hesitate to describe what it was then as idyllic. Its ambience almost rural. My childhood was the perfect childhood for a boy. I remember that I had so much fun then romping about the flooded streets, and even beneath the houses, trying to catch small fishes and daphnia with improvised nets. We boys, always had clear jars with us when we waded through the waters. Those jars were our improvised aquariums where we tried to raise the fish we caught. We called the daphnia, dapya. They are minute water creatures, colored light brown, and were said to be food for the fish. We caught the fishes and daphnia with nets made from worn-out ladies' stockings and wires. But no matter how diligent we were in feeding the fish, every fish we caught lived for only a day or two.
We lived in that house on Kagitingan until 1963, I think. Or, 1964 - I can't remember now the exact year. We had to leave the house because it was sinking into the mud. The flooring of one room was no longer level, with one end elevated like a slide. We asked close relatives from Cebu to live there for a while until the time when we were able to sell it. I get to see that house again in 1976, when I was already twenty years old. It was the same house I knew, but it was so sunk in the mud that the second storey flooring was only about two feet off the ground. That house is gone now. It was burned down in a fire that razed a big swath of Tondo Foreshore in 1978. The fire, said to be the biggest fire yet in post-war Manila, lasted 11 hours.
The first house we owned was located at Kagitingan Street, which is just two streets away from North Harbor. Although my paternal relatives are Cebuano Visayans, we found ourselves residing in a street teeming with people from Pampanga - the Kapampangans. Kagitingan Street was truly Little Pampanga then, with almost all of our neighbors coming from that province. The only exception was the neighbor whose house was in front of ours. They we're from Bicol, and the head of their family, Mang Pulen Malayo, became my parents' compadre when my mother stood as sponsor during the baptism of Mang Pulen's youngest child Henry. The next street going to the piers, on the other hand, was Little Visayas, where the Visayans, Warays from Samar and Leyte mostly, chose to stay put. Their street is Tagumpay Street.
I have a little theory. It seems to me now that the very names of the streets - Kagitingan (courage) and Tagumpay (victory) - may have contributed to the arousing of ethnic pride and passion, so much so that the hotheads from each street often resorted to riots and raids to settle once and for all the question of which tribe truly was tougher. That's the time when criminal gangs sprouted. The Kapampangans had their Sigue-sigue Sputnik gang and the Visayans their Oxo gang. My father Papa Nene once told me of an incident where the Sigue-sigues of Kagitingan Street raided Tagumpay. It had dismal results apparently, because when the raiders came back, one of them was missing an arm which was chopped off by a bolo.
My Cebuano father got along very well with our Kapampangan neighbors. His Kapampangan friends embraced him as one of their own. One even became his compadre, my Ninong Guido Lalu of Candaba, Pampanga. He is my one and only ninong, because it wasn't customary then, in the 1950s, to name several godfathers and godmothers for a child's christening. Ninong Guido's youngest son Nilo (below left) later on became my compadre too, when he chose me to be one of the godfathers of his eldest daughter Shiela.
Those days were what I would call the Post-Asiong Salonga era, when the life of that murdered Tondo crime kingpin was made into a movie, which cleansed his image and turned him from a notorious gangster into a much-lamented folk hero. As a result, many criminally-inclined toughies sought to emulate him and organized their own gangs. One such character from our place was a certain Mario Cortez of Arayat, Pampanga. Seeing how friendly and humble my father was, Mario Cortez took a liking to him, and they became friends. One time, Mario Cortez, brought his group and my father to Cavite, to meet someone. My father said that he was handed a gun by Mario, in anticipation perhaps of some trouble that might ensue. My father wanted to refuse, but he rode along because he didn't want to antagonize Mario. Luckily, nothing untoward happened, and Mario Cortez later on was murdered too. It's good that he was, because if not, my father would have continued being a friend of that toughie, who'd surely be a bad influence on him.
Our all-wood house wasn't along the main road. It was located in the interior , in the so-called "looban" - whose only access was through an "eskinita". To go to our house, you have to walk on a wooden foot-bridge built on top of wet mud - or murky waters after a heavy rain. The surroundings are so, because Tondo Foreshore, being reclaimed land, was "swampy". Many houses were built on low stilt-posts, that's why those houses really have no ground floors. Underneath the houses' floorings were pools of dirty water, where water creatures like very small fish and daphnia (water fleas) thrived.
But growing up, I see nothing miserable in my surroundings. Compare to what our place is today, I won't hesitate to describe what it was then as idyllic. Its ambience almost rural. My childhood was the perfect childhood for a boy. I remember that I had so much fun then romping about the flooded streets, and even beneath the houses, trying to catch small fishes and daphnia with improvised nets. We boys, always had clear jars with us when we waded through the waters. Those jars were our improvised aquariums where we tried to raise the fish we caught. We called the daphnia, dapya. They are minute water creatures, colored light brown, and were said to be food for the fish. We caught the fishes and daphnia with nets made from worn-out ladies' stockings and wires. But no matter how diligent we were in feeding the fish, every fish we caught lived for only a day or two.
We lived in that house on Kagitingan until 1963, I think. Or, 1964 - I can't remember now the exact year. We had to leave the house because it was sinking into the mud. The flooring of one room was no longer level, with one end elevated like a slide. We asked close relatives from Cebu to live there for a while until the time when we were able to sell it. I get to see that house again in 1976, when I was already twenty years old. It was the same house I knew, but it was so sunk in the mud that the second storey flooring was only about two feet off the ground. That house is gone now. It was burned down in a fire that razed a big swath of Tondo Foreshore in 1978. The fire, said to be the biggest fire yet in post-war Manila, lasted 11 hours.
WANDERING YEARS
We rented rooms for the next two years. We stayed in a house on Pavia Street after leaving our Kagitingan house. The house which is near the Pavia Market still exists, though very much renovated. I think my mother planned to stay there for a long time, because she applied for and was given a stall for selling groceries inside the market. But things didn't go well. I don't know what happened. I just guessed that Lolo Elpid had a quarrel with the market master. A serious one I supposed, because I saw him preparing his gun. To avoid trouble my mother decided to leave the place, taking with us dozens of cartons of canned goods and other grocery items which my mother intended to sell in the market. So, it was us who ultimately consumed those goods.
It's a pity that we were forced to leave Pavia $treet. I liked it there. Being a marketplace, there were always treats that can be bought just outside the house, like banana cues, turons, and ice cream. There was a small ice cream factory nearby, at the corner of Pavia and Franco Streets, which was owned, I learned just recently, by the family of an elementary schoolmate. I was in grade two when we lived in Pavia, and I used to buy buko ice cream from that factory on my way home from school. My school, the Holy Child Catholic School, is just walking distance from Pavia.
We next rented rooms in a house at Tagumpay Street. This was the house I described before as almost like a farmhouse. It was pleasant living in that house, because it is quite big and airy, and seemed cooler because of the plants planted outside. Another thing I liked about that house was its nearness to the piers. The street next to ours was Mabuhay, and after that, if you cross the wide road is Pier 8 of the North Harbor. Although my mother forbade it, I often sneak out to go to the piers to have a look at the sea and the ships docked there. But our life there turned nasty when Typhoon Dading struck. Not only did the second floor got all wet with rainwater, the ground floor was also flooded almost knee-high. So, we have to relocate again.
We next moved to Leandro Ibarra Street, where we rented rooms on the ground floor of an old house. Just in front of that house was the residence of the Nazareno family - a big compound with a big house. My father (before he became a mechanic for a fishing boat) and grandfather worked for the family as paymasters for the company they owned, the Banahaw Labor Stevedoring and Arrastre Services, whose office was in that compound. The Nazarenos, who were originally from Oslob, Cebu are our relatives. The company owner, Claudio Nazareno was the husband of Gregoria Mirasol, a relative of my Lolo Elpid. We called them Manong Kalaw and Manang Goring.
The Nazarenos were the richest family in our neighborhood during that time. Not only did they owned deep-sea fishing boats, they also got the contract to provide stevedores for the ships docked at the North Harbor. Ship cargoes weren't packed in containers in those days, that's why stevedores were needed to do the job of loading and unloading bales and other cargos that can be carried manually. The stevedores Manong Kalaw hired were mostly Oslobanons. Aside from their wages, they were also provided board and lodging inside the big house. The room assigned to them was pretty expansive with teheras (canvas folding beds) and double-decker bunks arranged in rows. Some stevedores chose to stay in Tondo for good because here was where they found wives.
