The father was a pool hall attendant who did not even have a high school education and who famously wore only white – so no one would notice he had only two sets of clothes. The son would soon inherit the father’s business, which would become one of the country’s first and largest business conglomerates, built out of nothing but hard work and mind-numbing discipline.
Gil J. Puyat’s rise would likewise be marked by initial difficulty. As a child he was afflicted with beriberi, a vitamin B deficiency that rendered him sickly and frail, unable to even feed himself without assistance. Anecdotes recall how several family members had to join forces just to make sure he swallowed his food. Years later, when he courted Eugenia (for seven years), his would-be mother-in-law frowned at the union, citing his frailness and thinness.
Despite such beginnings, his destiny seemed to have been set early on: Gil J. Puyat was only in fourth grade when his father Gonzalo placed him in charge of the pool hall’s day-to-day operations. He often literally found himself in his father’s place, sleeping on the felt tables after hours.
Years later, with the Puyat family already enjoying much better times, a stern look from his father was all it took for him to dispel his early dream of being a doctor. Puyat instead enrolled in a business administration course at the University of the Philippines. He reveals, later on, that he had thought of business as a default course for lesser minds.
But his acquiescence was a kind of family duty, a sense of duty that would return to him many times, in many forms and under many dispensations, over his multiple careers.
In school, the good son quickly became a good student and, soon enough, a good teacher. Economics became Gil’s primary language and he found himself gifted enough at it to eventually teach it, quickly rising from instructor to associate professor. Soon, it would attract the attention of his dean and the university president, who offered him the deanship. When that wasn’t enough to solicit a positive response, the President of the Philippine Commonwealth personally convinced him and so, at 33, he became the youngest dean the college had ever had.
When the war came and the universities were closed, Puyat made sense of the time by turning introspective. Considering the amount of work he had been doing till then, it might have been the first time he ever really looked around. The postwar economy had carried with it the lumbering momentum of the economic imbalances of American policy; in the context of a devastated Manila, the imbalance might have threatened to swing a more dangerous weight.
Puyat’s academic background would prove a powerful, informative force, limited not only to the realm of forming technocratic policy on macroeconomic levels, but was also evidenced by his numerous victories in the arena of business.
He drew upon the Philippine Chamber of Commerce to build a highly leveraged business syndicate that would turn shipments of surplus war goods back to Manila, where they were desperately needed for the reconstruction effort. He would move on to prove his mettle in the business arena by continuing his father’s work, becoming one of the first true Filipino industrialists.
While it was Gonzalo Puyat & Sons that was the cornerstone of the Puyat family’s fortunes, it was his perspicacity that lent him his father’s ear and allowed him to take the reins and become the chief architect of the family’s expansion into various other fields. Firstly, as a natural progression from the billiard tables and bowling alleys, was a move into the furniture business. At the time the vision was to revolve around the basics, and in Puyat’s case this meant a housing-based framework. What followed was an organic growth into steel sheets and pipes, as well as lumber and wood veneer.
It was the sense of patriotic duty that would call him to his next career, a post that would define him in the decades to come. His first foray into politics, filled with the reservations and self-doubt almost required of a schooled economist, proved contradictory to his quiet academic background: Puyat hit second place on his first run as senator. It was also powerfully prophetic, as he went on to lead the senatorial race in the next three elections.
But his father perhaps had more to do with this than it seemed. Don Gonzalo always wished to involve the family in industries that would be beneficial to the public at large. This cornerstone ethic had formed and set into the son’s political life. As senator, and later on, Senate President, Puyat became known as incorruptible, even applying his personal business mantra into his politics: “Integrity above all.”
Puyat put the full weight of his economics and business background into his political career, injecting structure and accountability into national fiscal and infrastructure policies. He also applied it on a larger scale, providing the technical backbone to new trade and financial policies between the Philippines and America, and working harder than ever to create the balance that he had so longed to see.
Later, at the onset of martial law, the same sense of duty that led him to politics called him back to private life and the fast-growing business house that Gonzalo Puyat & Sons had become. In America, while working on the Laurel-Langley agreement and studying American fiscal policy, he had seen a country brought up on the pioneering spirit of the Hearsts, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers. He found himself spearheading the latter stages of his conglomerate’s expansion in similar spirit, with forays into real estate development, memorial park services and, most significantly, financial services.
His achievements as a private businessman would make him one of the true titans of Philippine business. On the centennial of his birth this year, Gil J. Puyat is remembered as a man who minded his private business, swept the Senate elections four times – and balanced the budget.