The Freeman: 90 years of history and prestige!

Congratulations are in order for the Gullas Family, especially to Sir Jose “Dodong” Gullas and the management and staff of The Freeman and of course to our President Sir Miguel Belmonte and Publisher Mr. Juanito Jabat on the occasion of its 90th Anniversary tomorrow. We’re writing this as we don’t have a column tomorrow. Other newspapers can claim anything that they can claim, but if there is anything that is exclusive only to The Freeman, there is no question that it has the prestige and the heritage of being the oldest newspaper in Cebu and that means a lot for us Cebuanos.

As Sir Miguel pointed out during a luncheon at the Marriott Hotel hosted by Sir Dodong last Wednesday, perhaps only the Manila Bulletin can claim to be older than The Freeman. So when you read The Freeman’s advertisement that are placed in conspicuous places that declares, “Nobody Knows Cebu Better than The Freeman!” you can say that this is a statement of fact and truth. Just reading the four-part series on the history of The Freeman by Dionisio Sy that has been published in the last few days gives you an idea of how long The Freeman has been around. In fact the names mentioned in The Freeman’s early years are names of our forebears.

Being an armchair historian, if there is anything I truly want to read from one of the earliest copies of The Freeman, it is the account on how the legendary Leon Kilat a.k.a. Pantaleon Villegas was murdered by his own friends in the Katipunan movement, most of whom came from Carcar. When a newspaper article prints that confession from one of the killers, it is tantamount to recording history. Indeed as a columnist, we write mostly about current events, but if you kept clippings of the articles you wrote, decades later, students of history would end up reading your report of that days incident as part of the history of Cebu.

Last Wednesday, TF Publisher Nito Jabat was asked to make a speech, but he always claims that he is not a good (most columnists believe in this, with the exception of my mentor and late friend Max Soliven) speaker. However, Nito somehow got carried away when he was asked by a student about the Rise and Fall of The Freeman so he really made a good speech. He pointed out that with the efforts of Sir Dodong and Sir Miguel, The Freeman only continues to rise.

Indeed, in the 90 years of the existence of The Freeman Empires have risen and fallen. I refer to the Czarist Empire in Russia, the Japanese Empire and yes, the so-called Thousand Year Reich of Adolf Hitler have come and gone and even the Shah of Iran has vanished, but The Freeman is still with us. When The Freeman was shut down during World War II, it wasn’t really a fall, rather it was merely hibernating, after all, business practically ground to a halt during those dark times.

But in the mid-60’s Sir Dodong Gullas from his own lips told us last Wednesday that he asked permission from the widow of his uncle Don Paulino Gullas to resurrect The Freeman and she was very happy because it was as if Don Paulino had come back to life through his newspaper. When Martial Law was declared, it was another dark time in the history of The Freeman but that didn’t last long as the Marcos dictatorship allowed the paper to operate, perhaps using it as their propaganda that there is press freedom under his regime.

Then Nito Jabat told us of another crisis, when Super Typhoon “Ruping” hit Cebu where all the power lines were down. Yet Sir Dodong Gullas asked that the newspaper must be out to carry the news of the greatest natural disaster that fell upon Cebu. Mr. Jabat had to literally walk a couple of miles from his home to be in the office and the next day, The Freeman was out with only eight pages of stories, stories that told the world about the wrath of Super Typhoon “Ruping’ that no other newspaper could tell as they too were out of commission because there was no power.

While my introduction to the world of journalism began when I joined The Philippine Star on the 25th of August 1986, as its Cebu Bureau Chief, it was through Mr. Nito Jabat who convinced me to write for The Freeman and my maiden column appeared on August 5, 1987. Back then, friends made fun of me saying that I joined a “Titanic” or a ship that was about to sink. But as God would have it, The Freeman somehow always recovered from crisis to crisis.

Perhaps the best thing that ever happened to The Freeman was when Sir Miguel Belmonte and the Star Group of Publications invested as a partner of the Gullas family in The Freeman it has become the newspaper to reckon with. It is a fact that the tabloid Banat, The Freeman’s sister publication is now dubbed as the newspaper with the largest circulation in the entire Visayas and that is no mean feat! More Power to The Freeman!

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