Me and my brother, and our boy relatives, who were the same age as us, found the Nazareno compound an ideal place to play. Not only was it spacious, there was also a lot of metal junk dumped at the back of the yard, where we boys convened, imagining the spot as some sort of war command post or bunker. The whole compound, including the ground floor rooms of the house itself, was our playground where we were free to play hide-and-seek and other boys' games, like gera-gerahan (mock war). The compound was our imaginary battlefield, where we acted like soldiers armed with wooden Thompson submachineguns. Those make-believe Thompsons were made for us by Ite Roger, the only son of Manong Kalaw. Ite Roger used a circular power saw in cutting the pieces of scrap wood and shaping them into those toy guns. Although Ite Roger was genuinely fond of us, we were considered nuisance by the resident cook, whom we called - but just among ourselves - asTunying Bayot. Whenever we got too noisy and rowdy, Tunying would chase us wielding a dustpan and broom. And we naughty kids would run out of the compound laughing.
I cannot help now but look back with affection at the Nazareno family who was so tolerant of us unruly and sun-smelling boys. We were a privileged lot. We were allowed to watch television shows upstairs at several times of the day. We watched Darigold Jamboree or Student Canteen at noon, then around 3 pm, cartoons like Popeye, Space Ghost, Betty Boop, Tom and Jerry, The impossibles, and Mighty Mouse. Then, during the early evening, we get to watch Oras Ng Ligaya and the tv show we liked best, Combat. It was Ite Roger's sister, Inday Alice, and his wife Inday Linda who allowed us upstairs and opened the television for us.
In those days, the Sto.Niño fiesta every third Sunday of January was always the event to look forward to. Fiesta celebrations at the Nazareno compound were truly "en grande" affairs with lots of guests, food, and drinks - which were, in a manner of speaking, overflowing. One image etched in my mind up to now, are the several stacks of San Miguel Beer cases higher than the wall of the compound, which was around 10 feet high. And the stink of beer leftovers gone stale in the bottles was a distinct odor permeating the compound in those days. In all fairness to Tunying, his cooking didn't disappoint. It was splendid. I remember to this day his morcon and embutido.
Another much-awaited event was the Nazareno family's Thanksgiving Prayer in May, during harvest time After the prayer, various fruits from their farm in Bataan were distributed to the workers and their families, which of course included us. Now, that farm also stirred fond memories of summers past. It was planted not only to rice, but also to mangoes, watermelons, avocados, and many other fruits. Although our families were all from Cebu, Bataan, because it's nearer Manila, became the province we spent a few summer vacations in. My father told me that it was he who accompanied Manong Kalaw to Bataan to pay for the farmland the latter bought. He said that he and Manong Kalaw rode a taxi from the bank all the way to Bataan with, if I remember correctly, 120 thousand pesos cash stashed inside a traveling bag. That amount may seem small today, but it surely was substantial then, because Manong Kalaw was able to buy with it that 60-hectare farmland. I asked my father if the rumor about Manong Kalaw winning in the sweepstakes was true. "Hindi," my father answered. "Ipon talaga nya yon. Meron silang negosyo." ( "No. That was truly his savings. They have a business.")
So, it was really unfair for the Marcos government, in the guise of land reform, to confiscate 53 hectares of the Nazarenos' farmland and just leave them with seven hectares. A grave injustice was done the Nazarenos by that Martial Law regime. Not only was his land confiscated, Manong Kalaw was also jailed in Camp Crame for refusing to give up his property. And why would he, when he bought that land with money he earned through hard work and thrift? That farmland was not a birthright. It was not land he just inherited without sweating from some rich ancestors.
Manong Kalaw was eventually released only after, I presume, yielding the land he worked hard for to the martial law government. It was fruitless holding on. With the judiciary, police, and military under the dictator's thumb, and Congress abolished, Manong Kalaw must have felt powerless, and realized that no one can rescue him from his plight. So, he did what any sane man would do, and thought it best to just surrender his property. His freedom and his life were far more valuable than any material possessions. I don't know if the confiscated 53 hectares were truly distributed to the farmers to score "pogi points" for the government. But that was immaterial. The government acted there like the modern-day Robinhoods I mentioned earlier, the big time thieves who robbed the rich to distribute part of the loot to the poor.
We rented rooms for the next two years. We stayed in a house on Pavia Street after leaving our Kagitingan house. The house which is near the Pavia Market still exists, though very much renovated. I think my mother planned to stay there for a long time, because she applied for and was given a stall for selling groceries inside the market. But things didn't go well. I don't know what happened. I just guessed that Lolo Elpid had a quarrel with the market master. A serious one I supposed, because I saw him preparing his gun. To avoid trouble my mother decided to leave the place, taking with us dozens of cartons of canned goods and other grocery items which my mother intended to sell in the market. So, it was us who ultimately consumed those goods.
It's a pity that we were forced to leave Pavia $treet. I liked it there. Being a marketplace, there were always treats that can be bought just outside the house, like banana cues, turons, and ice cream. There was a small ice cream factory nearby, at the corner of Pavia and Franco Streets, which was owned, I learned just recently, by the family of an elementary schoolmate. I was in grade two when we lived in Pavia, and I used to buy buko ice cream from that factory on my way home from school. My school, the Holy Child Catholic School, is just walking distance from Pavia.
We next rented rooms in a house at Tagumpay Street. This was the house I described before as almost like a farmhouse. It was pleasant living in that house, because it is quite big and airy, and seemed cooler because of the plants planted outside. Another thing I liked about that house was its nearness to the piers. The street next to ours was Mabuhay, and after that, if you cross the wide road is Pier 8 of the North Harbor. Although my mother forbade it, I often sneak out to go to the piers to have a look at the sea and the ships docked there. But our life there turned nasty when Typhoon Dading struck. Not only did the second floor got all wet with rainwater, the ground floor was also flooded almost knee-high. So, we have to relocate again.
We next moved to Leandro Ibarra Street, where we rented rooms on the ground floor of an old house. Just in front of that house was the residence of the Nazareno family - a big compound with a big house. My father (before he became a mechanic for a fishing boat) and grandfather worked for the family as paymasters for the company they owned, the Banahaw Labor Stevedoring and Arrastre Services, whose office was in that compound. The Nazarenos, who were originally from Oslob, Cebu are our relatives. The company owner, Claudio Nazareno was the husband of Gregoria Mirasol, a relative of my Lolo Elpid. We called them Manong Kalaw and Manang Goring.
The Nazarenos were the richest family in our neighborhood during that time. Not only did they owned deep-sea fishing boats, they also got the contract to provide stevedores for the ships docked at the North Harbor. Ship cargoes weren't packed in containers in those days, that's why stevedores were needed to do the job of loading and unloading bales and other cargos that can be carried manually. The stevedores Manong Kalaw hired were mostly Oslobanons. Aside from their wages, they were also provided board and lodging inside the big house. The room assigned to them was pretty expansive with teheras (canvas folding beds) and double-decker bunks arranged in rows. Some stevedores chose to stay in Tondo for good because here was where they found wives.
Me and my brother, and our boy relatives, who were the same age as us, found the Nazareno compound an ideal place to play. Not only was it spacious, there was also a lot of metal junk dumped at the back of the yard, where we boys convened, imagining the spot as some sort of war command post or bunker. The whole compound, including the ground floor rooms of the house itself, was our playground where we were free to play hide-and-seek and other boys' games, like gera-gerahan (mock war). The compound was our imaginary battlefield, where we acted like soldiers armed with wooden Thompson submachineguns. Those make-believe Thompsons were made for us by Ite Roger, the only son of Manong Kalaw. Ite Roger used a circular power saw in cutting the pieces of scrap wood and shaping them into those toy guns. Although Ite Roger was genuinely fond of us, we were considered nuisance by the resident cook, whom we called - but just among ourselves - asTunying Bayot. Whenever we got too noisy and rowdy, Tunying would chase us wielding a dustpan and broom. And we naughty kids would run out of the compound laughing.
I cannot help now but look back with affection at the Nazareno family who was so tolerant of us unruly and sun-smelling boys. We were a privileged lot. We were allowed to watch television shows upstairs at several times of the day. We watched Darigold Jamboree or Student Canteen at noon, then around 3 pm, cartoons like Popeye, Space Ghost, Betty Boop, Tom and Jerry, The impossibles, and Mighty Mouse. Then, during the early evening, we get to watch Oras Ng Ligaya and the tv show we liked best, Combat. It was Ite Roger's sister, Inday Alice, and his wife Inday Linda who allowed us upstairs and opened the television for us.
