MEDIUM RARE

Responding to President BBM‘s call to memorialize the courage, not only of saints but also of our dear departed, the brave and the bold, as we end a week of holy days and holidays, I beg the reader’s indulgence to let me pay tribute to my mentors in journalism, the only profession I’ve known and practiced all my life (starting with my mother, who taught me how to read, and my father, who taught me how to write).

In UST, our professors in journalism were Joe Bautista, editor in chief of the Prieto-Roces Manila Times, and Felix B. Bautista Jr., who would also be my first boss at the Evening News. Everything I know about journalism I learned at age 17 from those two Bautistas (who were not related).

Felix mapped out my 7 a.m.-12 noon job: lay the groundwork for the news desk and photographers. Four years later, Joe Bautista showed up at my door telling me to skip classes and go see Chino Roces for an interview for a job at the Times.   

As things would turn out, my editor in chief at the Times’ afternoon paper, Daily Mirror, was Emilio “Abe” Aguilar Cruz, he who would be my boss and hero. Abe never went to college – the war interrupted his studies – but he taught himself English and, later on, French (enough to qualify him for the post of ambassador to UNESCO in Geneva).

Separately, Abe and Chino took me to lunch in unglamorous places near the Times building on F. Torres st. – a small perk for the only desk editor who was not male. We ate in restaurants that served good food at newsmen’s prices, but with the meals we exchanged gossip, as long as it was not fit for print.  

A side bar to my Abe-Chino period. When I was offered a salary that angered the Times union, it took their vice president, who was the Mirror’s Labor reporter, Leon Ma. Gonzales, to talk them out of it. When the handsome Leon and debonair Pete Lopez, managing editor, perished in a plane crash in 1969, Mr. Roces took to the sky in his “Newsboy” helicopter to send down a shower of rose petals to honor the two fallen soldiers at their funeral.