I thought, “Could anything be more ABSURD than THAT?”
They have demolished practically ALL BUILDINGS in Camp John Hay that held any historical value, what “historical core” are they talking about?
Let’s go through some of those buildings that once TRULY existed in Camp John Hay’s history, and see how many of them you can remember.
NINETEENTH TEE. This was a simple cafeteria with a wraparound verandah facing the 18th fairway at the top of the hill where the Forest Lodge is today.
It’s just a small two-storey building—well, technically it’s just one-storey because its upper floor is level with the road at the back of it which connected to the Main Club 500 meters away.
The floor beneath the road level housed a golf pro shop, with its “Wall of Fame” featuring small brass plates nailed to a particle board, engraved with the names of golfers who have scored a “hole-in-one” in any of Camp John Hay’s 18 holes. The shop also served as a display room for club trophies won by some local golf teams.
It’s also where you rented a “driver” (a golf club which hits the farthest, usually a “1-wood”) and a largish wire-basket of golf balls. You carried these to the driving range across the street where you whacked them downrange off Ordonio Drive, hooking and slicing all afternoon to your heart’s content.
The one thing I liked the most from this cafeteria was their “bowl of chili.” It became such a popular entreé that once every summer, Camp John Hay even held the Annual John Hay Chili Cook-off—drawing some of Baguio’s best undiscovered chefs pitting against each other’s “top secret” chili recipé.
MILE-HI RECREATION CENTER. For a while, the John Hay Management Corporation also tried to do their own bit of historical revisionism.
They renamed the old Base Main Headquarters as “Mile-Hi” but no one who is from Baguio believed them. They must have felt how badly it stung to be the laughingstock of Baguio residents, so they later renamed it “Camp Nike” but not after also unsuccessfully trying “John Hay Commissary”—acceptance of either name was a total flop.
You don’t switch names of places around just like that and think you can “rewrite” Camp John Hay’s history. Even today, only new Members think of the present-day “Main Club” as its faithful namesake, because REAL Baguio people know it’s sitting on the site of the OLD Mile-Hi.
The old, true Main Club is where The Manor now sits. The now-derelict Main Headquarter building that used to house the spankiest administration office in Baguio is an abandoned wagwag and ukay-ukay place, fronted by the only kind of “development” we are experts at: a food "tiangge" housed in a row of rickety tents elbowing at one another for space.
It’s a far cry from the OLD and REAL Mile-Hi (in its original site) which, from the 60s up to the early 80s, was a showcase of what a real “State-side” games arcade was supposed to look like, gathering several Western-style recreation facilities under one roof.
It featured 6 lanes of competition-grade Tenpin bowling alleys—when the only two other bowling alleys in downtown Baguio (Olympian Bowling Lanes and Strike-and-Spare, both in Upper Mabini street) only offered “duckpin” balls.
Back in the day, Mile-Hi was the only one that had an automated pin-setting machine designed by Brunswick. It swept the pins clear after each frame, or after each strike, eliminating the need for a human pinsetter.
The mechanism also retrieved your bowling ball and sent it back up the alley to you, through a pneumatic delivery tube that ran underneath the floor and spat the ball out in front of the player.
So, unlike in duckpin bowling which sent back six smaller balls to a waiting rack, the Brunswick machine allowed you to keep using the same ball for every shot.
In fact, the really serious players often owned and showed up with their own personalized bowling ball, with its three grab holes custom-drilled and spaced to conform to the dimensions of their bowling hand.
Even just standing around watching, I could never forget the muffled cracking sound of falling pins, and the low humming noise of that Brunswick machine in action.
As a little boy, I was so fascinated by that mechanism, I swear I could watch it all day.
There were also four tournament-size billiard tables with the best Aramith balls and several “house cue sticks” and “bridges” you can rent from the front desk.
Again the really serious players often showed up with their own custom-made two-piece cue sticks and played for discreet wagers.
But the true iconic thing about Mile-Hi was its lineup of pinball machines and authentic Vegas-style slot machines.
Tragically (for me and my poor boy peers), they only accepted REAL US coins, not tokens.
The slot machines only accepted quarters, which we rarely had more than two or three of—to say nothing of a cupful of them which is how much you needed if you really had to play for real stakes.
The idea, of course, was if you could punch just the right combination of buttons and pull that side lever with just the right amount of torque—those three fruit symbols on the spinning dials lined up together, showing 3 fruits of the same kind and—voila!—your cup runneth over! With REAL quarters!
A cupful of quarters, after you exchanged them for legal tender, could fetch up to ten dollars which, back in the 70s, would be about the equivalent of P5,000 pesos today.
It was a total thrilling experience of colorful lights and a cacophony of technomusic themes that filled the air with excitement.
Local “funhouses” like the one on the corner of Carantes Street beside Bob’s Dry Goods (now Tiong San Harrison) tried to mimic that atmosphere, and famously succeeded in turning many schoolboys like me into young delinquent class-cutting truants.
But it could never recreate that “Stateside” feel of Mile-Hi.
For all the energy you spent playing these machines, Mile-Hi’s cafeteria offered a quick and hearty “recharge” with humongous all-beef Big Boy burgers (I wonder if that’s where my friend JB Balinong got the idea for naming his burger joint near SLU’s Gate 3?), and Baguio’s first taste of the giant Slurpee before there was even the first 7-11 here.
Mile-Hi was such a total package that I suspect when people talk about Camp John Hay being the “crown jewel” of tourism entertainment, they’re probably thinking of Mile-Hi.
No wonder the promotional bumper stickers that the American base administrators had printed plenty of, and would give away to people, said simply: “I’d rather be on my way to Camp John Hay.”*
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