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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Thursday, October 5, 2017
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THE OTHER day, I called up a former columnist of this newspaper to congratulate him for having been promoted to the position of warden of the San Jose District Jail in San Jose, Antique, with jurisdiction over 13 towns.
Senior Inspector Jimmy Britanico returned the compliment, sounding as if he would have loved to write once more pag may taym. He had done years of column-writing for Panay News.
The 67-year-old me, on the other hand, can’t retire from the cerebral job I have been doing since 1970. It’s no longer just to earn a living but also to fight memory loss. Dementia is an ailment that could befall the “young once.”
Writing is exciting because it also enables one to rub elbows with people from all walks of life. There was a night in 1991, for instance, when the late columnist Teddy Sumaray and I slept with alleged thieves and killers at the Iloilo Provincial Jail.
We could have avoided that supposedly humiliating experience by immediately posting bail over a libel case but we did not. To us journalists, a libel case is a “medal” of valor – an award for exposing graft and corruption.
We made use of our time befriending the jail guards. One of them – whose nameplate showed the surname Antiquiera – told us that he was working there to ensure the good future of his children. One of his children is now a lawyer, Eldrid Antiquiera.
After only one sleepless night in jail, we posted bail and earned the right to be free again the following day. True, we realized, we take freedom for granted until we lose it.
As much as we value freedom, we value fulfillment of our ambition. Deprived of the opportunity to fulfill it, man loses his zest for life; or worse, life itself – as in the case of a University of the Philippines (UP) student who committed suicide because she had no money to pay for tuition.
I was already a Veterinary Medicine student at UP when I quit against the will of my late father, who had been saying, “Son, there’s no money in writing.”
I shifted to Journalism anyway because I was not interested in getting rich at that time. What I wanted was to break into print. The “kontrabida” stance of my father was ironic; he had always been an avid newspaper reader.
In my third year as Journalism student at the Manuel L. Quezon University in Manila, I was chosen news editor of the university paper, The Quezonian.
One of my professors happened to be an active newspaperman. He was Angel Anden, retired editor of the defunct This Week magazine.
To keep us interested in the course, Anden said that Imelda Romualdez Marcos might not have become First Lady without him.
“I was walking on Aduana Street,” he said, recalling an event of the early1950s, “when I met this pretty young lady. As editor of This Week magazine, I was so desperate for our next cover girl that I offered it to her. She waxed ecstatic, confessing that it had always been her desire to be famous. That cover story indeed brought her fame, since it caught the attention of Ferdinand Marcos, who would be her husband and President of the Philippines.”
That true story somehow illustrated the power of the press not only to mold public opinion but also to shape history. As United States President Thomas Jefferson aptly said in 1787, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” (hvego31@gmail.com /PN)
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