Remembering ‘Tatay’

The University of Baguio celebrates its 58th anniversary this week, with the Bautista clan getting together for yet another commemoration of what started as a Mom-and-Pop operation way back in 1948. They will look back with much love at the old folks, now gone – Tatay and Nanay – who strived against all odds in that post-war period to establish an educational institution that has since become synonymous with the mountain city we have all learned to love as our own.

Tatay Nanding Bautista, or Fernando Bautista Sr., who left us four years ago after living to a ripe old age of 94, would have his centenary celebrated in 2008. He was 40 when he established Baguio Technical and Commercial Institute with Nanay Rosa.

We are drawn to a recollection of this great Filipino’s memorable life story after recently being gifted with a book that is all of a dozen years old, but which remains an excellent example of the biography genre.

The large coffeetable book that is replete with photographs is Tatay: A Biography of Dr. Fernando G. Bautista (Snapshots of A Life), written by Abe Florendo and published by Naktaynay Foundation in 1994.

The collectible belatedly made its way into our radius of appreciation when architect Bnn Bautista, a friend for over four decades, sent it along with an invite to come to Baguio this week to join the clan reunion. Regret over our inability to relive old camaraderie with Bnn and his brothers should find its own amends, thus this loving recollection.

At the turn of the 1960s, I became friends with Benjamin Bautista, the second of seven sons raised by Tatay and Nanay. He was taking up Architecture in UP Diliman, and daily repaired to a modest apartment in Gagalangin in Tondo. My Dimasalang and UP buddy Eric Villegas and I would visit on weekends to pretend to discuss existentialism with Bnn and Frank "Primo" Libatique, another Archi student.

Bnn and I also frequented the Jai Alai on Taft. One night after a losing spree we walked dejectedly down the length of Roxas Blvd. all the way to Baclaran, where we revived our spirits by hooking up with some ladies (of the night). It can be said that Bnn has had a lifelong influence on me.

Eric and I would also spend time in Baguio on holidays, at the Bautista residence on Bonifacio Road. We got to know the rest of the Bautista brothers: Fer the oldest, Rhey who followed Bnn, then Des, Herr, Gil and Jojo, who was yet a tyke then. Presiding over the bounteous dinner table were the soft-spoken Tatay Nanding and Nanay Rosa, ever gracious and hospitable.

Unimaginable how many separate barkadas the Bautista boys brought home to roost. One time, table talk drifted to fabled Sagada, a veritable Shangri-La as Eric and I heard it – remote, idyllic, hardly visited by outsiders. One of the household help happened to be a Sagada native. We asked to talk to her. She said we could stay with her family "up there."

The spirit of adventure moved us, so Eric and I roused ourselves up at dawn the next day, trudged over to the Dangwa bus terminal, and boarded a Yamashita bus – with its lateral rows of wooden seats that only opened up on the right side of the bus – for what was then an eight-to-10 hour ride to Sagada. We arrived blond from the dust.

We proceeded to a village I recall now to have been named Pide – one of those small clusters of cogon-roofed huts right smack on the middle of expansive rice terraces, as viewed panoramically from the road leading to the big cave. We spent a few days there, romancing primitive conditions and loving it like fresh bohemians – no electricity, scooping water from a large jar to brush our teeth at a stone yard, marveling at the mist and fog that always seemed to enshroud our out-of-this world habitat for the moment.

That was in 1962, when Sagada still had no lodge for visitors. Two years later, I made my way back with painter Rene Castillo who was a classmate at PWU, honest, at the College of Fine Arts where I also met the graphic arts genius Pandy Aviado. Rene and I imposed ourselves on then Bishop Richard Abellon’s convent house. We did woodcuts during our one-week stay, and ran out of fare money to get back to Baguio, let alone Manila. Bishop Abellon saved us from our predicament, but not before giving us a gentle lecture on teenagers’ lack of responsibility.

But those were the days when I thought nothing of hocking, whenever I wound up penniless in Baguio, an expensive watch my dad had given me upon high school graduation. In Baguio, I always seemed to grow heedless of my logistics, especially when I fell to hanging out with Des and his barkada when Bnn wasn’t around.

Subsequent years also drew me close to Herr the laughing one, who always found mirth in everything, even his appointment as Baguio’s water administrator. It was through Herr that I formed lifelong relations with direks Butch Perez and Peque Gallaga, from the days the LaSallian trio came up with the Fabulous Gamboa Show for TV.

Fer the kuya was so much older and had already assumed responsibilities at UB. Rhey looked stern and unfriendly in those days, but in recent years his genuine appreciation for the arts (Santi Bose’s wizardry in particular, as well as patronage of the Baguio Arts Guild) had me seeing him in a new light. A few years ago, Rhey went out of his way to help me resolve an unexpected flap with a Sagada family, for which I have yet to express my full appreciation. His son Peter Rey is Baguio’s young vice mayor, and now acting mayor, thanks to a parking-lot controversy.

