September 21, 1972: The Beginning of the Age of Brainwashing

eptember 21, 1972 was a day like any other in my carefree childhood years growing up in a peaceful city like Baguio.

I was in the Grade Two, Section 2 class of Mrs. Esther dela Cruz, our homeroom teacher in Baguio Central School, which was right behind City Hall, just across Kayang Street Extension.

Next to City Hall itself, my school building was the second most imposing edifice that side of town. The huge Justice Hall where it is now wasn’t there yet. That used to be a triangular park with no other feature than grass and several pine trees, the oldest perhaps no more than ten years. They were young trees just planted around a newly-built picnic grove.

The only other significant building nearby was that Masonic Temple across the street—and it looks exactly the same today as it did in 1972.

If you turned to face north, you could see the Officers Club building at Camp Henry T. Allen—which was an exclusive gated housing subdivision for military officers and their families.

I didn’t get the sense that it was only for high-ranking officers. I had a classmate, Emmanuel Mendoza--a "gentle giant" of a kid--who lived in one cottage that faced our school. His father was no higher than a major in the Army but sentries at the gate saluted HIM—the nine-year old son of a major. So I'm guessing the armed forces family was still that small and intimate back then.

The mayor of Baguio was Luis L. Lardizabal—our teachers called him “triple L.” He was the guest speaker at almost every public occasion I could remember—maybe there just weren’t that many causes celebré available back then. And the man, who stood about 5 foot 4 inches—certainly no taller than Danny de Vito whom he also RESEMBLED—was notorious for giving the longest speeches.

We hated it, because we would bake under the morning sun at the school quadrangle during programs, waiting for him to finish delivering his speech standing under the cool shaded school stage.

We were children, for crying out loud—very little ones—couldn’t he have figured out that we didn’t really care to listen to long profound speeches?

He knew this, too, well enough to have fashioned a joke about it—and then he went on telling the SAME joke everywhere he spoke. I must have heard him tell the joke in 10 or 15 speeches, and it goes like this:

“I gave a long speech that bored everybody, except for one man who sat quietly listening throughout my speech until the very end. So as I came off the stage, I approached that man and shook his hand saying, ‘thank you for having the patience to listen to my whole speech. Everybody else thought it was boring and had stood up and left. I really appreciate you staying.’ Then the man replied, ‘I couldn’t leave, I just had to listen up to the very last word.’ I felt very proud and I asked ‘Really? You really felt you had to listen to my whole speech? Why?’ and he said ‘because I’m the one supposed to speak AFTER you!”

With a sick joke like that, which he retold a million times, we can’t understand why our school principal Mrs. Herrin kept inviting him to our school programs—and it just seemed like we had one EVERY month.

1972 was the year of the last Apollo Mission to the moon. It had been 3 years since Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface in 1969, and the moonlanding mania was waning.

Filipinos were refocusing on more earthbound concerns, like when is this weakening of the peso ever gonna stop? It’s trading almost FIVE PESOS TO THE DOLLAR now. If this slide continues, where are we going to get the dollars to pay for our crude oil imports? The 1970s oil crisis was in its early stage.

We were Grade Two. What do we care? We FELT the effects of the weak peso, we just didn’t need to make the connection. Ignorance was bliss.

The jeepney fare was FIVE CENTAVOS to ride in one of those short six-seater Baguio jeeps (not counting the driver and 2 more seated in front).

These were “AC” jeeps--short for “auto-calesa” which is all their design was meant to copy. Three people sat abreast on either side in the back, which featured the largest openside windows—just like a real calesa. When it rained, it was the passengers themselves who took care of unrolling the clear plastic tarps that were hooked on the side of the roof with sleeves that hang down from the sides.

You may find this hard to believe, but those little jeepneys weren’t “small” at all by any measure. Back in the day, those jeeps WAITED for 20 minutes in their loading terminals (“sakayan”) to get full! And that is during rush hour.

In the lull periods in between, there just weren’t that many passengers that many of these AC jeeps had a common “sideline.” They queued by that curbside in front of the City Market building, maybe a little off towards being right across the old Tiong San Bazaar (which was as new and spanking in 1972 as SM is today) to render a unique transportation service called “short trip.”

It was very expensive—you had to pay the equivalent combined fare of the full capacity (8 passengers) plus backload because you paid for BOTH ways coming and going, and a little bit more for the waiting time. So typically, a “short trip” would cost at least two pesos.

In 1972, that’s two large blue-tinted PAPER bills with Jose Rizal’s face on it. That’s right, the one-peso was still “papel” at that time.

It wouldn’t surprise me if—adjusted for inflation over the last 50 years—that might the equivalent of two blue-tinted ONE HUNDRED-peso paper bills with Manuel Roxas’ face on it today.

Taxis were an unaffordable extreme optional luxury—because the flagdown was TWENTY CENTAVOS and the “patak” was TEN CENTAVOS every 500 meters after that. The only good thing about it was that in an emergency, you could ride one without any money on you because when you got home, the taxi driver was always willing to wait while you ran up to your house and got the fare money from your parents.

In the unfortunate instance where you miscalculated and your parents are out, you could ask the taxi driver to come back for it the NEXT day!

That was okay, the taxi driver wouldn’t turn you in YET to the policemen—who wore khaki uniforms and smart-looking Pershing caps, like the ones worn by airline pilots.

I don’t know whose cheap fashion idea it was to replace those elegant “McArthur hats” with baseball caps like those worn by streetcorner thugs and rap music artists on MTV.

In the 1970s of my childhood, policemen were fearsome figures of authority--and not just necessarily because of martial law, either. It’s because they had these fat wooden dowels, called “batuta” that hang from their khaki belts, and they blew these really loud referee’s whistles. (“silbato”) It made this very shrill high-pitched blood-curdling sound that carried such a potent psychological punch that, very often, just the sound of it portending the approach of a batuta-wielding cop was enough to break up many ongoing brawls. Today It would take the sound of a rapid-firing machinegun to achieve the same effect.

So on that uneventful (to us) Thursday, September 21, 1972, right after flag ceremony, we filed into our classroom on the ground floor of the south wing of the Baguio Central School main building.