In those days, the Sto.Niño fiesta every third Sunday of January was always the event to look forward to. Fiesta celebrations at the Nazareno compound were truly "en grande" affairs with lots of guests, food, and drinks - which were, in a manner of speaking, overflowing. One image etched in my mind up to now, are the several stacks of San Miguel Beer cases higher than the wall of the compound, which was around 10 feet high. And the stink of beer leftovers gone stale in the bottles was a distinct odor permeating the compound in those days. In all fairness to Tunying, his cooking didn't disappoint. It was splendid. I remember to this day his morcon and embutido.
Another much-awaited event was the Nazareno family's Thanksgiving Prayer in May, during harvest time After the prayer, various fruits from their farm in Bataan were distributed to the workers and their families, which of course included us. Now, that farm also stirred fond memories of summers past. It was planted not only to rice, but also to mangoes, watermelons, avocados, and many other fruits. Although our families were all from Cebu, Bataan, because it's nearer Manila, became the province we spent a few summer vacations in. My father told me that it was he who accompanied Manong Kalaw to Bataan to pay for the farmland the latter bought. He said that he and Manong Kalaw rode a taxi from the bank all the way to Bataan with, if I remember correctly, 120 thousand pesos cash stashed inside a traveling bag. That amount may seem small today, but it surely was substantial then, because Manong Kalaw was able to buy with it that 60-hectare farmland. I asked my father if the rumor about Manong Kalaw winning in the sweepstakes was true. "Hindi," my father answered. "Ipon talaga nya yon. Meron silang negosyo." ( "No. That was truly his savings. They have a business.")
So, it was really unfair for the Marcos government, in the guise of land reform, to confiscate 53 hectares of the Nazarenos' farmland and just leave them with seven hectares. A grave injustice was done the Nazarenos by that Martial Law regime. Not only was his land confiscated, Manong Kalaw was also jailed in Camp Crame for refusing to give up his property. And why would he, when he bought that land with money he earned through hard work and thrift? That farmland was not a birthright. It was not land he just inherited without sweating from some rich ancestors.
Manong Kalaw was eventually released only after, I presume, yielding the land he worked hard for to the martial law government. It was fruitless holding on. With the judiciary, police, and military under the dictator's thumb, and Congress abolished, Manong Kalaw must have felt powerless, and realized that no one can rescue him from his plight. So, he did what any sane man would do, and thought it best to just surrender his property. His freedom and his life were far more valuable than any material possessions. I don't know if the confiscated 53 hectares were truly distributed to the farmers to score "pogi points" for the government. But that was immaterial. The government acted there like the modern-day Robinhoods I mentioned earlier, the big time thieves who robbed the rich to distribute part of the loot to the poor.
THE BOY TOYMAKER
The second property we bought in Tondo was just three houses away from the Nazareno compound. We owned that property from 1966 to 1988. My mother Mama Ninay said that they bought the house and lot for just two-thousand pesos, which wasn't surprising because it wasn't titled yet. But come to think of it, two-thousand pesos was already a lot of money in 1966, and it came from my father's extra earnings as marine engineer on a ship plying the Philippines-Vietnam route. The Vietnam war was already heating up and the extra money he was getting was war hazard pay.
It was in that house that I discovered my talent for making toys. I already knew that I had talent in art even before I begin going to school. I loved to draw. That's what I did day in and day out. I was almost always doodling during the years when we still lived in our Kagitingan house. What I remember I was very fond of drawing then were images of firefighters aboard firetrucks on their way to put out fires somewhere: and Japanese and USAFFE soldiers too, on board their respective war vehicles - the Japanese on their trucks and the USAFFEs on their jeeps mounted with 50-caliber machine guns.
The mid-1960s were the years when my father (below) was already working regularly aboard ocean-going vessels. It was routine for him to buy toys abroad for me and my siblings. What he bought for us boys were cowboy pistols, air-powered rifles for which we used corks as bullets, and battery-operated cars, tanks, and non-flying aircrafts. Those rifles were cowboy rifles, the sort you bent in the middle, looking like you're breaking them, and then straightening them up again before pulling the triggers. We played with those pistols and rifles for a long time. But the cars, tanks, and planes were just stored in the glass cabinet after they ran out of batteries. Those battery-operated toys were not for play for long - they have become just for show: things we showed to our playmates whenever we feel like bragging. I therefore have to resort to making toys with my own hands to keep myself amused - and to have variety. With only the pistols and rifles as toys, all l and my brother can play with our playmates, aside from hide-and-seek, skipping rope, and other sissy games, were mock Western shoot-outs and Second World War combat, which will bore us all sooner or later.
There was a digging at the corner of Leandro Ibarra and Lualhati Streets which was never refilled with soil. The streets in our place then were all soil and gravel. Not one road was asphalted yet. That digging turned into a pond in time because of the rains. Grasses grew along its edge, and aquatic creatures like tadpoles soon made their appearance. That pond opened new opportunities for games for us city boys. We saw that what the pond lacked were toy boats, so I put myself to work and began making boats.
The first boat I sailed on that pond were made of old rubber slippers without straps on top of which I stuck banana-cue sticks as mast for the sail. I soon made an innovation, and found a way to add a propeller to it. The propeller was just a small flat piece of popsicle stick inserted in-between a stretched rubber band which I twisted many many times. When I stopped twisting and laid the boat on the water, and then released the popsicle stick propeller, this propeller will revolve rapidly and thrust the boat forward. The longer I twisted the rubber band, the longer will be the run of the boat. I later on levelled up, when I got hold of a chisel, to making real wood-carved toy boats. I remember that the last wooden boat I made even had a name lettered on its bow. The name was Vaya con Dios.
Our youngest sister Teresa was being groomed even then to be a nurse. So, I took it upon myself to provide her with improvised medical gadgets like stethoscope made from wire, a length of rope, and soda bottlecap; a syringe made from clear ballpen tubes and needle made from wire; a nurse' cap made of white cardboard on which I drew a red cross using a crayon - and even a bag made of cardboard to put those toys in. Nursing was truly her calling, She became one. She graduated from UST, and when she took the professional board exams for nurses, she placed sixth. She's now a nurse in California. A very successful one, I must say.
I even "invented' a television set. It was a discarded shoe box, the front of which I cut open to imitate a tv screen. Behind the screen was a long scroll on which I pasted drawings and colorful cut-outs from magazines. If you want to "change channels" or see different pictures, you just need to roll the dials on the side of the box either up or down, and the scroll will also roll up or down. There were many other toys I made during those years, like bamboo swords with coconut-shell and wire knuckle-guards, and futuristic-looking ray guns made up of dozens of popsicle sticks. I also made my own kites, on some of which I pasted the longest tails ever.
It was every November when the winds became just right for flying kites. During that month and on until December, almost all of us boys deserted the streets and climbed the rooftops where we can be seen flying kites of different sizes and shapes. I was very agile and quite adept in climbing rooftops then, sometimes using the septic tank exhaust pipe at the side of our house as means of hoisting myself to the top. The way I climbed that pipe was like the way a boy would climb the bamboo pole in palo sebo. But most of the time I just climbed out of the little window at the back room on the second floor of our house. From that window, I stepped on to the roof of our neighbor's house and from there transfer to our own roof. The gap between houses even then was so narrow, or even nil, that we boys could run from one roof to another without missing a beat to catch descending loose kites. Those were stressful days indeed for house owners whose roofs became playground for kite flyers.
There were three kinds of kites boys of our time flew. They were the boka-boka, the fighter kite, and the gurion. The gurion was the least flown in Tondo. I saw one flying only once or twice. The gurion resembles the Malaysian kite "wau bulan". I made a gurion one time, but I couldn't make it fly, maybe because of its weight. My father said that gurions were the type of kites they flew in his hometown, Oslob. Maybe, gurions were popular kites during the pre-war era, especially in the provinces where there are plenty of wide spaces ideal for flying those big ponderous kites.
The boka-boka was the poor boy's kite. It was just a rectangular piece of paper folded twice on either end where the cross string is tied. The string wound around the milk can spool was then tied at the middle of the cross string. Boys during our time practice flying kites using boka-boka, after which they graduated to flying real kites.
