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[av_heading heading=’PEOPLE POWWOW ‘ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=’30’ subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=” av-medium-font-size-title=” av-small-font-size-title=” av-mini-font-size-title=” av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” admin_preview_bg=”]
BY HERBERT VEGO
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Tuesday, November 28, 2017
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IT HAS BEEN seven years since I turned senior citizen, but I can never forget lessons learned in childhood which today’s children may learn from.
My earliest childhood memory takes me back to age three in the year 1953 in San Pedro, a barrio in San Jose, Antique. My youngest brother Walter, three months old, was aching from a rare skin disease. Since the nearest doctor was five kilometers away, we had to rent the car of a certain Palermo, who would willingly drive us to the doctor’s clinic.
But dermatology had barely gone beyond the “primitive” stage. The prescribed ointment failed to save my brother; he died at the age of six months.
The trips to the doctor on borrowed car must have motivated my late father to buy his own second-hand jeepney. It cost him three thousand pesos, a princely price at that time.
I can still visualize the joy in my father’s face as he said, “Now we don’t have to beg for a ride to wherever we want to go.”
We went to a photography studio for my first photograph at age three. I cried on being left alone on a chair in front of a big camera, until my father handed me his fountain pen. I was already smiling while toying with the pen when the photographer took a shot.
Looking back to that incident, I now wonder whether I was subconsciously paving the path to my future career in journalism.
To regain his investment on our jeepney and earn, too, Tatay registered it as a 12-passenger vehicle plying the seven-kilometer San Pedro-San Jose route at 10 centavos per passenger.
One day, my Lola Maria gave me a 10-centavo coin. She said I could trade it for bread or candy. So I ran to the corner store and pointed at a jar full of round candies called dulce de limon. The smiling storekeeper wrapped 20 of them and handed me a five-centavo coin as change.
In my innocence I thought I would always get a change each time I bought with a coin. But I got none the next time I took my coin to the same store for the same dulce de limon. Anyway, it taught me a lesson on the perishable value of money.
The biggest-sized coin at the time had the smallest value. One centavo, bigger than today’s five pesos, could buy a piece of wrapped candy.
I was six years old in 1956 when my mom enrolled me in Grade 1. Our school supplies were cheap. Seven pieces of pad paper cost only five centavos.
We did not have to buy books in public schools. The government lent us all our textbooks, returnable at the end of the school year, to be relent to the next batch.
Inflation was a slow process as prices remained constant for a decade or more. In the mid 1950s and until the mid-1960s, gasoline cost only 30 centavos per liter.
I remember that a bus ride from San Jose to Iloilo City cost only one peso.
The minimum wage of government employees in early 1960s was P120 per month, but that was good enough to make both ends meet.
We practiced “business” in first year high school in 1962. Our Economics teacher would occasionally ask us to man the school’s retail store. One day, she told us we would have to increase the price of soft drinks from 10 to 15 centavos per bottle due to “inflation”.
“Your parents,” she told us, “should earn more money to keep you well-fed.”
True enough, today as a parent myself, I need to earn thousands of pesos to afford what P120 could buy in the 1960s. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
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