Something was wrong.

Something different was in the air. Our teachers were outside our room, clumping together in the hallway, nervously talking about something we couldn’t understand.

My Grade Two Section 2 class was not the so-called “star section”—that was the Section 1 “English Section.” I belonged to the second-tier “Pilipino Section” and my teacher Mrs. Dela Cruz made the somber announcement in Tagalog of what would be my first occasion to become aware that this thing called “martial law” had been declared.

But she never used the words “martial law.” I think the memo they got emphasized more on implementing IT, not really making "it" understood.

“O, mga bata, makinig nang mabuti!” she began, “simula ngayon, lahat magpapakabait na ha? Bawal na ang pasawayin, kung hindi, mapapalo. Simula ngayon, ito na ang lagi ninyong tatandaan: SA IKAUUNLAD NG BAYAN, DISIPLINA ANG KAILANGAN.”

The age of systematic brainwashing of the martial law babies' generation--that was US--had begun.*

Baguio shouldn't build skyscrapers

he jolting earthquake on July 27, 2022 is causing residents to revisit concerns about survivability in the nation’s summer capital in the event of another ‘killer quake.’

Specifically, it is reviving the question should Baguio City have high-rise buildings—meaning those that have more than six floors?

This is my opinion: NO.

This is not about simply getting around the Building Code. There is no engineering limitation involved in the question. It is totally possible to construct in Baguio a building as tall as any in Manila, or any other place in the world. The laws of gravity are the same anywhere on Earth. The physical forces that could bring down any structure on a flat surface at sea level are the same as on any flat surface 5,000 feet above it—which is Baguio’s elevation.

Yet, the truth is Baguio is only “mountainous” in postcards now. New technology can prep any construction site in Baguio to look as if it’s in the lowlands. Heavy earthmoving equipment are no respecters of topography these days. Over the last few years I’ve seen entire mountains and hillsides disappear, bulldozed flat as a pancake in just a matter of days. So the only limiting factor remaining is cost. Otherwise, if you can cobble up enough money, you can replicate the Petronas Twin Towers in the nation’s summer capital if you want. Modern engineers will not back away from the challenge.

So we can certainly build high-rises in Baguio. The question is, should we?

Baguio is a “floating city” perched on top of a mountain. In this regard it’s no different from a floating ship in the middle of the ocean. All its stores (that’s a nautical term for “provisions”) are trucked up the mountains, either through unreliable Kennon Road or bottleneck-prone Marcos Highway. Like a marooned vessel, it doesn’t grow its own rice, fruits and vegetables, nor raise its own livestock, or grow its own fish—it produces nothing to eat.

If the main arteries leading up to Baguio are closed down, like they were briefly on July 27, this city could literally starve in no time. Fuel tankers cannot refill the city’s petroleum reserves, estimated to last no more than a week without replenishment. In July 1990, when Baguio was isolated for more than four months, traffic ground to a halt because gasoline was held in reserve to power generators instead of cars circling the city with no place to go.

Back in 1990 Baguio experienced what an economic siege felt like. A growing population competing for shrinking provisions—it was a nightmare. For the first time, planners became aware of the correlation between population and quality of living.

But as often said, God hasn’t stopped making people but He certainly had stopped making LAND. What is happening in Baguio today is the same experience that started happening in Japan at the turn of the last century. Hampered by a small land area, Japan used technology to increase living space nonetheless by expanding vertically.

The math is simple. If all you have is a 200-square meter lot, it can accommodate a modest bungalow with ample living space for, say, a family of 5 or 6. But if you build ten floors above that, you have increased its resident capacity to 50 or 60.

Roam around Baguio today and you will lose count of how many buildings have broken through the 6-floor ceiling (set by local law). The newer “pygmy” condominiums today are at least 12-floors high. Oftentimes, it’s not too obvious because 5 or 6 of those floors are below their street level entrance, with the rest of the other 5 or 6 jutting above.

No matter the configuration though, considering that the minimum “footprint” for a mixed-use commercial building is 800 square meters, the resident capacity figures are staggering. Each floor can hold at least six residential units, because the average condo unit is 120 square meters. That means each floor hosts between 36 to 40 residents—the 10-story building about 400 residents. Get 3 or 4 of these buildings together and you have a small barangay!

So coaxing the direction of Baguio’s development towards high-rise construction is not an issue of geohazard mitigation. It is an issue of failing to mind the impact of raising the resident population WITHOUT the accompanying enhancement of the capacity to feed, clothe, transport, enable communication, etc.

How often have you heard complaints about Baguio’s growing traffic EVEN on weekdays? Of course “even on weekdays” it will be—those motorists gridlocking Baguio’s narrow streets ARE residents. They’re not here on weekend vacays.

The city has just obtained its Amended City Charter (the term “New City Charter” is wrong, that’s just like saying “new birth certificate”). I don’t know if the City Government has sat down and gone to work fine-tuning its Implementing Rules and Regulations but I hope when they do, they would keep in mind a thought well worth contemplating: Development does NOT always have to be about increasing capacity. Sometimes it’s also about recognizing and respecting LIMITS.

It is within the powers of the City Government to impose any cap on constructions, or details of construction within its jurisdiction. But in the past, the City has often surrendered this prerogative to the bullying of NATIONAL agencies—like the Housing Land Use and Regulatory Board (HLURB) that approves housing “development” proposals, often under specifications that are in conflict with local building criteria. The DENR, through its Mines and Geo Sciences division, can point out “no-build” zones in its “Geo Hazard Map” of Baguio and its suburbs. Ironically, most if not all, high-rose constructions in the city right now are right smack in the middle of these “no-build” zones.

The final guard rail, supposedly, is the City’s own engineering Office which grants the ultimate paper needed: a Building Permit. The assumption is that technical reviewers of that office should have considered the entire gamut of laws and ordinances in certifying if a building is totally compliant and deserves to get a go-ahead.