The real kites I refer to were called fighters. They were made preferably from papel de hapon or Japanese rice paper. But any thin paper will do. There were even kites made of thin transparent plastic sheets. Fighter-kites were diamond-shaped, with strips of fin-like triangular papers pasted on both sides. They seldom have tails because this will lessen their maneuverability. The perfect fighter-kite was one which a flyer could make dive, soar, turn left, or turn right swiftly, which a fighter kite with tail can't do. And why were they called fighter-kites? Well, that's because they were flown to engage in aerial duels with other kites. The string connected to these kites, through which signals to dive, soar, and turn were communicated to the kites were abrasive. The strings were capable of cutting the strings of other kites. And that was what the aerial duel was for, to cut the string of your opponent's kite so that it will float away loose and descend to the ground. We described those loose or defeated kites as "umalagwa".
Neophyte kite flyers who were only into boka-bokas as of yet made their strings seemed abrasive by rubbing cooked rice paste on them, which when dried would make the strings feel gritty and sharp to the touch. But they were not abrasive of course, and can't really cut other strings. The paste applied to their strings by the bonafide fighter-kite flyers, on the other hand, were a mixture of kola (glue) and powdered flourescent tubes or incandescent light bulbs boiled in water.
In all my years of kite flying I have won an aerial duel only once. What a flyer should do when the string of his kite gets in contact with that of another kite was to let loose or unwind his string from the spool faster than his opponent can. The friction of the abrasive string sliding over the opponent's string will do the job of cutting it. It is a must therefore that one's kite and it's string should be the one above. That's why the dive maneuver was very important. One's kite should always be the one diving to engage it's opponent. I was in high spirits after that duel which took several minutes to finish. I almost run out of string. I remember my and my opponent's kites as way way up in the air and very very far and very very small. I was congratulated afterwards by Pate Pangan, who was also on the roof a few houses away watching the duel. Pate was the foremost and best fighter kite flyer and kite-maker in our neighborhood. A true master Compliments coming from him was surely worth a lot to us aspiring fighter-kite flyers.
Now, about that longest kite tail. Although tails on kites make them less responsive to tugs on the strings to make them dive or swerved, it somehow made it easier to fly them. I don't know why, but that's what I discovered. I wasn't really a top-notch fighter-kite flyer, so I just did a strange thing to my kite to get noticed. I don't know how I came up with the idea, but I just found myself one day cutting the leaves from our used notebooks into strips about an inch wide. I pasted this strips end to end to I don't know what exact length. But it was very long indeed. Trying now to recall its length with my mind's eye, I presume that it could be more than thirty feet. Flying a kite with a tail that long can be cumbersome because the tail could get entangled with itself, so I had a playmate assist me. That playmate was Rody Ollegue, whom we called Rody Tuko. We didn't call him that in derision. It's just our joking way of distinguishing him from our other playmates also named Rodolfo. They are four, in fact. One was Rodie Hamor, with the "bansag" or monicker Rodie Lapad, because the back of his head was flat. Another was Rhody Valiente or Rhody Popo. Popo was derived from the repetition of the last syllable of his name Rodolfo. But behind his back, we refer to Rhody Popo, again jokingly of course, as Rody Hika. Both of them have passed away - Rodie Lapad when he was just 26 years old and Rhody Popo when he was in his forties. Another Rodolfo is my brother Rudy. But that's not how we called him. All of us here called him Buding, which must be a variation of Ruding.
Back to Rody Tuko. As I've said, it was he who assisted me in flying those long-tailed kite. I charged him with the task of gradually and gently letting go of the kite's tail to follow the flight of the kite, making sure that it didn't get entangled with itself. Other kite flyers upon seeing my kite, were amazed and amused by it's very long tail. First time they saw one. The kite was already way up high in the air, yet several feet's length of its tail was still lying on the roof waiting to be pulled up by the slowly rising kite. It was exciting for a while. But before long, the novelty wore off. I stopped flying long-tailed kites altogether because nobody was amazed and amused anymore.
The first boat I sailed on that pond were made of old rubber slippers without straps on top of which I stuck banana-cue sticks as mast for the sail. I soon made an innovation, and found a way to add a propeller to it. The propeller was just a small flat piece of popsicle stick inserted in-between a stretched rubber band which I twisted many many times. When I stopped twisting and laid the boat on the water, and then released the popsicle stick propeller, this propeller will revolve rapidly and thrust the boat forward. The longer I twisted the rubber band, the longer will be the run of the boat. I later on levelled up, when I got hold of a chisel, to making real wood-carved toy boats. I remember that the last wooden boat I made even had a name lettered on its bow. The name was Vaya con Dios.
Our youngest sister Teresa was being groomed even then to be a nurse. So, I took it upon myself to provide her with improvised medical gadgets like stethoscope made from wire, a length of rope, and soda bottlecap; a syringe made from clear ballpen tubes and needle made from wire; a nurse' cap made of white cardboard on which I drew a red cross using a crayon - and even a bag made of cardboard to put those toys in. Nursing was truly her calling, She became one. She graduated from UST, and when she took the professional board exams for nurses, she placed sixth. She's now a nurse in California. A very successful one, I must say.
I even "invented' a television set. It was a discarded shoe box, the front of which I cut open to imitate a tv screen. Behind the screen was a long scroll on which I pasted drawings and colorful cut-outs from magazines. If you want to "change channels" or see different pictures, you just need to roll the dials on the side of the box either up or down, and the scroll will also roll up or down. There were many other toys I made during those years, like bamboo swords with coconut-shell and wire knuckle-guards, and futuristic-looking ray guns made up of dozens of popsicle sticks. I also made my own kites, on some of which I pasted the longest tails ever.
It was every November when the winds became just right for flying kites. During that month and on until December, almost all of us boys deserted the streets and climbed the rooftops where we can be seen flying kites of different sizes and shapes. I was very agile and quite adept in climbing rooftops then, sometimes using the septic tank exhaust pipe at the side of our house as means of hoisting myself to the top. The way I climbed that pipe was like the way a boy would climb the bamboo pole in palo sebo. But most of the time I just climbed out of the little window at the back room on the second floor of our house. From that window, I stepped on to the roof of our neighbor's house and from there transfer to our own roof. The gap between houses even then was so narrow, or even nil, that we boys could run from one roof to another without missing a beat to catch descending loose kites. Those were stressful days indeed for house owners whose roofs became playground for kite flyers.
There were three kinds of kites boys of our time flew. They were the boka-boka, the fighter kite, and the gurion. The gurion was the least flown in Tondo. I saw one flying only once or twice. The gurion resembles the Malaysian kite "wau bulan". I made a gurion one time, but I couldn't make it fly, maybe because of its weight. My father said that gurions were the type of kites they flew in his hometown, Oslob. Maybe, gurions were popular kites during the pre-war era, especially in the provinces where there are plenty of wide spaces ideal for flying those big ponderous kites.
The boka-boka was the poor boy's kite. It was just a rectangular piece of paper folded twice on either end where the cross string is tied. The string wound around the milk can spool was then tied at the middle of the cross string. Boys during our time practice flying kites using boka-boka, after which they graduated to flying real kites.
The real kites I refer to were called fighters. They were made preferably from papel de hapon or Japanese rice paper. But any thin paper will do. There were even kites made of thin transparent plastic sheets. Fighter-kites were diamond-shaped, with strips of fin-like triangular papers pasted on both sides. They seldom have tails because this will lessen their maneuverability. The perfect fighter-kite was one which a flyer could make dive, soar, turn left, or turn right swiftly, which a fighter kite with tail can't do. And why were they called fighter-kites? Well, that's because they were flown to engage in aerial duels with other kites. The string connected to these kites, through which signals to dive, soar, and turn were communicated to the kites were abrasive. The strings were capable of cutting the strings of other kites. And that was what the aerial duel was for, to cut the string of your opponent's kite so that it will float away loose and descend to the ground. We described those loose or defeated kites as "umalagwa".
Neophyte kite flyers who were only into boka-bokas as of yet made their strings seemed abrasive by rubbing cooked rice paste on them, which when dried would make the strings feel gritty and sharp to the touch. But they were not abrasive of course, and can't really cut other strings. The paste applied to their strings by the bonafide fighter-kite flyers, on the other hand, were a mixture of kola (glue) and powdered flourescent tubes or incandescent light bulbs boiled in water.
In all my years of kite flying I have won an aerial duel only once. What a flyer should do when the string of his kite gets in contact with that of another kite was to let loose or unwind his string from the spool faster than his opponent can. The friction of the abrasive string sliding over the opponent's string will do the job of cutting it. It is a must therefore that one's kite and it's string should be the one above. That's why the dive maneuver was very important. One's kite should always be the one diving to engage it's opponent. I was in high spirits after that duel which took several minutes to finish. I almost run out of string. I remember my and my opponent's kites as way way up in the air and very very far and very very small. I was congratulated afterwards by Pate Pangan, who was also on the roof a few houses away watching the duel. Pate was the foremost and best fighter kite flyer and kite-maker in our neighborhood. A true master Compliments coming from him was surely worth a lot to us aspiring fighter-kite flyers.
