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.*