But on days like today, as I drive along Marcos Highway near the entrance to Suello Village, and I see another monstrous new construction shooting skyward, I wonder if we have “building officials” or just plain BULDING (cross-eyed) officials.*

The MURDER of pine trees goes unabated

he practice has NOT stopped. Land developers (there’s another contradiction in terms) wanting to eliminate a big hindrance to their plans are still killing PINE TREES in Baguio City the same effective way they invented: by drilling holes in these trees’ trunks and injecting poison to slowly destroy the trees’ cambium layer. The trees stay green for a few weeks, even months, but the slow irreversible injury eventually—nay, INEVITABLY—dries the trees’ upper branches and needles. The pine tree ultimately dies LONG AFTER their killers have slithered away from the crime scene. And you can’t lift fingerprints off a tree’s rough bark, of course.

No one has ever been punished for killing a pine tree, to say nothing of deliberately decimating a whole stand of pine trees. The culprits have always gotten away with it.

I put the blame squarely on the lap of government prosecutors who refuse to rise to the challenge. Mayor Benjie Magalong filed a criminal complaint against several “John Does” (meaning “suspect unidentified”) at the start of his term, seeking sanction against these “developers.” But government prosecutors DISMISSED the case for “lack of probable cause.”

Technically, they are correct because probable cause looks for a “reasonable ground to engender a well-founded belief that a crime has been committed, and that the person charged probably committed the crime.”

Prosecutors reasoned that they cannot charge a person who has not been identified.

But, like the rest of us lawyers in private practice, you have to keep up with developments in environmental law and climate science. In one case (Oposa v. Factoran, Google it!) the Supreme Court introduced the concept of “intergenerational responsibility” where it said an action to assert environmental protection rights can be filed by persons alive today in behalf of future generations.

If I were a government prosecutor, that would be MY sweet comfort to find probable cause against “John Doe.” So what if the culprit doesn’t have a name, the Supreme Court has hurled the challenge to the legal community, as if to say, "No, no, no--you don't get off the hook that easy. This is the PLANET EARTH we're talking about here! You gotta try harder!"

These unnamed tree killers have violated the rights of BILLIONS, or JILLIONS of Filipinos who are not only unidentified, they couldn’t even be given names yet because they haven’t even been BORN!

So don't let them hide conveniently behind anonymity, indict those bastards. Use every tool in your toolbox.

An intelligent pro-active prosecutor would indict John Doe, the Rules allow that. Then he should present evidence, even just part of the dead tree would be enough. Then several presumptions and doctrinal jurisprudence kick into play.

Qui bono? “Who benefited” from the elimination of the trees? Obviously, the clearing of the land made it suitable for construction, enabling the developer to erect a lucrative commercial structure. How is that NOT benefiting from the killing of the pine trees?

If the developer insists he will NOT benefit from the criminal act, then the government prosecutor must ask the court to seal that commitment by ordering the area cleared of trees to be off limits to construction in perpetuity.

That’s a gutsy move. It is, that’s why it would take a gutsy, intelligent and pro-active prosecutor to do it. He must submit a level-headed ratiocination for it, perhaps (among other ways) by asserting that the area cleared of the pine trees is part of the corpus delicti (body of the crime) which CANNOT be given to the culprit—for that would amount to rewarding the accused with the fruit of his crime. If you carnapped a vehicle and you are convicted for it, do you get to KEEP the car?

Of course not. It is returned to its true owner. WHO are the true owners of an oxygen-producing pine tree, or TREES plural, growing on an erosion-proof block of organic nutrient-holding soil? All future generations, that’s who.

If the developer is unhappy with that kind of Decision, of course he can elevate his appeal all the way to the Supreme Court and ask the en banc to REVERSE the doctrine of “intergenerational responsibility.”

Then the pressure on the government prosecutor is off. The battle of wits versus lame excuse would now be between the TREE KILLERS and the tree-hugging Supreme Court justices.

Kelangan lang iyabot hanggang sa Supreme Court. That is how crucial it is for some government prosecutors to seriously grow a pair.***

Post script: after you're done reading this, take a look at these stomach-cringing pictures taken by my tocayo retired Baguio photojournalist Joel Art "Artibal" Tibaldo (husband of hardworking PIA Director Helen Tibaldo) of some of these tree MURDER victims:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10221692381324295&id=1397806177

We were "toy soldiers" in 1979

experienced Citizens Army Training (CAT) in high school in 1979 in Baguio City High School (BCHS).

I can’t remember if my batchmates and I ever understood that it had anything to do with martial law. We were not very well-informed politically at that age, most of us were 15 years old--we just knew it was the defining experience of being a Senior in high school in those days.

The only cynical reminder (to me, at least) that CAT was part of some complex politically-inspired paramilitary indoctrination culture was the fact we memorized so many trivial things.

For example, we memorized that “our” Commander-in-chief was Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos, our AFP Chief-of-staff was Brigadier General Fabian C. Ver—even though as early as then we already knew the joke that the general actually just used to be the Marcos’ family dri-VER. I mean, the guy had zero military credentials, he probably didn’t even know the difference between a US M1 Garand rifle and a folding umbrella.

We certainly did, because one of the compulsory skills to become a CAT officer was to be able to disassemble this vintage World War II rifle, then put it back together in under a minute and a half.

Many of us did it in a minute-20 seconds or minute-25. Alpha Coy (that’s the abbreviation for “company”) commander Jordan Diagan could do it in 52 seconds. Don’t ask what MY time was, but the fact that I was always the last one to be dismissed in weapons class ought to be a clue.

In hindsight, I should have joined the Medics Corps, instead. These guys never had to stand under the baking sun in field formations like the rest of us. They would just sit around the First Aid Station, which was a large tent on the sidelines, and wait for somebody to collapse from heatstroke. Then they’d run over to the fellow with their army stretcher and “extricate” him from the field.

On the other hand, whether I became an officer or just one of those nameless, faceless “Privates” in the rank-and-file, it did not diminish the expenses my single-parent mother had to spend.

It was substantial, for sure--paying for my “ramie” army fatigue uniform, leather combat “shoeses” (its what WE called them), army regulation green socks, T-shirt, black nylon belt, sword sash, breast plate, beret hat, the list goes on and on.