Now, about that longest kite tail. Although tails on kites make them less responsive to tugs on the strings to make them dive or swerved, it somehow made it easier to fly them. I don't know why, but that's what I discovered. I wasn't really a top-notch fighter-kite flyer, so I just did a strange thing to my kite to get noticed. I don't know how I came up with the idea, but I just found myself one day cutting the leaves from our used notebooks into strips about an inch wide. I pasted this strips end to end to I don't know what exact length. But it was very long indeed. Trying now to recall its length with my mind's eye, I presume that it could be more than thirty feet. Flying a kite with a tail that long can be cumbersome because the tail could get entangled with itself, so I had a playmate assist me. That playmate was Rody Ollegue, whom we called Rody Tuko. We didn't call him that in derision. It's just our joking way of distinguishing him from our other playmates also named Rodolfo. They are four, in fact. One was Rodie Hamor, with the "bansag" or monicker Rodie Lapad, because the back of his head was flat. Another was Rhody Valiente or Rhody Popo. Popo was derived from the repetition of the last syllable of his name Rodolfo. But behind his back, we refer to Rhody Popo, again jokingly of course, as Rody Hika. Both of them have passed away - Rodie Lapad when he was just 26 years old and Rhody Popo when he was in his forties. Another Rodolfo is my brother Rudy. But that's not how we called him. All of us here called him Buding, which must be a variation of Ruding.
Back to Rody Tuko. As I've said, it was he who assisted me in flying those long-tailed kite. I charged him with the task of gradually and gently letting go of the kite's tail to follow the flight of the kite, making sure that it didn't get entangled with itself. Other kite flyers upon seeing my kite, were amazed and amused by it's very long tail. First time they saw one. The kite was already way up high in the air, yet several feet's length of its tail was still lying on the roof waiting to be pulled up by the slowly rising kite. It was exciting for a while. But before long, the novelty wore off. I stopped flying long-tailed kites altogether because nobody was amazed and amused anymore.
WATER AND FIRE
There was one more game we loved to play when we were kids. That was the annual "basaan" or dousing with water on the feast day of St. John the Baptist every June 24. A practice that seems to be on the wane, in our place at least, because when last we went out to eat on that day, there were no longer anyone on the streets with dippers of water for dousing passers-by. Must be the lure of the internet. The kids nowadays would rather spend time playing computer games than prowling the streets and dousing people with water. St. John was the one who baptized Jesus at the Jordan River. I don't know when or who originated this practice, but it was said that what the water-dousers were doing was just a reenactment of that biblical event.
Biblical though it may be, June 24 was a day most dreaded by office workers and students who have to go to school in the morning, because they know that there is a line of boys and istambays waiting along the sides of the streets with water-filled dippers. Just for fun, that's what the water-dousers would say to justify their actions. This is the tradition, they would add. "Pasensya na (So, sorry.)." So, the only thing all those doused with water could do was cast hateful looks at those who did the deed. Nothing more, because those istambays were capable of doing something worse - hurl expletives at them for example, or pick up a fight.
But I confess that I and my childhood friends truly considered June 24 a fun day. It was a day we all look forward to. A day or two before, we will all be buying water guns and water grenades which we'll use on that day for our water-spraying battles. But what we did was but child's play compared to what the teenage boys of Lualhati Street did. We boys did the water-spraying for fun. We were all laughing while we're at it. But those teen-agers played that water-spraying battle with intensity and real animosity. There were two teen-age "gangs" on Lualhati Street. They were not criminal gangs - just two barkadas or peer groups who weren't friends and who were rivals for I don't know what. The name of the gang whose members lived on the south side of Lualhati Street near Lakandula was Vhoraks. The other gang based on the north side near Sandico Street was called Sophists.
The boundary between their respective territories was the digging at the intersection of Leandro Ibarra and Lualhati Streets. The two gangs might have arranged the night before for them to do battle in the morning, because we saw them early the next day lined up on either side of the road-digging with their respective water-spraying weapons. But perhaps, the battle might have been impromptu, with the challenge hurled and accepted on the very day and hour. It was said that the water in their water guns and grenades was not clean water. Not only was the water not clean, it was also said that it was laced with ground siling labuyo and urine. Their target were the eyes of their opponents and their objective to inflict pain on those eyes. Ha ha ha....That truly showed how much they hate each other.
As I said, they fought with intensity and genuine animosity. They kept on spraying each other with dirty water for several minutes, and would have kept on doing so until their water run out. But it so happened that a boy from each side fell into the digging, and both, upon bumping into each other, promptly exchanged fist blows. It's good that there were men watching who proceeded forthwith to stop the fistfight between the two boys, and who prevented the other boys from each side from coming into blows themselves. It was a spectacle we younger boys enjoyed watching. We never imagined that we could be as intense and belligerent as them in playing that silly though fun game.
I don't know why or how June 24 was selected to be St. John the Baptist's feast day because no one could have known when he was born or what the exact day of Christ's baptism was. But June was a very apt month indeed for events connected with the pouring of or dousing with water, because the wet season starts on this month. The Philippines has two seasons only, the wet and the dry season. The dry season is our so-called summer which begins in March, or even as early as the third week of February, when the cool air drastically becomes warm.
If June is the start of the watery months, March is the start of the fiery ones. That's why we in the Philippines designate March as Fire Prevention Month. But our fire, the fire that gutted our neighborhood in 1969, occurred in April, on April 9 to be exact, about a month after I graduated from elementary (below)
It was around 12 midnight when we were awakened by cries of "Sunog! Sunog! (Fire! Fire!) I scrambled out of our double-decked bed. I was on the bottom bunk and my brother at the top. I shaked his shoulder to wake him up. It was panic time. When we looked out the window, a most frightening sight greeted us. The scene outside was all orange, gray, and black. Orange flames blazed and gray smoke billowed against the black sky just a few houses away from us. Aside from my mother, my brother, and my two sisters, we have living with us a female cousin of my father and a housemaid. My father was abroad at the time.
We lost all of our possessions to the fire, except for a few bundles of clothes, several photographs, and important documents. The television set, refrigerator, and other appliances and furnitures we just left behind, because aside from having no big men to carry them, our house was insured anyway and those furnishings can eventually be replaced after the insurance company paid us out. What I really regret losing were our toys and the album of artworks I did for the art class of Mr. Joe Mortera who was also our scoutmaster at the Holy Child Catholic School - a legend among us HCCS boys.
We were lucky, because my mother had our house insured one week before the fire. What prompted her to do so was the fire that occured earlier. That fire raged just one block away from our place. It so alarmed my mother that she got in touch at once with a fire insurance agent. I don't know the name of the insurance company, but I know where its office was. That's because I was the one my mother brought along with her when she claimed the money paid by the insurance company. The office was on the ground floor of a building at Ayala Avenue corner Herrera Street in Makati. The name of the building was Rufino Building (now Rufino Pacific Tower), which is owned by the family of my future publisher Reni Rufino Roxas, owner of Tahanan Books for Young Readers. The insurance payment was 10 thousand pesos which is very small these days, but enough then to start building a house.
I heard that a woman died in that fire which started on the second floor of a grocery store. That grocery store which faced Wagas Market was along Lakandula street, the street next to where we live. The woman was a live-in sales girl, most likely from the province, who was said to have placed a burning katol (mosquito coil) beside her kulambo (mosquito net). The story isn't convincing, although I admit that I believed it then. Because why would you still use katol when you can already sleep inside your kulambo without those pesky mosquitos buzzing around and biting you. But we never know. There were perhaps others sleeping outside the mosquito net. That 1969 fire was just a minor fire. It razed only about two blocks of houses. The major fire was still to come exactly nine years later - in the summer of 1978, again on the month of April.
All of us Holy Child Catholic School students called him Mr. Joe (above left).
He was our shop and art teacher, and scoutmaster. Mr. Joe told us that his full name is Joe R.R. Mortera. The first R stands for Rustico. I don't know what the second R (his middle initial) is. Rustico is actually his first name, most probably the name of a saint picked up from the calendar whose feast day fell on the the day Mr. Joe was born. Jose was just added to it to conform to the practice of many Catholics of affixing Jose and Maria to the names of children about to be baptized.