Sorry for the extended digression. But that should make for a backgrounder on how I became one of the unofficial, adopted (or self-appointed) kinsmen of the Bautistas of Baguio.

Getting back to Tatay and his biography, I turn even more appreciative of those brotherly relations down the years – owing to one outstanding Filipino whose life story veritably reads as an epic rise to great influence and benevolent power, all the way from tsinelas days in Tondo.

Fernando Gonzaga Bautista was born on March 10, 1908, and grew up by the banks of the Canal de la Reina, the second of four sons of zarzuelistas of modest means. As a young boy, he joined older brother Vicente in peddling Liwayway magazine and haunting the docks daily as a bootblack, so that he had to repeat Grade One. He attended different primary schools and the Manila North (now Arellano) High School, before putting in four years at Philippine Normal School for an Elementary Teacher’s Certificate. He became a plumber’s assistant to continue with his studies. He wanted to take up Law, but the family couldn’t afford it, so it was decided that he would be the maestro.

At 20, he started teaching at Sta. Ana Elementary School. He enrolled for evening classes at UP at Padre Faura, where Rosa Castillo was a Botany classmate while also serving as a model teacher at the Magdalena Elementary School in Sta. Cruz. In the senior teachers examination in 1935, Rosa came out first and Nanding second.

It took Ding seven years to gain a Master of Arts in Education degree from UP. In 1936 he was appointed assistant principal of the Gregorio del Pilar Elementary School in Binondo (now Jose Abad Santos H.S., and formerly the Meisic Elementary where he had studied for Grades 1 and 2). In 1937, he became principal of the Rizal Elementary School in Tayuman, the youngest in Manila at age 29, and with the highest degree. A year later he and Rosa tied the knot and had their honeymoon in Baguio.

In June of 1940, an offer came to teach in UP Baguio, and Ding Bautista grabbed it. Eventually, Rosa taught at the Baguio City H.S. Wartime saw the Tondo boy turn to his resourceful self, engaging in buy-and-sell and opening a canned goods stall in the Baguio market. He rode an open freight truck to take vegetables and brooms down to Manila every fortnight, and came back with grocery items purchased in Divisoria.

Upon Liberation, he served as a janitor for the Americans, just so he could put food on the table for a fast-growing family. He erected a shanty on Session Road across Pines Theater, and set up a store and a barbershop. His reputation as a former UP professor led to an offer to help turn an unprofitable hotel into a school building. Baguio Colleges opened in January 1946 with Ding as executive dean and registrar, and Rosa as principal of the elementary and high school and dean of the Normal department.

Two years later, they resigned to set up their own school, Baguio Technical and Commercial Institute, which opened with 89 students and five fulltime teachers.

"Our idea was to produce young men and women who are technically trained to assist in the immediate rehabilitation of Baguio and the country," Bautista explained. "What was urgently needed was a vocational school offering courses that required relatively short periods to complete."

The school transferred to the UB site on Gen. Luna. In 1951 it was renamed a college. Tatay also helped establish the Baguio Military Institute in 1956. But he soon had to devote full time to Baguio Tech, which was growing by leaps and bounds, until it became a university on August 7, 1969. Tatay served as its first president, but gave way to oldest son Fer when he was elected a delegate for the 1971 Constitutional Convention.

Tatay also became known as "the durable old man of sports," attending, as a PAAF official and often as an appeals jurist, all the Asian Games since 1954, and the Olympic Games from Rome 1960 to Barcelona 1992 when he was already 84. He single-handedly framed the constitution and by-laws of the Asian Amateur Athletic Association.

In 1987, Nanay Rosa passed away, at age 79. In 1989, Tatay remarried, at age 80. His bride was the 75-year-old widow Constancia Y. Guevara, also a teacher in Tondo, and who had been a childhood acquaintance. They enjoyed 13 loving years together, until Tatay passed away on October 9, 2002. Now Mama Anching still lives with Gil Bautista and family in Baguio.

What a romance of a life. What an exemplar of an educator, and a great Filipino.

This week, he would have enjoyed being with over 130 grandchildren and great grandchildren, courtesy of Fer and Mila, Bnn and Malou, Rhey and Debb, Des and Auring, Herr and Leonie, Gil and Lilian, and Jojo and Bubut, as well as Rosalynn or Lin-Lin who was adopted to "bring a girl’s grace to a household of boys."

His spirit will be there, together with Mama Rosa’s, hovering over the brood that grew into a distinguished clan, smiling as well at the hundreds of thousands of students who have gained a life start by passing through the hallowed gates of the University of Baguio.