So I thought I might as well aim to become a “salutable” senior to give my mother the most “bang for the buck” so to speak. As well, me and my classmates helped transform into “nouveau riche” the people who owned the “official supplies” shops—Balderas Tailoring in Kayang Street or Conrado’s Tailoring in Bonifacio street in front of SLU.

Almost the entire focus of our senior year in City High was the preparation for the Annual Tactical Inspection—a yearly competition among different CAT corps units who qualified from all over the Philippines.

In Baguio City, we were the only CAT unit big enough (600-strong, at least) to qualify. Saint Louis University’s Boys and Girls High Schools were too few in number—and their ‘fashionista’ girls refused to wear the olive drab Army pants that our City High girls didn’t mind wearing one bit. So we were just up against Benguet’s Mountain State Agricultutal College (MSAC) High School which had about 200 cadets.

The oddysey of becoming a “commissioned” toy soldier in high school properly began in Junior year, when it was almost obligatory to join “recruitment” to the Cadet Officers Candidates Corps (COCC).

This was a yearlong scrimmage process of selecting who would be the “officers” for the following year’s CAT corps—meaning who would be the corps commander and his staff, the battalion commanders and their staff, the company commanders and the platoon leaders. BCHS Batch 1980 was about 670-strong, so we comprised about four battalions.

Almost every afternoon in the third quarter of the school year we stood in formation at the Athletic Bowl parade ground, locating our individual places in our assigned units based on marker flags staked to the ground.

It’s amazing how to this day, during our class reunions, when we couldn’t quite remember a classmate, our old CAT unit assignments were always an invaluable clue:

“Si Rapisura? Yung adjutant natin noon?”

“Ah, yes! Si Elvie, 3rd battalion commander…”

“Ni Oliver ngay, haan mo malagip? Bravo Company, 2nd platoon…!”

It's also amusing how FORTY YEARS years we still remember which classmates we're supposed to salute!

Regular officers from the Philippine Army were assigned by the AFP to serve as CAT Commandants in big schools like City High. Our commandant was a jolly and decidedly-likeable clown, 2nd Lt. Charito P Caceres--who gave a whole new meaning to the command “Proceed!” but I won’t even try to explain it here—it’s a private joke only Batch 80 City Highers will understand!

There was “hazing” during our last week of COCC training—but NOT the kind that injured anyone of us, except to our pride maybe. Our training officers, who were outgoing seniors, always did their worst to get us to quit right from Day One of the recruitment. Yelling in our faces at the top of their lungs,“Don’t you want to quit now, COC Dizon, huh?? DON’T YOU?? Why don’t you just quit now??!” their sworn mission was to try to cut down our number—we were just too many.

So at the completion of every corporeal punishment (“Get down and give me 50 pushups, soldier!”) they kept yelling out the same question like a broken vinyl record, “Do you want to quit now??”

The “correct” answer, of course, is “Sir, NO, sir!!!” which left them with a huge problem: there are about a hundred of us officer candidates and only around 60 “commissioned officer” positions to fill.

That is what “HELL WEEK” is for—it’s the gingerly-anticipated final initiation rites to “separate the men from the boys” (I forget the counterpart expression for girls!). It’s the last chance for our senior officers to whittle down the field—because the school armory only had 60 swords to award on Recognition Day.

I’m amazed at our senior officers’ creativeness at “hazing.” We were all blinfolded, one of them would fake retching sounds with his throat and you hear him spitting “something” into a cup. Another one says, “open your mouth!” and drops a teaspoon of raw egg yolk in your mouth. Your raw imagination led you to think the worst as you gagged and fought hard not to throw up, “How about it, soldier? Don’t you want to quit now??”

The correct answer, of course, is still “Sirlgh, NO, Sirlgh!!!” It’s only fun to reminisce NOW but at the time it lived up to its billing “HELL WEEK.”

They strung up an inch-and-a-half thick Manila rope from the high wall of the school to one of the pillars of the grandstand--about fifty yards long and 10 or 15 feet high off the ground. We had to "jungle crawl" crossing it, with our heavy wooden rifles slung on our necks. Done properly, you looked like Rambo. But if you forgot to keep your "ballast leg" hanging low enough as you pulled your way along the rope, your center of gravity became too top-heavy and you ended up spinning on the rope where you're now hanging from it on all fours--upside down. Right below us, the Medics, like hungry crocodiles, waited for anyone of us to fall--or to inspect any broken bones. I didn't fall but mostly I remember staring at the sky.

The most unforgettable part of HELL WEEK was making us crawl through the “Holy Hole”—which was an underground culvert about one meter in diameter and ran about 50 feet under the CAT HQ Cottage on the east side of the Athletic Bowl, exiting on a manhole right about the middle of the baseball diamond.

Boys AND girls had to go through it, there was no “soft gender” exemption, whatsoever. If you were either claustrophobic or squeamish, or BOTH, you quit. But NOBODY did!

At the end of HELL WEEK, there were NO QUITTERS. So the school youth development department head Mr. Antonio Gumabol came up with a solution: “We will create new positions to accomodate everybody!” Very AFP!

Whereas before, company commanders stood alone, this time they’d have an “Executive Officer” (Ex-O) and a guidon bearer who would hold a company banner that identified each company from the others.

That meant all of us officer candidates would get our “diamonds and siopaws”—a reference to the gold-embroidered insignias pinned to our collars that consisted of diamonds and circles indicating specific rank. What’s more, the introduction of the “guidon bearers” fired up a new competition among the company units designing their “fighting colors.”

When we did our “pasamasid” (parade-in-review) we looked like medieval gladiators flying the banners of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was an absolutely fascinating sights-and-sounds show, especially given the fact that City High had its own 50-piece full marching band under the baton of Mr. Martin Balangue, the school bandmaster (who drives his 1957 Vauxhall soooo slow you could overtake him on foot!) He didn't actually march with the band himself, more often than not he delegated that duty to one of the best high school band conductresses I've ever seen, Ms. Merriam Abubo.

