Once upon a time in Manila and Far Eastern University

The retirement of the 10th Far Eastern University president, Dr. Lydia B. Echauz, brought together alumni of the University at the Peninsula the other week, among them the taipan, Alfonso Yuchengco, former Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban, Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim, the banker Ramon Sy and this tired, old memoirist.

Professor Echauz succeeded Dr. Edilberto de Jesus — DJ to friends, that brilliant educator and technocrat who was drafted into the government service as secretary of education by then President Gloria Arroyo. I met DJ at Yale in the United States sometime in the Sixties when he was there with his wife, the former Melinda Quintos, working on his dissertation on the tobacco monopoly during the Spanish regime.

In May 1938, I left Barrio Cabugawan, Rosales Pangasinan where I was born to go to Manila. My mother’s older brother, Andres, a surveyor in the Bureau of Mines, was to send me to high school. It was a time honored custom among us Ilokanos to help one another; that year, I finished grade school and was considered bright enough to merit my uncle’s assistance.

My uncle’s family lived in a rented accessoria off Requesens in Santa Cruz and I walked from there to the FEU boys high school, which was then in a one-story spread of buildings in the corner of Azcarraga and Quezon Avenue where the Isetann mall now stands.

Our high school principal was Angel Roman, Jr. — a tall, dapper mestizo, always in a white suit, shepherding us in the morning flag ceremony, our teachers — a Mr. Recio, the beautiful, willowy Marina Dikit with whom all of us boys had a crush. Dr. Echauz later told me she was an aunt.

After classes, and a spartan lunch of pan de sal with sardines, hard Dutch cheese or plain Star margarine at one in the afternoon, with other classmates, we trooped to the Quiapo market below the new Quezon Bridge. On the stone embankment of the Pasig, we disrobed then jumped into the river. On occasion, we would race to the other bank, but that required some effort, so we rarely did.

Barges and small boats plied the river then. Towards the bay, just below Jones Bridge, the inter-island steamers, and some times, the Presidential yacht, the Casiana, docked.

If I did not swim, I often walked to the Escolta, crossed Jones Bridge then went to the National Library which was at the basement of the Legislative Building — now the National Museum. The National Library had at the entrance the Encyclopedia Britannica, the latest newspapers. It was in the reading room, too, that I recognized the writer, Manuel Arguilla — he cannot be missed because he had this black birthmark on the left cheek. I had read him in the Weekly Graphic, and Salvador P. Lopez in the Herald Midweek magazine. I was much too shy to greet them.

In the 1930’s, left-hand driving was followed in Manila and all over the country; it was only in 1945 when the Americans returned with their jeeps that it was switched to the right. Some streets were redolent of horse manure; the piers were drenched with the smell of copra.

Horse-drawn calesas, caretelas, and the four-wheeled caretela bus were the main vehicles like the jeepneys today. Streetcars — trambiya clattered along Rizal Avenue, Azcarraga (now Recto), Legarda and San Marcelino. No traffic jams strangled Manila, some streets even in Ermita-Malate were not asphalted. España and Taft were not lined with trees but Rizal Avenue was.

There were no skyscrapers then; the tallest buildings were City Hall as it stands today, the Avenue theater and hotel in Rizal Avenue, and the Great Eastern Hotel in Echague.

Along Rizal Avenue, an attraction for pedestrians was the Smile Bengco Dance Academy. On the third floor of the building, we could see the students do the tango, the conga, the rhumba, and the pasa doble; the Lambeth Walk and the Jitterbug were now passé, and the Boogie Woogie had just come in.     

The Luneta was one vast stretch of grass from Taft all the way to the bay; the only structure on that verdant green aside from Rizal’s monument was the bandstand near it where the Constabulary band played on Sunday afternoons.

Kangkong ponds lay along portions of España, Dimasalang. Diliman was world’s end. Makati was a wilderness of grass and San Andres was swampy with rice fields.

The major social events like the Kahirup Ball of the sugar barons were held at the Manila Hotel’s Fiesta Pavilion or Winter Garden; the New Year parties of Manila’s 400 at the Club Filipino at Rizal Avenue. As a boy in short pants, I used to watch from the grilled iron fence the black sedans, the society icons in their elegant gowns and tuxedos.

Before World War II, the higher you went up, so the old saying goes, the whiter it became — Spanish white, and the elite language was not English but Spanish. The Spanish mestizo landlords dominated Filipino society, and President Manuel Quezon personified that leadership.  He was always in the newspapers as well as the object of gossip in the barbershops and tiendas. He was known to be suffering from TB and the local belief was that a person so afflicted had an increased libido. 