I remember an old movie I watched on television in the 1960s. The title of the movie is "Troop 11", and the lead stars are Manding Claro and Nenita Vidal. The name of the scoutmaster character in that movie, if I remember correctly, is Mr. Joe. Just a guess, Mr. Joe must have adopted his moniker and the name of the HCCS drum and bugle corps Troop 11 after that movie was shown. Nothing wrong with that because after all, one of his given names is Jose, which is Joseph or its diminutive Joe to the Americans. But it could be the other way around too. The movie and its scoutmaster character must have been inspired by the exploits of our scoutmaster. We HCCS scouts tend to believe the latter, because Mr. Joe, even then, is already a legend to us.
We saw him as an expert in many things. Not only was Mr. Joe our shop and art teacher, he also organized, trained, and molded our school's drum and bugle corps, the ARAMAC Ship 11, into the consistent first-prize winning marching band it became. True, the PTA president, industrialist Manuel Camara, also played a great part in the success of the marching band by sponsoring it, but all the money in the world would be money down the drain if the bandleader was incompetent. ARAMAC (reverse of Camara) Ship 11 was the pride of HCCS in the early 1960s.
Mr. Joe was a stern master. He would never brook tardy, lousy, and crybaby scouts. If a scout arrived late, he would be ordered either to face the wall for several minutes without moving, or do push-ups. For heavier violations, the offender had to pass the line. Passing the line was when one has to crawl between the spread legs of fellow scouts strung out in a very long line, with each boy allowed the liberty to whack one's behind with their hands as hard as they like. But if a boy committed a very serious offense, Mr. Joe would give that boy a short stiff jab at his abdomen.
"Sisikmuraan sya ni Mr. Joe," was how batchmate Rey Noble put it.
There was even a time during formation after the Sunday mass, when a strong rain fell. We thought that he'd order us to break ranks and seek a roofed refuge. We all thought wrong. He didn't do it, and just let everyone of us scouts who were standing at attention - and himself, too - got drenched with rain. All that sternness may seem like overdone and suited only for young men undergoing real military training. We were only boys after all. But the irony was we liked it, and were truly proud to have experienced it. We felt as if we were truly grown-up men being subjected to real military discipline.
I became a boy scout when I was in grade five, the same year when we boys had a shop and art class under Mr. Joe. Application forms were handed to those who wanted to become scouts which a parent should sign if they approve of their boy's joining. My mother asked me, "Gusto mo ba talagang sumali? (Do you really want to join?)" I nodded. Next step was to buy the collar-less khaki boy scout upper uniform and short pants, navy-blue neckerchief with the HCCS Sto. Niño seal, and the olive-green knee-high boy scout socks. To complete the look, we also bought khaki oversea cap, traffic whistle, white gloves, and the embroidered Lion Patrol and Troop 11 patches. Confident of being admired, I went out of our house the first day of our formation, a Sunday, attired in complete boy scout uniform and strutted along Leandro Ibarra Street on the way to school. But to my dismay, when I was about to reach the intersection at Wagas Street, boys standing by chanted, "Boy scout lamon, pambala sa kanyon, boy scout lamon, pambala sa kanyon...! (Boy scout glutton, fodder for cannon...!)" And all my enthusiasm was doused right then and there.
Well, not all. I was still excited with my joining the boy scouts, and looked forward to all the scout activities still to come, especially the camping trip to Mt. Makiling in Laguna. Campings were scheduled every October, at the height of the typhoon season. I used to wonder why not in January and February, when days are cool and rainless. Why subject us little boys to spending early evenings huddled up in tents while a thunderstorm rages outside? I realized later on that it was part of the training. We were supposed to be boy soldiers, and all the synchronized marchings, standings at attention and parade rests while in formation, flurry of salutes, and the yes sirring all around were all preparations for the military training we will undergo later in life. We were being taught to be tough and resilient, and not be upset by adverse situations like mere downpours. And that's the reason why we were taught the proper way of pitching tents, especially the need to dig a canal around the perimeter of each tent to prevent flooding inside. That canal was for catching rainwater pouring down the sloping sides of tents.
I belong to Lion Patrol. With me were Hugolino Quintano and his brother. Ramon, Alex Manalang, the late Reynaldo Abuedo, Rodolfo Cinco, and Jose Busquit. Our patrol leader the first year was Sir Flores. Just Sir Flores because I don't remember us fellow patrol members knowing his first name even then.. Although I was appointed patrol leader the next year, when I was in grade six, an officer was still above me - our patrol adviser. He was Sir Jesse Tuazon, who was a graduating high school student.
Those camping trips were the biggest and most exciting event in our life as boy scouts. I remember us, all energetic boys, loading the bus with our knapsacks, and camping paraphernalia and equipment. We loaded the bus with tents, ropes, bamboo poles, giant pots and pans, patrol flags, and totem poles. Totem poles were long wooden boards about 8 feet tall, a foot wide, and an inch thick, on the topmost part of which the animals after which the patrols were named were painted. Filling up the totem poles' surfaces were pictures, usually of cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, Superman, Batman, etc. Each patrol were required to have a totem pole which should be planted on the ground of their fenced area. The names of the patrols I remember, aside from Lion, were Deer, Fox, Hawk, Tiger, Python, Horse, and Eagle.
There were many outside the bus who were sending us off - like our mothers or fathers, teachers, and girl classmates (whose crushes may be among those going to camp, ha ha ha), all with concerned or worried looks on their faces. But we little boys, feeling like big men, showed no signs of worry whatsoever. We acted like true soldiers going off to war, or boot camp, or wherever soldiers go on their mission.
Our camping ground was up a foothill of Mt. Makiling on a grassy flat land at the edge of a bushy ravine. That place was the site of the 10th World Scout Jamboree in 1959 attended by more than 12 thousand boy scouts from around the world. It was dubbed the "Bamboo Jamboree" because of the prevalence of bamboo and nipa structures on the site.
The first task of each patrol upon arriving at the camping site was to choose and fence with bamboo poles and ropes the area where they will pitch their tents. There were two tents allowed each patrol. The tents should be pitched erect and stiff, without any sagging. Demerits shall be slapped a patrol if tents sagged and if the patrol area wasn't neat. I have joined only two camping trips, the first when I was in grade five, and the second when I was in grade seven.
The first time I joined a camping trip it rained two consecutive nights. That's why a camp bonfire and demonstration which were scheduled on the second night were cancelled. But at the next year's camp, the weather was clear the second night, so all the driftwoods gathered and the branches cut from trees were all put to use. A demonstration was a performance competition, held not only during camp nights but also monthly at school after the Sunday mass, where patrols did their numbers like singing scouting songs, chanting patrol yells, and acting skits whose scripts they themselves wrote. The prizes were pennants or banners which the winning patrols hanged on their poles below their patrol flags. There would be patrols who'd be selected as Best In Yell, Best in Song, and Most Outstanding Patrol. I don't know who garnered the first two prizes, or if ever such were selected, but I do know that Deer Patrol won the Most Outstanding Patrol prize that night. Two of my classmates in grade seven were part of that patrol - Efren Tila and his cousin Barcissus Santiago.
Taps were always sounded by a bugler at exactly 10 o'clock every night. We were all required to go to sleep after that, to observe silence and put all lights out, as there would be roving senior officers who'll see to it that regulations are followed. But boys being boys, we never really followed that rule. Stories of ghosts and other frightful entities, and sometimes humorous stories too, were told in whispers. The reveille or wake-up call by the bugler was at 6 o'clock. But not on Sunday morning, when we were roused from our sleep at 4 to troop to and hear mass at a small church on Mt. Makiling just several minutes walk downhill from our camp.
Before the demonstration and bonfire on Saturday night, all the scouts went trailing first just after lunch, where they followed their leaders down ravines with the aid of ropes, then across a stream dotted with giant boulders, and clambered up again the opposite slope towards flat ground. There was also that game where a patrol would plant its flag along a slope with one patrol member defending the flag against the enemies, or whoever would try to capture it. The enemies were all hidden behind trees and bushes and can't be seen by the defender. A try was made to capture the flag of one patrol by a courageous fellow who made a dash for the flag by sliding fast along the steep slope and pulling forcefully the flag pole planted deep in the soil. He succeeded in capturing the flag but his downward momentum broke the pole when he grabbed it, and the lower half remained embedded in the soil. Poor fellow. He was forced by the patrol who owned the flag to pay for the pole he broke.