To this day, I always struggle with getting impressed when I watch PMA cadets do a parade-in-review, or even a Silent Drill exhibition.

Why?

Because WE could do ALL THAT, and more!

We marched all year long.

It’s all we ever did.

For a whole year.

We held fake wooden rifles but we kept faithful count switching from “kanang balikat” (5 counts), “kaliwang balikat” (4 counts), “tanghal” (3 counts), "siyasat" (2 counts and a head nod), “agap” (one hard slap) all the way to “baba” (2 counts).

One kid doing it didn’t sound or look too amazing. But when all 670 of us did it en masse in total precision at Melvin Jones parade grounds, it totally melted our parents watching in pride! And THAT many kids slapping those wooden rifles at the same time SOUNDED like the way PMA does it, totally.

Our MP Company became our “pambato” when it came to Silent Marching Drills. I don’t know how they did it (they had their own “secret training”) but those guys and gals could march any letter of the alphabet into a formation on the ground. This meant they could form any 8-letter word on the ground. Why 8? The company only had two platoons, with 4 squads each and it takes one squad to form a letter—except “Q”. For some reason they hated “Q!”

One of our last class projects before we left City High upon graduation was raising money to buy 800 “Class A” fake rifles for use by the batch that came after us. These were still made of wood, but they had a simple mechanism that could mimic the sound of opening and closing the sliding bolt of a real M-14 rifle (not quite the AR-15 or mock M-16, which apparently were more expensive) and it had a real “clickable” trigger. These could not fire real bullets, of course, not even blank ones. Producing authentic-sounding rifle noises is all they could do.

We never got to use them too much ourselves, because we had graduated by the time these were delivered. But our hearts swelled with pride watching Batch 1981 duplicate our “Manual of Arms” routine on the field with all those authentic sounds the next year.

After CAT was discontinued in 2004, we have no idea what became of those shiny new impressive looking fake rifles.

Oh, what I’d give to OWN one of those FAKE rifles as a souvenir of our happy high school days being REAL toy soldiers.***

POST-SCRIPT: I made it to “CADET Lt. Col. Joel Dizon, Corps S2 (Intelligence Officer)”! 

The project was patience, not an ash tray

ike many sentimental fools out there, I’m biased (and proud) to say there must be something worthy and noble about the old basic education curriculum.

Back in the day, we only went up to Grade Six. The first half of that six-year elementary program (Grades 1 to 3) was called “primary education” while the second half (Grades 4 to 6) was called “intermediate instruction.” That’s why when you graduated from elementary, you progressed on to SECONDARY education—meaning HIGH SCHOOL.

You could never be confused because even your educational supplies went along with that distinction. In “primary school” you wrote on “pad paper” that was HALF the size of a full “intermediate pad paper.” From Grades 1 to 3, it was assumed that your cursive writing was not yet that developed, so the “primary pad” paper sheets were ruled in alternate black and blue lines. That way, you had visual aid in keeping the height of your “small cursive” between a black and a blue line, while your “capital letters” must touch two black lines.

Then when you progressed to using “full intermediate pad”, the blue lines disappeared. But you became conscious that you would always tend to spill your writing off the right edge of the paper and couldn’t be consistent with starting your next line directly below the line above it for a neat look. So to help you along “margin lines” were added on BOTH edges of the pad paper: black on the left side, red on the right side. This meant you could not write on the sheet upside down!

From Grades 1 to 2, it was really all just the “3 R’s”—reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic (obviously, THAT’S also the root of bad spelling). The “rithmetic” was rudimentary, of course—just adding 1 to every number. So 1+1=2, then you go 2+1=3, followed by 3+1=4 and so on.

You learned to tackle “two digits” in Grade 2. Grade 3 is when you really discovered that the Arabic numeral system is infinite going positively higher (you didn’t learn until high school that “integers” went infinitely BOTH ways, positive and negative).

In Grade 5, we learned that the way we normally count is in “Base 10” meaning the digits go from 0 to 9—there is really no “ten” as such, it’s really “1 of the tens column, and ‘0’ in the ‘ones’ column.” That’s counting in “Base 10.”

Although I could think of no practical purpose for it, we learned how to write down (or as Mrs. Leonora C. Adalim, my Grade 5 classroom adviser would say) to “represent the value” of any number in Base 3, Base 4, Base 5, Base 6, and so on up to Base 9. Why was there no Base 2? Because that would be the “binary system” where the only valid digits are “1” and “0” it becomes too unwieldy and too abstract for our eleven year-old brains to tackle. Later on, of course, the digits “1” and “0” would conveniently correspond to the “ON” and “OFF” state that would become the basis of the computer machine language. But in the 70s we know none of that.

By the time you reach Grade 4, you now had to MEMORIZE the Multiplication Table, which was printed on the back cover of every notebook you could buy. That’s why during tests, the first thing Mrs. Elsie P. Gutierrez, my Grade 4 classroom adviser, would do is tell everybody to bring their notebooks and deposit them up in front of the classroom. No fair peeking at those multiplication tables!

I had classmates who were of Chinese descent—guys like Lee Ignacio, Warren Lee Abad, Napoleon Lechoco—I hated those guys! They knew how to do math calculations using nothing but their fingers and knuckles! I, on the other hand, had to struggle with long division and three-digit multiplication, mouthing crap like “carry one,” “borrow one” or “cannot be” etc. until I stumbled on the right answer. These disgusting Chinese mestizos aced the math tests every single time, submitting their papers a half hour before time is up. I always only barely made it to “finished or not finished, pass your paper.”

Grade 5 was more like MY wheelhouse. The subject “Music and Arts” was added. We left the regime of just coloring inside the lines to understanding the colorwheel. The primary colors were red, blue and yellow—which looked like the Mercedes Benz logo. Between the red and blue stripes lay violet; between blue and yellow lay green and between red and yellow lay orange. It was easy to guess from there that between red and orange lay “red-orange” or between blue and violet lay “blue-violet” and so on.

More importantly, I found out that if you take any color and pair it with the color OPPOSITE it on the colorwheel—they were called “complementary colors” and of, course, if you take ANY number of colors as long as they lay right beside each other on the colorwheel—those guys were called “analogous colors.”