I was going to the bay for a swim one afternoon. And there in front of the Manila Hotel, a film was being shot and that pretty petite star being photographed was Amparo Karagdag who was rumored to be Quezon’s girl friend. During the November 15 celebration of the Commonwealth, there he was on the Luneta perorating about independence and lustily cheered always by Filipinos mesmerized by his charisma.

The Americans were not very visible as rulers; they occupied special enclaves and were openly discriminatory, posting signs at their Army and Navy club: Dogs and Filipinos not allowed. Although they held political power until 1935 when the country was declared a Commonwealth, they did not socialize too much with Filipinos except with their counterparts in government and business.

The American military men were confined to special areas, in Manila in Fort Santiago, in Cavite, in Fort Stotsenburg. American sailors were visible only when the fleet was in, in the tourist shops in Intramuros, and in Plaza Goiti where there were bars and restaurants that catered to them. The area would then be patrolled by their Special Police in naval uniform.

All over the city were signs in Spanish, se prohibe fijar carteles, relojeria, zapateria, panciteria, casa de empeños, vaciador, panaderia, se alquila. Words like accesoria, bailarina, muchacho, maton have no currency now.  

Pre-war Sta. Cruz Plaza, Manila: My uncle’s family lived in a rented accessoria off Requesens in Santa Cruz and I walked from there to the FEU boys high school.

And the Chinese? The small corner sari-sari shops in Manila were theirs. One could ask for a clove of garlic, a spoonful of vinegar and salt for free. The Chinese were also street vendors; they bought old newspapers and used bottles.

The snootiest social club was the Casino Español. The Club Filipino and the Columbian Club were set up to promote Filipino nationalism. The membership was dominated just the same by mestizos — in fact, the major politicians were mestizos, and that lineage is somehow sustained to this very day.

The classy housing districts were Ermita-Malate, some sections in Santa Mesa and Pasay, and of course, New Manila — that sprawling area which Quezon, upon the formation of the capital city named after him, allocated choice lots to his mestizo friends. As for Intramuros, it was then in its nascent decay; the big stone houses were quartered, the rooms rented by clerks and their families.

Escolta was the main shopping street for the rich, with its beautiful Crystal Arcade, shoe shops like Walkover and Florsheim. The masa went to Gandara close by where local shoes were much cheaper. The main Escolta shop, the Heacock’s  had an intimidating automatic electric door.

Almost all government employees, even those in the private sector, and law students wore white drill suits. The wealthier wore a shiny, silky fabric — sharkskin, and the drill de hilo or alpaca, much more expensive and glossy, too. The maong was for peasants and laborers — it was durable and didn’t get dirtied easily. It was unthinkable in the Thirties to imagine that maong would today become an international fashion material for men and women. Men’s shoes came sometimes in two colors, and upper class Filipinos even wore spats, and of course, the traditional buntal or straw hat. The barong tagalong as an expression of Filipino nationalism was embroidered with nipa huts, coconut palms, the flag.

I have no knowledge of the gourmet restaurants of the time but I do know that a comida china — a meal with soup, an entrée and dessert at the restaurants in Rizal Avenue cost 18 centavos. In those days, a housemaid earned two pesos a month and an ordinary clerk 18 pesos.

My knowledge, too, of the nightlife was limited to a visit with Manong Osing, a much older cousin, to the cabarets in Maypajo and La Loma. He did not take me to Santa Ana to the cabaret there which was reputed to be the largest in the world. The girls were seated at the entrance of the dance floor. The customers bought ten centavo tickets and once the band started, they’d race to the dance floor and pick the girls they would dance with and give them their tickets.

The Metropolitan Theater — that magnificent Art Deco building in Plaza Lawton, now decrepit and unused, was the cultural hub in those days. Movies were shown in the afternoons and the evenings were for concerts, plays; it was there where I heard my first Beethoven concert by the Manila Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the expat Herbert Zipper. Ballet presentations were choreographed by his wife, Trudl Dubsky. Here, too, the magnificent violinist Ernesto Vallejo, exhibited his bravura genius and his equally talented sister, Fely Vallejo belted opera arias.

The bigger movie houses, Ideal, Avenue and the State at Rizal Avenue and the Lyric and Capitol at the Escolta showed only American films and the lesser theaters like the Grand showed Filipino films. Rosa del Rosario, Elsa Oria, Arsenia  Francisco, Corazon Noble, Norma Blancaflor, Rogelio Dela Rosa, Angel Esmeralda, Fernando Poe, Sr., Leopoldo Salcedo were the stars.

