Author’s Note: Fidela Mendoza Magpayo, lovingly called Tiya Dely by everybody, died last Monday, Sept. 1, at the Manila Doctors Hospital on UN Avenue, Manila, where she was rushed late Saturday night, Aug. 30, after she had a cerebral hemorrhage due to a stroke while hosting her long-running program Serenata Kolektibista on dzRH. “She died with her boots on, so to speak,” said her good friend Danny Dolor, philanthropist, banker and STAR’s Remember When? columnist. “She had just played Bella Filipina, the intro music to the program, when she began stuttering. And then, she backed away from the microphone which had been her inseparable companion for many, many years. She slipped into coma.”
On the afternoon of Sunday, Aug. 31, Tiya Dely was supposed to receive, together with a few others including Komiks King Carlo J. Caparas, the Quezon Sagisag Award for propagating the Filipino Language, one of the numerous awards and citations she had garnered in her colorful career as The First Lady of Radio.
She was buried yesterday at the Loyola Memorial Park in Marikina City, her home until she died. She would have turned 88 on Oct. 29.
As a tribute to the Fabulous Lady of the Airlanes and to update the new generation of radio listeners, I am reprinting unedited my interview with Tiya Dely which came out on July 7, 1985, in Weekend, the Sunday magazine of the Martial Law paper Daily Express.
The intro music to her radio programs has not, despite the years, lost its soothing effect. It is titled Bella Filipina (“An old, old song, which my Lola used to sing”) and it touches the lovelorn and the lovesick and other people burdened with other (mostly emotional) problems with a magic more potent and more curative than medicine. And when the equally soothing voice fills the air, “Ito ang inyong…Tiya Dely!,” the legions of avid listeners from Aparri to Jolo brace themselves, certain that all will be right with the world after all.
The voice with a caressing quality is hard daily on DWWW (Monday to Friday, 11 p.m. to 12 midnight; Monday to Saturday, 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.; and Sundays, 9 to 10:30 a.m.) and for the past 32 years, it has been so much a part of the Filipino psyche that, at the slightest hint of a problem, the immediate “prescription” comes quick and easy: “Ba’t di ka humingi ng payo kay Tiya Dely?”
She also invaded television with Hamon sa Kampeon, featuring a rondalla contest every week, which she co-hosted with Pepe Pimentel. The show, lasting from 1957 to 1972, won the prestigious (but now defunct) CAT Awards as Best Cultural Show for five consecutive years. When it folded up due to financial constraints, “I died a little,” says Tiya Dely.
Sometime in 1957, her radio program Mga Liham Kay Tiya Dely, was made into a movie by Larry Santiago Productions, a five-episode drama which launched Chiquito and Joseph Estrada’s movie careers.
At 64 (she’s turning 65 on Oct. 29), Fidela Mendoza Magpayo (that’s her real surname, no kidding!), your and my Tiya Dely, is radio’s most enduring, most loved and most widely-followed institution. She has hardly changed. Then and now, before she dishes out little pieces of advice to letter-writers whom she deems too stupid and too much of a martyr, she first qualifies: “I’ll talk to you like I do to my family and relatives.” And then, to a long-suffering wife who allows her husband to go around with other women, she’ll say, “E, napaka-gaga mo naman pala, e. Niloloko ka na’t lahat nagtitiis ka pa rin.” Or, to a cuckolded husband abandoned by his overly-pampered wife for another, not necessarily better,“Ang laki talaga ng sira mo. Alam mo na palang kumakaliwa ang misis mo, hindi mo pa itinuwid habang maaga. Ayan, iniwanan ka tuloy.”
They love her brutal frankness and they interpret it as her sincere concern for people who come to cry on her shoulder, who come to unburden their emotional load on her.
Once in his sermon, the equally brutally frank Fr. Sonny Ramirez recalled turning on the radio during his seminary days, only to be jolted by the “angry” voice of a lady-announcer reprimanding somebody: “Sira ka pala, e; gaga ka pala, e. Niloloko-loko ka na, sige ka pa rin nang sige.” That lady-announcer was, you guessed it, Tiya Dely and Fr. Sonny admits that he derived his own brutal frankness from her.
“Kaya kaming dalawa ni Fr. Sonny,” Tiya Dely laughs, demurely now, “magka-vibes. We are good friends. We treat each other like relatives.”
Smelling of Tea Rose (the one from London, not from New York or Paris), one of her favorite perfumes, Tiya Dely steps out of her DWWW booth after her 9-to-10:30 program Sunday Morning Date With Tiya Dely. She’s simply but impeccably dressed in a light brown pants topped by a gold-colored shirt, prim and proper as always on or off the airlanes, with every strand of her hair (only slightly graying) in place.