In Music in the 70s in Baguio Central School, we learned how to READ NOTES! And I mean sheet music. We had some of the best music teachers on the planet and although I’m sure there must have been more in that school, I only knew the names of two: Mrs. Anita C. Peña and Mrs. Thelma S. Ferrer. Mrs. Peña taught us how to sing—headtones, nasal tones, falsetto and the one she preferred best: diaphragm tones. She taught the girls how to reach those high B’s and B-sharps on the third octave with “whistle tones”—the way Mariah Carey--and, locally, Nina—would sing them.

Mrs. Ferrer was a consummate piano teacher who patiently tried to make us understand the “circle of fifths”—but few of us, if any, could quite “get” it. But, at least, we learned about key signatures and how to transpose from one key signature to another. To this day, many “Centralers” like me playing the guitar can go up and down the scale even without using a capo.

Our “Music and Arts” subject, which was in the morning, dovetailed nicely with our Practical Arts in the afternoon. Our teacher was Mr. Pulmano who introduced us to crafts like woodcarving and simple metalworks. No, we did not weld metal—mostly we just cut, folded and pounded thin salvaged aluminum or steel sheets on hollowed out wooden molds to turn them into dustpans and soup laddles—but with an element of art.

There were other "projects" of course. He sent us off to this chalk cliffside site in front of Baguio City High School (behind where the DOT buildings are sitting now, which weren’t there yet in the 70s). There we would pick off small blocks of limestone each—all 25 or so of us BCS Grade 6 boys—and run back to Central.

In the school industrial shop, we would fight to take turns over ten table vises were we would clamp on these limestone blocks and start whittling them down to an ashtray.

There were no “limestone carving tools”—we had to make them ourselves. Mr. Pulmano gave each boy a six-inch nail, we cut off the pointy end of it with a hacksaw and pounded it endlessly on the anvil to form a half-inch wide chisel. We took turns on the hand-cranked grinding wheel (that’s why a “best friend” in elementary school is obligatory, you could never finish a project working by yourself). Your best friend cranked the grindstone while you machined your chisel into a sharp flat edge. You ended up with a one-of-a-kind metal chisel made of US-grade wrought iron, we personalized our chisels by fashioning wooden handles out of sawn-off pieces of dilapidated school desks. No two chiels were the same, you couldn’t BUY one of those things from any hardware store!

But having a metal chisel as sturdy as that wasn’t necessarily meant to enable you to work faster—a lesson I learned the embarassing way. You were supposed to use the chisel BAREHAND and scrape off a little bit of limestone at a time from the center of the block, until it “bowled” enough to look like an ash tray. If the limestone fought back, you would coax the chisel gently along by tapping it with your soft flesh-padded palm. Then you used a 40-grit sandpaper rolled into a small dowel to grind a cigarette rest on the lip of the bowl. Done CORRECTLY it took about a week to finish an ashtray.

I would have none of that. What the heck, I thought, I had the sturdiest chisel that could cut marble, why be so gentle with this bloody little piece of limestone? So I took a mallet and aimed at the center of the block with my hardened chisel and took a whack at it. You should have heard my classmates burst out laughing when my limestone block shattered in a million pieces with a sickening cracking noise.

“What did you do??” Mr. Pulmano demanded to know as his hulk loomed over my shoulder.

“I thought it would be faster if I just gouged a big hole in the middle first then enlarge it later, so I whacked it hard," I answered sheepishly.

"It's limestone, nakkong," he said, "don't let the 'stone' part fool you, it's still made of lime and sand. It's very brittle, that's why I told you boys to whittle it away bit by bit. You have to do it slowly."

"I'm sorry, sir, I didn't realize how brittle this thing was," I squeaked.

I could sense Mr. Pulmano’s deep disappointment with me. But he didn’t get mad at me, or anything. He just shook his head gently, and said, “You’re missing whole the point of this project, Joel."

He handed me a spare piece of limestone block that he had lying around, then softly said something I'll never forget--"I wasn't trying to teach you how to make an ash tray. I was trying to teach you PATIENCE.”

It was all I could do to keep from crying when this gentle old man said that.

I think we not only miss a good old basic traditional curriculum these days. We miss good old basic traditional teachers like Mr. Pulmano, Mrs. Ferrer, Mrs. Pena, Mrs. Adalim and Mrs. Gutierrez.*

Baguio Central School Spaceship Designers Circa 1973

e was one of my best friends in Grade 3 at Baguio Central School.

It was the year 1973, we were about 9 or 10 years old and we both belonged to Section 1 under homeroom adviser Miss Basilisa O. Pena. Ours was the “English Star Section”—back in the day, the school principal put all the “good pupils” together in one section. It was the showcase classroom, the one always exhibited to DepEd inspectors who would periodically inspect public schools to monitor how the “Bagong Lipunan” curriculum was being implemented. It had just been a year since martial law was declared in 1972. But, of course, as 9 or 10-year olders we simply didn’t care.

After we graduated in 1976, I never heard from Frederick del Prado again. Until the day before the elections last May 8, 2022, when he sent me a personal message on my Facebook, “How are you, ‘bro?”

“Freddie! I’m good! My God, how long has it been? How are you?” I eagerly PM’ed him back and instantly he and I were launched into this virtual time machine that turned back the clock forty-nine years.

It appears he had come up to Baguio just to vote. I found that so sweet—that although he had spent the better part of the last 40 years being based in Manila, he never gave up his voter registration in Baguio. To Freddie, once a Baguio boy, FOREVER a Baguio boy.

“I miss your mom, Evelyn,” I said, “I cannot count how many relishing ‘recess’ time meriendas she fed me at your house in Palma Street!”

I decided to challenge Freddie’s memory. What the heck—what’s a little fun every now and then? I sometimes amaze my friends from 40-50 years ago by dropping all these memory trivias none of them would probably remember anymore had I not reminded them. I don’t even know how I remember these things myself, I just do.