I could afford only the cheaper movie theaters — the Tivoli and Oro in Plaza Santa Cruz where I followed those serials, The Lone Ranger and The Drums of Fu Manchu. They were sweaty, hot as boiler rooms because they were not air-conditioned but they showed double features — all in black and white, for Technicolor had yet to come.  

In 1941, in my senior year talk was rife that the war with Japan was forthcoming. A cousin, Raymundo Alberto who was a student at the University of the Philippines was drafted into the Army. I had visited him at his house in Antipolo once when he was on short leave from Capas where the recruits were training. He was in khaki shorts, his hat made from coconut husk like those worn by the Constabulary. Indeed, war may be inevitable as Japan had already advanced in China, but he said not to worry — the powerful American Army and Navy would come to our succor.

In preparation for that war we had air raid drills in Manila, practise black outs — the siren atop the Cold Storage building close to the Santa Cruz Bridge, would wail to announce when the drill would start and when it would end.

We thought that, indeed, we were prepared, but on December 8 1941, the Japanese planes bombed Nichols field in Manila. Fort Stotsenburg in Pampanga and Iba Zambales — chaos prevailed. That day, too, classes stopped. I bundled my few belongings, and rushed to Tutuban. Hundreds with the same intent were there but I managed to wiggle into the Ilokos Express and that same afternoon, I was in the old hometown. The Japanese landed in Lingayen a few weeks later.

That war defined the kind of people we are; we emerged from it, chastised, and battered. In hindsight — so many of us collaborated with the Japanese — this moral disaster from which, I think, we have yet to recover.

Time is a linear continuum; the past is a window to the present and from the present, with foresight we can see tomorrow. A remembrance of a past long dead, of what use is it? Nostalgia itself is not enough; it is even harmful if all it does is glorify the past and disable a people with necrophilic paralyses. The past can be meaningful when, with memory, we realize our failings and the possibilities that we missed. Manila in the Thirties had less that a million people — with slums, for sure, and people who were hungry, too. But in hindsight, our leaders should have had vision to face the urban blight, the moral malaise that loomed so clearly ahead. They didn’t.  

I WAS AT my dear alma mater recently. The University’s superb cultural guru Dr. Rustica Carpio — a longtime friend, staged Victor Torres’ drama adaptation of my story, The God Stealer, the bibliophile, Jose Cabaltera, also spruced an exhibit of my books at the University Library. I was stunned by the transformation of the wide but staid campus into this well-groomed green expanse studded with handsome statuary and  flanked by elegant buildings.

The University’s cultural agenda is alive and well. Lourdes R. Montinola had continued and enlarged the programs of development as envisioned by her father. But I appreciate her most for her memoir of World War II — Breaking the Silence, a superb recall — elegiac and poignant — of those bitter years

The FEU theater built before the war was the venue of concerts, operas, cultural programs immediately after World War II when it was the only available public theater. It continues to stage cultural presentations, lectures as planned by Martin Lopez as impresario, and in literature, which the University has also been identified with writers like Jaime An Lim.

The FEU library in the second floor of the main building facing Quezon Boulevard was one of my favorite haunts particularly when in my junior year, the high school moved to the building beside it. That year, my byline appeared in the Junior Advocate, the high school paper — a brief essay; it was my first time to see my name in print and that precious moment — the wonder, the excitement — these I will never forget.

Universities like FEU were, a few decades back, maligned as diploma mills. What its founder, Nicanor Reyes, envisioned was an institution for lower class Filipinos who cannot afford the elite universities. FEU led, therefore, in the democratization of higher education, imparting to the working poor quality education — this is to say, FEU was primarily for working students.

The model has been praised universally and adapted particularly in countries where universities are expensive and reserved mostly for the rich. Institutions like FEU have no subsidy from government, unlike the state universities. But led by brilliant and dedicated teachers like Lydia B. Echauz, and Edilberto de Jesus, they often triumph as proven by their topnotchers in the government exams, by their multitude of achiever alumni. I am happy and proud to have spent four of my formative years at FEU. My alma mater is further blessed because it is administered by the daughter of its founder, Lourdes R. Montinola, a committed educator and philanthropist who made the “diploma mill” into one of the best universities in the country today.

She has agreed to answer several questions I’ll ask for a forthcoming Hindsight.