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.*
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