Freddie’s mom, Evelyn, used to work in the collection division of BENECO back when it was still headquartered at the old Officers Club building in Camp Henry T. Allen a stone’s throw away from our school. Their house in Palma Street was also just behind the school.

Around 10:00 each morning on school days, the bell would ring announcing (as the classic joke goes) our FAVORITE SUBJECT—recess!

Instead of jostling our way through the congested school canteen/cafeteria, Freddie and I would quickly dash over to their house and raid their refrigerator. His mom, without fail, would have always left something for us to snack on: fried banana slices, sometimes in sweet syrup, or sometimes just the peel-and-eat kind. Or a note written on a small piece of paper magneted to the fridge door, “boys, heat up the arroz caldo in the small sauce pan.”

Freddie and I quickly set off on an automatic “division of labor” routine: he would fire up the stove to heat the arroz caldo, while I went to their living room to set up the “Snakes-and-Ladders” gameboard.

While waiting for Freddie and the arroz caldo, I’d pick up one of his Viewmatic toys. It’s one of those binocular-looking things where you insert a disk containing colored slides of Walt Disney cartoon scenes. You viewed the “storyboard” of classic Walt Disney themes like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Dumbo, the Flying Elephant by clicking through the slides frames.

Shortly after, Freddie would emerge from the kitchen with two bowls of piping hot arroz caldo, which we ate as we took turns throwing around the game dice. We could complete about three rounds of the board game (and two servings of the arroz caldo) before we needed to run back to school in time to catch the last subject of the morning, called “GMRC”—short for “Good Manners and Right Conduct.”

“If it’s any curious thing to you, Freddie, I’m one of the lawyers of BENECO now!” I said, which amused him a lot, “Wow, BENECO, yes. Mommy retired from there years ago.”

Well, so far he remembers everything—the merienda, the Snakes-and-Ladders, the recess time. So I decided to push for the big memory test. “Sooo…” I started keying my text message furiously, “if you didn’t end up with Juliet Monteclaro, who was Miss Valentine 1973 to your Mr. Valentine, who did you end up marrying?”

“Wow, Joel! The name recall! Suddenly, people’s names and faces are popping up!” he texted back, “No, I married someone from Marikina. Three kids.” Then suddenly he turned the tables round and began to test MY memory!

“You know, we need to meet up sometime. We better get to work on that submarine project…”

I panicked. Submarine project? What submarine project?

Then he followed up his own text, “We lost Roy Rivera in the mid 80’s but I ran into Jaime Ocampo one time, he’s in the US Navy…”

Thank God he mentioned all of that! Now, it’s all coming back to me. The “submarine project”—of course!

“Well, I have to work on a few more details in the command module, otherwise tataob tayo sa starship nina Reve Velunta!” I texted back.

Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve lost YOU. Let me explain. Back in the day (1973) the futuristic series Star Trek was all the rage. Every boy (and girl? hmm…I’m not so sure) knew about the adventures of Captain Kurt, Dr. Spock and Scotty—the main crew of the Starship Enterprise. When kids of today talk about the Avengers and other Marvel adventures following them on YouTube or playing them as computer games I’ll have you know that during OUR time (when there were no consumer-grade computers of any kind, whatsoever) we chased those same dreamlike pursuits just using our imaginations, a pen and piece of paper.

So we, the Baguio Central School Grade 3 section1 boys—we formed “spaceship crews” of between 3 or 4 guys. In each group, the boy who could draw the best was the crew leader. His duty was to sketch up a “plan” for a unique space battleship—the other boys peppered him with out-of-this-world suggestions.

I was the crew leader for the Spaceship we named “Gentle-B” (for the life of me, I can’t remember the reason behind that name!). So I drew, on several sheets of white coupon bond with a faint watermark on it that said “FOR OFFICIAL USE” and a BENECO logo—so you can just imagine where Freddie and I got them! I drew several schematics for the ‘Gentle B’s” command module, battle stations, crew’s quarters—the works. It was like a precursor to the International Space Station—except Freddie wanted a “laser blaster” on the port wing, and a “tele-transporter beam” on the stern. Another of our “crew” Roy Rivera—God bless his soul in heaven—demanded that I equip the thing with “crawler tracks” just in case we landed on a rocky planet in an emergency.

Other boys forming other crews made competing designs. The group of Reeve Velunta (that guy could draw like Walt Disney himself, made me disgustingly jealous!) they named their Starship “Space Hurricane” and it looked seriously badass! It was bristling with “thermal rockets,” and “super pulsators” whetever the hell that was.

Then after school we would gather in the playground, under pine tree shades (Yes! There were plenty of TREES in Baguio Central School in the 70s, believe it or not). We would show each other’s designs, and begin to brag about ours, criticize the others, and take turns extolling the technical virtues of our respective “spaceships.”

Like if I said, “Our Gentle B has tracked crawlers we could move around on a rocky planet if we landed on an emergency!” but Reeve’s group would counter by saying, “Our Space Hurricane can HOVER, so we don’t need to even touch that planet’s soil, who knows what alien bacteria there might be!”

The group of Jaime Ocampo would come up and say, “Well if any of you morons get sick out there in space, feel free to dock on our ship cause we have a fully-equiped space medical clinic!”

It was all fun, great yabangan, even greater kantiyawan—but surreptitiously, we would actually take note of the design features of the OTHER ships. Then we repaired back to our space headquarters and reworked the design of our ship. So the next time we met up, not only can our “Gentle B” hover already too, it can even scoop planetary dust now and turn it into food! Only our imagination is the limit.

It was fun reminiscing these things with Freddie, and he asked me something he DID forget, “I remember we agreed that we would meet again sometime in the future and we would go to work actually building ‘Gentle B‘ I forget now what date it was..!”

“It’s way past, Freddie,” I texted back, “we said it would be in the year 2000 cause in 1973 that sounded like 2000? Really? Would be we even REACH that year?? Yun pala ganun lang kabilis hehehe!”

“Oo nga! 2000 nga pala. It’s 22 years past the deadline na pala hahaha!”

