My classmates and I from Baguio City High School (BCHS) would save up our daily allowance—don’t laugh now but back in 1979 you’d be a rich kid if you got FIVE PESOS a day pocket money from your thrifty parents—so we would have P25 pesos jingling in our pockets by Friday.
Even the school faculty jokingly called the last day of the week as “Fly-day” and they would dismiss our afternoon class sessions at 3pm, instead of 4:30.
Occasionally—and we loved them the universe for it—our teachers wouldn’t even meet us on Friday afternoons. Instead, they also scheduled their weekly “faculty meetings” on Friday afternoon—and those meetings were notoriously short.
As soon as they adjourned, these hardworking teachers too would scatter to the four winds. There would be no point in going back to the classroom anymore because we their students had long vanished.
Everybody looked forward to “Fly-day” to pay homage to that ancient adage “all work and no play makes Jane a dull girl.”
Before you scream “gender insensitivity!” understand that the expression expresses (that IS redadundant!) a factoid that only girls have the potential to BECOME dull. For them, it’s a transformation. For us boys, it’s a continuing condition, a congenital permanent trait. What normal boy did not act silly in high school, pray tell?
So Fridays for our generation was a blending of the genders—nice girls from Monday to Thursday morph into bad girls on Fridays, join the boys just being themselves and hie off to Camp John Hay to celebrate a shared juvenile decadence.
“Fly-day” is reserved for SERIOUS “bulakbol”—a weekly enjoyment of unbridled freedom, mindless truancy and juvenile mischief. It was a youthful joyous celebration of LIFE!
Not just any kind of life—but life in the fast lane. And you can’t get any faster (without a car) than strapping on a pair of rollerskates.
Today Camp John Hay “Building No. 215” is no longer there, but it used to stand on top of the hill just off the fork of Sheridan Drive and Mile-Hi road, across a small traffic island—which is still there. It’s that little planter box with three pine trees growing in it near the main guardhouse on the driveway leading to the present-day Main Club.
Actually, Building No. 215 was not even properly a skating rink. It was an indoor regulation-size basketball court on the second floor, with a weightlifting-and-body-building gym on the ground floor.
There was ONE vending machine in the building that dispensed chocolate bars and soda in cans—a novelty at the time because soda IN CANS did not exist anywhere else in Baguio, back in the day! We locals came to grief with soda BOTTLES—only bottles (which have since been phased out).
There was no skating in the mornings because American G.I.s on “R-and-R” who preferred shooting hoops to hitting golf balls used the basketball court in the mornings to play “pick up” games among themselves.
This suited us just fine, because we still had classes in the mornings. But as soon as the school bell rang to signal lunch, we were off to Camp John Hay—which was a mere 15-minute walk from City High on a brisk pace.
We also made sure our lunch on Fridays consisted of sandwiches (not the “rich kind” but pandesal with Star margarine that you sprinkled a little sugar on) so we could eat while walking at the same time.
Sometimes we got to Camp John Hay so fast we were EARLY--there would still be the tail end of a pickup game happening in the hardcourt. Not for long though because we subtly heckled the players to wrap up their game. When the referee blew the final whistle, we rushed up the narrowish stairways leading up to the second floor where the “pro shop” was.
In fairness, the American base officials probably “get it”—that high schoolers in Baguio embrace the decidedly American skating culture, but didn’t have enough American dollars. So the skating rink was one of the few base facilities that accepted payment of rental fees in pesos.
It was fairly affordable to rent a pair of boot-type rollerskates at twelve pesos for NINETY minutes—not one hour. They gave us some allowance for trying on several pairs of rollerskates to test for fit, comfort and “cool looks.”
You cannot rent skates if you’re not wearing socks. And you cannot step onto the skating rink until you laced up properly, meaning you threaded that shoelace (which was a sturdy indestructible paracord, probably recycled from discarded US Army parachutes) through all 18 holes and tucked the lace ends in the side of your boots. You didn’t want to run over your own laces, or somebody else’s, and spool it into your axles.
Somebody at the entrance to the rink floor checked everything and made sure you did everything right because a huge sign by the bleachers declared the stern policy : “Think Safety At All Times. No Horseplaying Allowed.”
The irony about this strictness for safety is that we were not made to wear skating helmets. If you crashed, your skull made acquaintance with the hard parquet floor in a jarring introduction that made you wonder if the colorful stars you see are coming from the solitary disco light ball hanging on the ceiling.
That basketball court’s quick conversion into a skating dance hall in the afternoons was amazing. First off, Camp John Hay had the best sound system. They played songs from Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40” and when we were seniors in high school the hottest ticket in cinemas was “Xanadu.” So we skated all afternoon to that movie’s soundtrack, lots of danceable songs from Olivia Newton John and Donna Summer.
The skating rink’s sound system featured wonderful bass woofers that put out a low booming rhythm, a constant thump-thump-thump that masked the sound of our constant thud-thud-thud as we fell and crashed on our rollerskates all over that rink.
You never stopped dancing even when you’re sprawled on the floor though—actually gyrating in pain but keeping time with the music—and I think THAT is how “breakdancing” must have been invented.
Nobody took skating lessons, and nobody gave them. After lashing those rollerskates on to your feet in the pro shop, you walked a few meters to the rink entrance on deep cut-pile carpet where those eight little wheels on you feet didn’t roll so well. That made your awkward duck walk quite manageable and you really thought, “I’m skating! I’m skating! I’m doing it!”
But as soon as you stepped on the smooth surface of the skating rink, you instantly discovered how utterly frictionless those tiny wheels’ rollerbearings really are. Youthful memory is selective, it doesn’t record everything and now at 60 I don’t even remember how painful it was to fall a million times.
But really all there was to it was that pride, envy and chivalry are the best skating instructors. You can’t afford NOT to be gliding soon on those wheels if your friends Carlo, Renato, Alan and Albert are doing it. Not while your blushing crushes Elvie, Melissa, Vilma, Ollyn and the rest of the bad girls are watching!
There’s a trick to it though, one that hit two birds in one stone, in a manner of speaking. You skated up to pretty Nordeliza and told her, “Here, let me TEACH you how to skate!”
Yes, the nerve.
You get to hold her hands, both of them in fact, and other parts of her anatomy on occasion (that’s bird number one) and you’re really using her as a brace to keep your own balance. So she was actually helping YOU learn how to skate. The best part is when you crashed together, you still get to blame HER. It was all the girl could do to apologize for her clumsiness as a "student" and to reward your patience and heroism as her "teacher," you might get a sultry peck on the cheek. Bird number two!
By the time we were about to graduate, all of us could skate BACKWARDS. I could even jump and spin a turn and a half in midair—but never stick the landing, so I made jumping my last routine. That way as I picked my bruised ego off the floor I could mumble, “that’s all the skating for today, guys, I’m so tired I can’t even land a SIMPLE twist-and-a-half anymore!”
Carlo, Renato, Alan and Albert all picked themselves up from their own wrecks and agreed loudly, “Me, too! Let’s go home!”
And THAT is how the real “Me, Too Movement” got started.
I think.*
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