Several weeks ago, at the Parangal Kay Huseng Batute (Jose Corazon de Jesus) sponsored by Danny Dolor’s Tribung Pinoy at the Los Hidalgos in Intramuros, I heard Tiya Dely read two nationalistic poems by Huseng Batute. She was calm and relaxed, exact to her smallest movement and to the slightest change in intonation, astonishing the elite afternoon crowd as much with her equanimity as with her youthful (a lady-writer said “well-preserved”) looks. When Danny, in his introduction, mentioned that Tiya Dely has been on radio for 40 years, an incredulous gasp was heard from the audience.
“Actually,” Tiya Dely clarifies as she settles on a chair inside a drama studio at the Broadcast City, “I was a radio talent in 1940, pakanta-kanta ako noon, and I was on radio even during the Japanese Occupation. At the same time, I was working at the Foreign Affairs; (Vice Pres. Elpidio) Quirino was then concurrently secretary of Foreign Affairs. It was Quirino who encouraged me to take up foreign service. Sabi niya, ‘You should take up something in college.’ And since I was already employed at the Foreign Affairs at that time, I thought the fitting course for me was foreign service so I enrolled at FEU. Pa-radyo-radyo din ako at the same time.”
When Pres. Manuel Roxas died in 1948 and Quirino became president, Tiya Dely left the Foreign Service and devoted full time to radio.
“When Professor (Gregorio) Zaide, my teacher in history, learned about it, he told me, ‘Ano ba, you’re back on radio. Ano, political sayang!’ You see, my major was political science. I told Prof. Zaide, ‘Sir, hindi rin naman political sayang because I can make use of my educational attainment in my work as a radio talent.”
She started as a radio actress in such soap operas as Gulong ng Palad, Aklat ng Pag-ibig, Principe Amante and Camay Theater On The Air, all sponsored by Philippine Manufacturing Company (PMC). Then in 1952, Rey Oliver of MBC/DZRH got her to host the Saturday night slot, for Tugtugin Natin (11 p.m. to 12 midnight), which came after the widely-followed Mga Reyna Ng Vicks. She didn’t become Tiya Dely until 1953 when the MBC/DZRH management thought of putting up an advice program ala Dorothy Dix, a famous tagapayo in the USA in the ‘50s. (Note: According to Danny Dolor, from DWWW Tiya Dely moved back to dzRH in the early ’90s and she revived her Monday-thru-Friday program Ito ang Inyong...Tiya Dely and hosted Serenata Kolektibista which was previously known as Serenata Filipina and Serenata Kumbidahan. — RFL)
She still ends her programs with her usual parting shot, “Nagpapaalam na sa’yo…sa’yo…at higit sa lahat…sa’yo!” She delivers that line with a voice so full of lambing that her listeners feel reassured, till the next day’s date with their Tiya Dely.
Psychologists attribute the wide appeal of shows like Tiya Dely’s to the fact that “misery loves company.” When you realize that other people have problems, too, bigger problems and more serious, you feel light and you thank God you are not that desperate after all.
“That’s true,” says Tiya Dely. “Many people ask me, ‘Don’t you feel burdened with so many thousands of people dumping their problems on your lap?’ I tell them, on the contrary, I feel lighter and luckier that I don’t have the same problems. All of us encounter problems every now and then but when you discover that other people’s problems are mas mabigat, gumagaan ang pakiramdam mo.”
She receives an average of 50 letters a day (there was a time when she received as many as 300!) and she reads every one of them. Then she passes the chosen ones to the scriptwriter for dramatization on the air and she goes over the script again before she hands down her payo.
“Hindi naman talaga ako nag-papayo,” Tiya Dely explains. “What I do is give suggestions. I make it a point to present the two sides. For example, if a wife writes me complaining that binubugbog siya ng kanyang asawa, I tell her to weigh things carefully. I tell her, ‘Nasasa’yo ’yon, kung matitiis mong mawalan ng asawa, e, di iwanan mo siya.’ I don’t usually tell my listeners to do this, do that, I just make them decide for themselves after presenting to them what could happen if they act this way or that. I give views and opinions based on my own experience. Most of the time, however, the most effective solution to problems is common sense. That’s what I always remind my listeners, ‘Common sense ang pairalin, hindi emosyon.’ It works most of the time.”
One of Tiya Dely’s unforgettable experiences as tagapayo was when a teacher (a substitute in Metro Manila School) wrote to her about her predicament: she fell in love with the wrong guy who left her when he discovered that she was pregnant. The poor maestra could not go back to her home province with an unwanted pregnancy. Tiya Dely read the teacher’s letter on the air and a couple, long childless, was so touched by her plight that they decided to look for the woman.