I couldn’t help getting a little bit misty-eyed. Those were our elementary “golden age.” And there was absolutely no politics in it at all. We said our goodbyes and vowed to meet up and have coffee…SOMETIME after we have voted.* 

Sometimes the best improvement is none

n 42 years as a journalist and newspaper editor, I have lost count of how many “public consultations” I have covered, all in the name of contributing my “two cents worth” of opinion about this public works project and that. I swore never to attend another one. Let me explain why.

I voiced my objection to a “beautification project” at the Military Circle, at the junction of Upper Session Road, South Drive and Loakan Road near the old main gate of Camp John Hay, back in 1981.

The design was for a modern sculpture featuring the American and Philippine flags in a copulating “embrace” of some kind to symbolize RP-US relationship. Apart from being cheesy and corny, I thought cement did not come in multiple colors. They would have to paint on the two flags’ colors. Given our propensity for forgetting the maintenance of any facility as soon as the inaugural fever has subsided, I knew that in a matter of time all those bright reds, whites, blues and yellows would fade, chip off or be consumed by lichens, moss or some other fungi. Then you’d end up with this unsightly formless gob of grey-black concrete resembling an upended turd. I was right.

I again objected to a similar “beautification” project, this time at the now-gone traffic island that used to stand at the junction of Governor Pack Road, Harrison Road and UP Drive, right off the Baguio-Benguet Museum, this time in 1982. It was for another outdoor sculpture—no Henry Moore, however—but a disproportional depiction of a native “kayabang”—that head-borne vegetable basket used by Cordilleran women to carry upland farm produce. Hey, don’t call me sexist, because I have NEVER seen a man with a kayabang on his head.

We in media (specifically Gold Ore) called it the “vegetable island” not because the kayabang brimmed over with limp crucifer leaves--pechay, wombok and a few eggplants dangling to one side--but because, like the expression “being a vegetable,” it was totally useless. Discounting its aesthetics, or lack of it, all it did was cause several traffic accidents at that junction among distracted motorists. I suppose drivers couldn’t handle the multi-tasking involved in hating the design so much and minding their driving at the same time. Besides, eggplant is NOT a highland vegetable and I have yet to see a kayabang full of it. I found this pretentiousness of some Manila-bred architect trying too hard to suck up to Igorot culture by misrepresenting its iconic symbols even more offensive than flattering.

Then there’s all these funeral crypt-looking “clean restrooms”—there’s one right off Lake Drive and Abad Santos drive fronting the BWD booster pump, beside the Peppot Ilagan Media Camp picnic grounds. There’s another one at the far corner of the horse briddle path in Wright Park, and one at the Post office Loop island park on Fr. Carlu Street opposite the old Patria building (now Porta Vaga). The last one, I think, has been repurposed as the headquarters of the BB-PICAG but it, too, was a restroom at some point.

Because of its massive and hideous mausoleum-like design, we called it “masilyas”—a contraction of mausoleum and kasilyas (toilet).

There there’s the uniform design element of all flyovers, welcome arches, government building facades and similar structures all over Baguio City. It seems the architects insisted on turning all structural beams, columns, and boards into fake pine logs. These are not living room fixtures, mind you, they are TRAFFIC CONTROL structures. In other countries, these would be painted bright international hazard yellow so that motorists could see them and AVOID COLLISIONS with them. But for some reason, we insist on camouflaging these heavy concrete barriers to make them look like harmless, flexible and maybe even lifesaving impact-absorbing soft wood. I keep wondering how many hapless drivers who have lost their brakes actually aimed for these things, thinking, “Aha! Wood! Here is where I ram my car on purpose and get a better chance of surviving!”

You see, I voiced all these objections at “public consultations” then called for by the Marcos-era Philippine Tourism Authority (PTA). Everything I said at those consultation meetings literally went in one ear and out the other. The reason, which is fairly obvious, is that the meetings were NOT meant to be an occasion for people to affect the design of these projects. They were meant to be forums for their designers to extol the virtue of their own designs before a captive audience. The sad reality is that these projects have big-ticket budgets and once you get some project implementors convinced they can get their hands on that money, there is NO WAY you can make them let go.

Secondly, all the proceedings of these consultation meetings never see the light of day again. They really never become “public.” They are recorded in private minutes and turned over to the p-r people to help them tailor an appropriate response to future criticism.

I was always amazed at how the PTA could parry subsequent criticisms, pivoting off some points I remember I said at their public consultation sessions. It left me feeling "used" in a sense because now I couldn't criticize the same thing as much without arguing with myself. Don't look now but by offering myself as the "virus" the PTA was able to develop "antibodies" that blunted all further valid dissent. In effect, I have unwittingly volunteered my imprimatur to the very project I was opposing.

So now I would rather write a comprehensive expository and publish them myself on social media. This way I can directly affect public sentiment about a project. People reacting to my articles generate more public opinion than there can be people you can jam into a small conference room. Best of all, no one can "contain" my points or repurpose them for their own opposing agenda.

If you sense a high level of cynicism in this, you are very discerning.

I have been invited to attend another public consultation--this time on the Session Road Uglification Project. No, thank you--if I went, there’s a good chance they might have to drag me out of the room. Not for misbehaving, or being unruly, or anything like that but simply because I would be in the wrong place.

The consultation session would have been convened so that CHANGES can be made to the DETAILS OF THE PROJECT—but not to wage a referendum on whether the project should even push through at all.

You see, my position on the Session Road Uglification Project is simple: DROP THE WHOLE THING.

I feel as if my wife was asking me, “Should I cut my hair, color it, buy a more expensive lipstick, mascara, eyeliner, etc? What do you think?”

I would tell her, “Honey, don’t mess with perfection. Don’t do a goddamn thing. I find you the most beautiful just the way you are!”

I have also lost count of how many pictures of the old Baguio I have seen and thought, “I wish we could go back to making Baguio look like THAT again!”

If you hate the way Session Road looks like today, imagine comparing that with what it would horribly look like ten, fifteen years from now—let alone fifty.”

To quote my mayor Benjie Magalong, "If it ain't broke, dont fix it." No matter how many times you try to improve it, the best shape for a wheel is still ROUND.

Drop it. Just drop it, please.*