The culminating event of our camp was swimming. That's on Sunday morning. The resort is perhaps less than a half-kilometer walk from our camp. I don't know if that resort still exists today, but it is in pretty good condition in 1968, the second year of my joining a camp. It has two levels. The pool on the first level has a depth of from 2 to 4 feet. The second level, which can be accessed by going down a steep stair, is deeper. I don't know the maximum depth of the second pool but it must be 6 feet or more. Mr. Joe first gave us tips on swimming followed by a demo on how to rescue a drowning person, which was beyond me because I don't even know how to float. After the demo, Mr. Joe gave us permission to swim on whichever pool we choose. To my embarrassment, everyone except me and my close buddy Eric Antonio rushed below to the second and deeper pool. Eric and I remained on the pool which must be meant for kids and tried the floating tips just taught us by Mr. Joe in water two feet deep.
That Sunday was the day we broke camp. We began dismantling our tents and cleaned up our campsite after lunch. The buses came before 3 pm. There was a last minute flurry of buying pasalubongs or take-home goodies, like chicos, espasols, and buco pies, before the buses rolled off. We arrived in Manila at around past 5 pm, and there waiting for us with happy relieved faces were our fathers or mothers. I can't remember if there were teachers and girl classmates also waiting for us because all I thought of and wanted then was to go home fast, and eat again steamed rice cooked just right, not "hilaw" or "malata" (undercooked or soggy) which was our regular mealtime fare at the camp, and sleep again on my soft-mattressed bunk which I have all to myself.
We saw him as an expert in many things. Not only was Mr. Joe our shop and art teacher, he also organized, trained, and molded our school's drum and bugle corps, the ARAMAC Ship 11, into the consistent first-prize winning marching band it became. True, the PTA president, industrialist Manuel Camara, also played a great part in the success of the marching band by sponsoring it, but all the money in the world would be money down the drain if the bandleader was incompetent. ARAMAC (reverse of Camara) Ship 11 was the pride of HCCS in the early 1960s.
Mr. Joe was a stern master. He would never brook tardy, lousy, and crybaby scouts. If a scout arrived late, he would be ordered either to face the wall for several minutes without moving, or do push-ups. For heavier violations, the offender had to pass the line. Passing the line was when one has to crawl between the spread legs of fellow scouts strung out in a very long line, with each boy allowed the liberty to whack one's behind with their hands as hard as they like. But if a boy committed a very serious offense, Mr. Joe would give that boy a short stiff jab at his abdomen.
"Sisikmuraan sya ni Mr. Joe," was how batchmate Rey Noble put it.
There was even a time during formation after the Sunday mass, when a strong rain fell. We thought that he'd order us to break ranks and seek a roofed refuge. We all thought wrong. He didn't do it, and just let everyone of us scouts who were standing at attention - and himself, too - got drenched with rain. All that sternness may seem like overdone and suited only for young men undergoing real military training. We were only boys after all. But the irony was we liked it, and were truly proud to have experienced it. We felt as if we were truly grown-up men being subjected to real military discipline.
I became a boy scout when I was in grade five, the same year when we boys had a shop and art class under Mr. Joe. Application forms were handed to those who wanted to become scouts which a parent should sign if they approve of their boy's joining. My mother asked me, "Gusto mo ba talagang sumali? (Do you really want to join?)" I nodded. Next step was to buy the collar-less khaki boy scout upper uniform and short pants, navy-blue neckerchief with the HCCS Sto. Niño seal, and the olive-green knee-high boy scout socks. To complete the look, we also bought khaki oversea cap, traffic whistle, white gloves, and the embroidered Lion Patrol and Troop 11 patches. Confident of being admired, I went out of our house the first day of our formation, a Sunday, attired in complete boy scout uniform and strutted along Leandro Ibarra Street on the way to school. But to my dismay, when I was about to reach the intersection at Wagas Street, boys standing by chanted, "Boy scout lamon, pambala sa kanyon, boy scout lamon, pambala sa kanyon...! (Boy scout glutton, fodder for cannon...!)" And all my enthusiasm was doused right then and there.
Well, not all. I was still excited with my joining the boy scouts, and looked forward to all the scout activities still to come, especially the camping trip to Mt. Makiling in Laguna. Campings were scheduled every October, at the height of the typhoon season. I used to wonder why not in January and February, when days are cool and rainless. Why subject us little boys to spending early evenings huddled up in tents while a thunderstorm rages outside? I realized later on that it was part of the training. We were supposed to be boy soldiers, and all the synchronized marchings, standings at attention and parade rests while in formation, flurry of salutes, and the yes sirring all around were all preparations for the military training we will undergo later in life. We were being taught to be tough and resilient, and not be upset by adverse situations like mere downpours. And that's the reason why we were taught the proper way of pitching tents, especially the need to dig a canal around the perimeter of each tent to prevent flooding inside. That canal was for catching rainwater pouring down the sloping sides of tents.
I belong to Lion Patrol. With me were Hugolino Quintano and his brother. Ramon, Alex Manalang, the late Reynaldo Abuedo, Rodolfo Cinco, and Jose Busquit. Our patrol leader the first year was Sir Flores. Just Sir Flores because I don't remember us fellow patrol members knowing his first name even then.. Although I was appointed patrol leader the next year, when I was in grade six, an officer was still above me - our patrol adviser. He was Sir Jesse Tuazon, who was a graduating high school student.
Those camping trips were the biggest and most exciting event in our life as boy scouts. I remember us, all energetic boys, loading the bus with our knapsacks, and camping paraphernalia and equipment. We loaded the bus with tents, ropes, bamboo poles, giant pots and pans, patrol flags, and totem poles. Totem poles were long wooden boards about 8 feet tall, a foot wide, and an inch thick, on the topmost part of which the animals after which the patrols were named were painted. Filling up the totem poles' surfaces were pictures, usually of cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, Superman, Batman, etc. Each patrol were required to have a totem pole which should be planted on the ground of their fenced area. The names of the patrols I remember, aside from Lion, were Deer, Fox, Hawk, Tiger, Python, Horse, and Eagle.
There were many outside the bus who were sending us off - like our mothers or fathers, teachers, and girl classmates (whose crushes may be among those going to camp, ha ha ha), all with concerned or worried looks on their faces. But we little boys, feeling like big men, showed no signs of worry whatsoever. We acted like true soldiers going off to war, or boot camp, or wherever soldiers go on their mission.
Our camping ground was up a foothill of Mt. Makiling on a grassy flat land at the edge of a bushy ravine. That place was the site of the 10th World Scout Jamboree in 1959 attended by more than 12 thousand boy scouts from around the world. It was dubbed the "Bamboo Jamboree" because of the prevalence of bamboo and nipa structures on the site.
The first task of each patrol upon arriving at the camping site was to choose and fence with bamboo poles and ropes the area where they will pitch their tents. There were two tents allowed each patrol. The tents should be pitched erect and stiff, without any sagging. Demerits shall be slapped a patrol if tents sagged and if the patrol area wasn't neat. I have joined only two camping trips, the first when I was in grade five, and the second when I was in grade seven.
The first time I joined a camping trip it rained two consecutive nights. That's why a camp bonfire and demonstration which were scheduled on the second night were cancelled. But at the next year's camp, the weather was clear the second night, so all the driftwoods gathered and the branches cut from trees were all put to use. A demonstration was a performance competition, held not only during camp nights but also monthly at school after the Sunday mass, where patrols did their numbers like singing scouting songs, chanting patrol yells, and acting skits whose scripts they themselves wrote. The prizes were pennants or banners which the winning patrols hanged on their poles below their patrol flags. There would be patrols who'd be selected as Best In Yell, Best in Song, and Most Outstanding Patrol. I don't know who garnered the first two prizes, or if ever such were selected, but I do know that Deer Patrol won the Most Outstanding Patrol prize that night. Two of my classmates in grade seven were part of that patrol - Efren Tila and his cousin Barcissus Santiago.
Taps were always sounded by a bugler at exactly 10 o'clock every night. We were all required to go to sleep after that, to observe silence and put all lights out, as there would be roving senior officers who'll see to it that regulations are followed. But boys being boys, we never really followed that rule. Stories of ghosts and other frightful entities, and sometimes humorous stories too, were told in whispers. The reveille or wake-up call by the bugler was at 6 o'clock. But not on Sunday morning, when we were roused from our sleep at 4 to troop to and hear mass at a small church on Mt. Makiling just several minutes walk downhill from our camp.