“Many months later,” Tiya Dely recalls, “the couple came to my house, with a baby. It turned out that they did find the woman and decide to adopt her baby. I never met the baby’s mother, though, but it was a big relief enough for me to know that the baby was safe, hindi pinalaglag, and the woman went home with her problem solved.”
There was also the case of a young woman, despondent after her boyfriend broke off with her to marry somebody else, who wanted to commit suicide.
“I told her, ‘Iha, the most precious gift that God has given us is life. Hindi mo mabibili ’yan kahit magkano, so you have to treasure it.’ A few days later, she wrote again, thanking me for saving her life. That’s what I always tell doon sa mga bigo sa pag-ibig: ‘Forget him, forget her.’ Later on, when you get over the pain of it and you grow older and you meet him or her again, you will laugh at yourself and at how foolish you have been. Then, you will tell yourself, ‘Ay, naku, mabuti na lang hindi kami nagkatuluyan.’ After a time, the guy or the girl whom you thought meant the whole world to you ay iba na. He or she doesn’t look as precious or as desirable anymore, di ba?”
And where does Tiya Dely go, to whom does she run, when she herself is facing a seemingly insurmountable problem?
“I pray. I am not a Catholic fanatic, neither am I a Born-again Christian, but I believe in the power of prayer.”
In all her 64 years, says Tiya Dely, she has encountered what she calls “an overwhelming problem” only once. That was in 1969 when Violeta, her daughter by her first husband, died of enlargement of the heart.
“At that time,” Tiya Dely recalls, her eyes growing misty with tears, “heart operations were very new at talagang hindi pa kabisado ng mga doctor ang operasyon maski na sa Amerika. But my daughter was determined to have that operation, although I was advising her against it dahil nga I had talked to many heart patients who had undergone that operation and they told me that either of two things could happen: magiging vegetable siya o babalik siyang nakakahon. Instead, I told her, ‘You should go to Lourdes, France.’ I believe in God and I strongly believe in miracles and I told my daughter so.”
But then, some people poisoned her daughter’s mind, telling her that her mother didn’t want to spend for her operation which cost at that time some $12,000, more or less. So what the daughter did, upon the advice of a radio announcer (popular then and still popular now), was appeal for financial help on TV, placing Tiya Dely in great embarrassment. The radio announcer denounced Tiya Dely on the air, picturing her as an uncaring, irresponsible mother.
To make a long story short, Tiya Dely’s daughter was able to leave for Houston, Texas, for the operation using the money raised through that TV appeal.
“She was already 20 and she thought she could already decide for herself. Humingi siya ng tulong sa Ermita Lions. The management called me, asking if I needed the money and if I did, they would give me any amount. I told them that money was not the problem. I could easily borrow if I wanted to or sell some of my properties. I told them I just didn’t believe a heart operation could save my daughter. ‘Yun namang radio announcer, inatake ako sa kanyang programa, sinisiraan ako, kesyo ayoko raw bigyan ng pera ang anak ko para pampagamot.”
Tiya Dely felt so alone and so desperate, so she went to the Sta. Clara Convent in the dead of night and sought solace from the nuns there. (The nuns turned out to be avid listeners of her radio program and they were just too willing, for a change, to let Tiya Dely sob on their collective shoulders.) The late Cardinal Rufino Santos also consoled her.
“What I told my daughter was true. When she came back from Texas, she was inside a coffin. But before she died, she wrote me a letter, her tone apologetic, expressing her wish that I and her Tito Leony (Tiya Dely’s second husband, now retired Col. Leonor Reyes) could also travel to the US someday.”
The pain of that incident still gnaws at Tiya Dely’s heart to this very day.
“I know it’s bad to be unforgiving,” she says, “but up to now, galit pa ako doon sa announcer na ’yon. Masakit pa hanggang ngayon.”
These days, Tiya Dely is happy and contented being a plain housewife when she’s off the air. She, husband Leony and daughter Delia (a UP M.A. Economics graduate now working with Dupont) live in a well-appointed house sprawling on a 1,400 square-meter lot on Juan Luna St. in Parang, Marikina. Also on the same compound is a smaller house, just off the garden, where live Tiya Dely and Leony’s other child, Bibbs, and his wife and child Bogs (Tiya Dely and Leony’s only grandchild).
“I cook and I putter around the garden in my free time,” says Tiya Dely, “and that’s enough to keep me trim (she has maintained an ubelievably whistle-bait figure, the years not withstanding).”
Apparently, she is abiding by the standard advice she gives problem-prone people: keep busy and be productive, because no matter how heavy a problem is, it becomes lighter when you keep your mind off it.
As Tiya Dely leaves the drama studio after the interview, the smell of Tea Rose fills the air, leaving behind her perfumed presence, with her parting words echoing in the wind: “If you can solve your problem, do something. If not, let Time solve it for you.”
(E-mail reactions at rickylo@philstar.net.ph)