PEACE-MAKER
As the whole world celebrates Father’s Day next Sunday, June 18, we wish to pay tribute to our beloved father, the late Jose Ravago de Venecia Sr.
After World War II, our father served as Judge at Large for the entire Bicol region, appointed by the late President Manuel Roxas, first president of the Philippine Republic, and eventually promoted to judge of the Court of First Instance in Nueva Vizcaya until he retired in the 1960s.
Before his appointment to the judiciary, he had been an assistant fiscal in Pangasinan, provincial fiscal of La Union, and chief of the Justice Department’s anti-usury division. He also served much earlier as municipal councilor of Dagupan.
He was soft-spoken but firm in his decisions, gentle in manners but tough on discipline. He frowned on idleness and encouraged productive activities. He always dressed properly.
Our father started us on a lifelong hobby of reading. As a young boy, we would spend many hours every day devouring our father’s library of history and literary books, biographies, and periodicals.
We believe it was our daily reading habit which began as a young boy that attracted us to journalism – the elegance of writing, the power of the printed word, the places around the world where events were happening, the men and women who shaped the course of history – and eventually to politics and international relations.
Our father also always told us that to serve our country and people through public service is an honor and a privilege, and for which one must carry out our duties with vision, excellence, commitment, dignity, and hard work.
Before joining the government, he worked in the law office of Don Teofilo Sison, who became governor of Pangasinan, Senator, and Secretary of Defense during the Philippine Commonwealth.
One of our father’s colleagues in the law office was Narciso Ramos, who eventually became a congressman and foreign affairs secretary. Narciso Ramos was the father of former President Fidel V. Ramos.
When he retired in the 1960s, our father and we began a family-owned Basic Enterprises, Inc., an agricultural initiative, some four years before the 1972 imposition of Martial Law. It quickly transformed into a pioneering public oil exploration company, Basic Petroleum and Minerals, Inc., and led with other active Filipino companies, Oriental Petroleum and Philippine Overseas, and U.S. companies, Sunoco, Westrans, Phillips Petroleum, and Champlain, in opening Palawan to international offshore oil exploration, leading after a few years to the historic El Nido and Masinloc oil discoveries in the Palawan Sea.
Our family also owned fish farms in Bonuan just off the Dagupan River, on the eastern outskirts of the city. We cultured Bangus, a brackish-water fish our family harvested in large quantity. The fish farms had been there for decades, inherited from our forefathers. We studied in college partly on the income we raised from the farms. That is also how our life-long romance with fish farming evolved.
Our father had four brothers who achieved some honors: Gualberto, who finished medical studies at the Imperial University in Tokyo; Herman, a graduate of medicine in the United States and married an American; Policronio, who studied medicine in Germany and married a Berlin girl, Erna, and who was appointed by President Ramon Magsaysay as consul general in Hamburg after the war; and Zosimo, who took up Fine Arts in America and returned to the Philippines as a soldier with the great General Douglas MacArthur’s liberation forces.
Our father, the eldest, was the only one who was not sent abroad for his graduate studies as he fell in love with our beloved mother Casimira Claveria at a young age and chose to marry her over foreign education. She passed away from tuberculosis in 1945 when we were nine, with the arrival of U.S. troops under General MacArthur in Dagupan, Lingayen Gulf, as there was still no penicillin during the Japanese occupation.
We tell friends that our grandfather, Guillermo de Venecia, who became mayor of Dagupan, must have had a profound understanding of geopolitics as he sent his children to countries which indeed shaped the course of modern history, the United States, Germany, and Japan during World War II.
Our grandfather groomed Eugenio Perez from the rival city of San Carlos, who later became Speaker of the House, last Speaker of the Commonwealth and first Speaker of the Philippine Republic.
Guillermo de Venecia was our hero who later inspired us to run for congressman and won five times as Speaker with God’s blessings. We owe everything to God and our people.
(This is a reprint of our column dated June 19, 2022).