Sito Beltran: Moving out of his dad’s shadow

Having a feisty, fiery father like Louie Beltran is tough. No one knows this more than the late newsman’s eldest child Sito. You can never really measure up. The reputation is just too forbidding; the task daunting. Thus it was that Sito, he with the familiar face in Isyu-101 (Wednesdays, ABS-CBN, 11:30 p.m.) first thought of tending, not to burning issues of the day like his controversial father did, but to animals. Yes, Sito wanted to shine as a veterinarian. "A newsman’s life is hard," muses Sito, who grew up seeing his father go on assignments that took him away from his family for long periods of time. Not even his siblings’ excitement over the pasalubong that lay waiting for them would ease the anxiety they feel whenever dear Dad is away.

Sito grew up answering anonymous callers mouthing death threats and learning how to target shoot as self-defense. He saw how their real estate properties, cars and his dad’s antique collection disappeared because they needed the money to fend for themselves after Louie landed in jail for challenging the Marcos government.

But some things are meant to be, it seems. Sito got frustrated when he failed a crucial essay test preparatory to veterinary medicine proper because "of my professor’s prejudice."

He decided to get out, fast. He made a deal with his dad. Sito was to try one semester of Mass Communication at U.P. (where Louie was then teaching) and see how it works. "The girls were pretty and I got into basketball," so Sito was hooked. He finished AB Journalism in seven years – after being sidelined by writing jobs. One of them proved that this guy won’t take an assault to his principles sitting down. When the publisher of the trade magazine he was working for tried to kill a scoop involving an anomaly in one game, Sito decided to call it quits.

He swung to another field: sales promotions, then resort development. Under the heat of a political cauldron where his father figured prominently, Sito left for the US to work. But the most monumental change in Sito’s career was yet to come. Back in Manila for good after he met Karen J. Vogelsang, a Dutch he fell in love with after he saw her in a Hard Rock Café party in Malate, Sito decided to settle down (by this time, Karen must have given birth to a girl, the couple’s first-born). he also joined the Victory Christian Fellowship. Then his father died of heart attack. At the wake, just when Sito was about to bid his last goodbye to his dad – the casket lying there before him, somebody whispered to him, "Make a wish."

Without even realizing it, he murmured,: "Dad, I don’t ask that you to leave me your fame. All I ask is for you to leave me your talent."

One year later, Jarius Bondoc asked Sito to write for Isyu, where his column appeared for two years. Then came the chance to work as commentator for DWWW.

When he learned that Korina Sanchez needed a co-host for Isyu 101, Sito additioned. He has been with the show since. Sito has this to say to those who think he comes on too strongly in the show: "Society teaches us to be humble and calm. My parents gave me a cosmopolitan upbringing where I am urged to speak my mind out. I am very emotional about what I believe in." But as much as he is his father’s son, Sito is also his own man. Sito, for instance, will not make his work his whole life, the way his father did.

"I have no illusion of permanence in media. Today you’re here, tomorrow you’re out," Sito mouths a lesson his colorful childhood and adolescence have taught him. At the end of the day, he is simply Sito, the happy husband and father whose best friend is his wife.

The lessons of history can also be the most powerful.