Before the demonstration and bonfire on Saturday night, all the scouts went trailing first just after lunch, where they followed their leaders down ravines with the aid of ropes, then across a stream dotted with giant boulders, and clambered up again the opposite slope towards flat ground. There was also that game where a patrol would plant its flag along a slope with one patrol member defending the flag against the enemies, or whoever would try to capture it. The enemies were all hidden behind trees and bushes and can't be seen by the defender. A try was made to capture the flag of one patrol by a courageous fellow who made a dash for the flag by sliding fast along the steep slope and pulling forcefully the flag pole planted deep in the soil. He succeeded in capturing the flag but his downward momentum broke the pole when he grabbed it, and the lower half remained embedded in the soil. Poor fellow. He was forced by the patrol who owned the flag to pay for the pole he broke.
The culminating event of our camp was swimming. That's on Sunday morning. The resort is perhaps less than a half-kilometer walk from our camp. I don't know if that resort still exists today, but it is in pretty good condition in 1968, the second year of my joining a camp. It has two levels. The pool on the first level has a depth of from 2 to 4 feet. The second level, which can be accessed by going down a steep stair, is deeper. I don't know the maximum depth of the second pool but it must be 6 feet or more. Mr. Joe first gave us tips on swimming followed by a demo on how to rescue a drowning person, which was beyond me because I don't even know how to float. After the demo, Mr. Joe gave us permission to swim on whichever pool we choose. To my embarrassment, everyone except me and my close buddy Eric Antonio rushed below to the second and deeper pool. Eric and I remained on the pool which must be meant for kids and tried the floating tips just taught us by Mr. Joe in water two feet deep.
That Sunday was the day we broke camp. We began dismantling our tents and cleaned up our campsite after lunch. The buses came before 3 pm. There was a last minute flurry of buying pasalubongs or take-home goodies, like chicos, espasols, and buco pies, before the buses rolled off. We arrived in Manila at around past 5 pm, and there waiting for us with happy relieved faces were our fathers or mothers. I can't remember if there were teachers and girl classmates also waiting for us because all I thought of and wanted then was to go home fast, and eat again steamed rice cooked just right, not "hilaw" or "malata" (undercooked or soggy) which was our regular mealtime fare at the camp, and sleep again on my soft-mattressed bunk which I have all to myself.
ISLA PUTING BATO DAYS
Beyond the piers is the breakwater, a long line of gigantic white rocks dropped into the sea just before the North Harbor. The breakwater serves as a wall that prevents the big waves from rocking the docked ships too much during typhoons. That is Isla Putting Bato, the poor man's beach resort. My father used to bring me and brother there when he was on vacation. He was a seaman. Isla Puting Bato was detached from the mainland during the 1960s. You need to ride a banca to get there. The first time we rode a banca to go to Isla Puting Bato I got very scared and almost panicked. The banca was overloaded and only about seven inches of the boat's hull remained above water.
It was only in the 1970s that an effort was made to connect Isla Puting Bato to the mainland. The resulting reclaimed or extra land became another squatter community, the so-called Luzviminda Village. Luzviminda Village was squatters area all right, but it was not slum. It looked more like any sleepy fishing village in the provinces. Some residents have boats, and they made a living fishing and gathering tahong (mussel), talaba (oyster) and bilakong. Bilakong resembles tahong, but its shell is brownish and is very much bigger. One time my father bought a bagful of bilakong from Isla Puting Bato which my mother cooked adobo style with lots of chillies. That was the first time I tasted that dish. I came to like it so much that today, whenever my wife Carina saw bilakong being sold in the market, she would buy an ample quantity right away, so that she can cook for me the dish I have developed a craving for.
Isla Puting Bato was the cheapest beach resort there was during my growing up years. No entrance fee and no transport cost. All we had to do to get there was walk. And no need to bring much food either. All my barkada (below) and I had to bring was cooked-rice and water, and spicy vinegar and salt, too. The latter two made up the "sawsawan" or dip for the tahong and talaba we could pry from underneath the rocks. Although those shellfish were our only "ulam" (viand), it was always happy eating for us. We were never fazed by the meagerness of our resources. What mattered most was our camaraderie.
And that camaraderie, that bond, was put to a test one time when I nearly drowned. I was not yet a good swimmer then. Yet, I was brave enough to jump into deep water time and again. We had with us an inflated car tire inner-tube which we used as "salbabida" or lifebuoy. I saw it already floating far from the rocks, so I jumped after it to retrieve it. But what happened was each time I made a hand-stroke to get nearer and grab it, the farther the salbabida floated away. When I looked back, I realized that I was already very far from the rocks. I was no longer confident that I can swim back on my own, so I swallowed my pride and waved at my friends and called for help. And they, like one man, jumped into the water to pick me up. The guys who saved me were Freddie Adina, Gani Dimayuga, and the late Ponching Bansil and Rody Valiente.
I was fascinated by the sea since my early childhood. Ever since my father brought me and my brother to the breakwater, ostensibly to teach us to swim, I've always kept in my heart the longing to really learn to swim. Teaching someone to swim right is a rigorous process that can't be accomplished in an hour or two. So, I have to tell now that it wasn't my father who taught me how to swim. I learned swimming on my own. I think I was in grade six when our maid caught me inside our drum filled up with water. I was practicing floating. When she saw me doing that, she warned me that she's going to tell my mother. "Sumbong kita sa Mama mo, " she said.. But she apparently never did, because I never heard from my mother. My mother never scolded me
Beyond the piers is the breakwater, a long line of gigantic white rocks dropped into the sea just before the North Harbor. The breakwater serves as a wall that prevents the big waves from rocking the docked ships too much during typhoons. That is Isla Putting Bato, the poor man's beach resort. My father used to bring me and brother there when he was on vacation. He was a seaman. Isla Puting Bato was detached from the mainland during the 1960s. You need to ride a banca to get there. The first time we rode a banca to go to Isla Puting Bato I got very scared and almost panicked. The banca was overloaded and only about seven inches of the boat's hull remained above water.
It was only in the 1970s that an effort was made to connect Isla Puting Bato to the mainland. The resulting reclaimed or extra land became another squatter community, the so-called Luzviminda Village. Luzviminda Village was squatters area all right, but it was not slum. It looked more like any sleepy fishing village in the provinces. Some residents have boats, and they made a living fishing and gathering tahong (mussel), talaba (oyster) and bilakong. Bilakong resembles tahong, but its shell is brownish and is very much bigger. One time my father bought a bagful of bilakong from Isla Puting Bato which my mother cooked adobo style with lots of chillies. That was the first time I tasted that dish. I came to like it so much that today, whenever my wife Carina saw bilakong being sold in the market, she would buy an ample quantity right away, so that she can cook for me the dish I have developed a craving for.
Isla Puting Bato was the cheapest beach resort there was during my growing up years. No entrance fee and no transport cost. All we had to do to get there was walk. And no need to bring much food either. All my barkada (below) and I had to bring was cooked-rice and water, and spicy vinegar and salt, too. The latter two made up the "sawsawan" or dip for the tahong and talaba we could pry from underneath the rocks. Although those shellfish were our only "ulam" (viand), it was always happy eating for us. We were never fazed by the meagerness of our resources. What mattered most was our camaraderie.
And that camaraderie, that bond, was put to a test one time when I nearly drowned. I was not yet a good swimmer then. Yet, I was brave enough to jump into deep water time and again. We had with us an inflated car tire inner-tube which we used as "salbabida" or lifebuoy. I saw it already floating far from the rocks, so I jumped after it to retrieve it. But what happened was each time I made a hand-stroke to get nearer and grab it, the farther the salbabida floated away. When I looked back, I realized that I was already very far from the rocks. I was no longer confident that I can swim back on my own, so I swallowed my pride and waved at my friends and called for help. And they, like one man, jumped into the water to pick me up. The guys who saved me were Freddie Adina, Gani Dimayuga, and the late Ponching Bansil and Rody Valiente.
I was fascinated by the sea since my early childhood. Ever since my father brought me and my brother to the breakwater, ostensibly to teach us to swim, I've always kept in my heart the longing to really learn to swim. Teaching someone to swim right is a rigorous process that can't be accomplished in an hour or two. So, I have to tell now that it wasn't my father who taught me how to swim. I learned swimming on my own. I think I was in grade six when our maid caught me inside our drum filled up with water. I was practicing floating. When she saw me doing that, she warned me that she's going to tell my mother. "Sumbong kita sa Mama mo, " she said.. But she apparently never did, because I never heard from my mother. My mother never scolded me
