The bold vision of Benjamin Salvosa

The first college established in Baguio City was the Baguio Colleges. The year was 1946, the city was  still in smoldering ruins from the devastation  of the Allied carpet-bombing of Baguio in World War II. Baguio was carpet-bombed by the Americans to flush out Japanese Imperial Army holdouts, and force them to surrender. It was a terrible miscalculation based on horrible intelligence-gathering. Their quarry, General Tomoyuki Yamashita who led the retreating Japanese soldiers was ultimately captured in Hapaw, Hungduan, Ifugao--some 500 kilometers away. Talk about missing a "target."

   That mindless Allied strategy--the true forerunner of the Pentagon's "shock and awe" concept--left Baguio City completely razed to the ground.

  Shortly before that,  around 1945, a young Manila corporate lawyer named Benjamin Romero Salvosa was diagnosed with terminal tuberculosis and given six months to live. Upon his doctor’s advise, he packed all his books and belongings and migrated to Baguio City, known for its healthful climate.

It was called Donida Building, then later Antipolo
building where Baguio Teahouse is now housed.
This is where Baguio Colleges--forerunner of
the University of the Cordilleras (UC) was born.

Arriving in the war-torn city of Baguio, he surveyed the surroundings,   saw the utter destruction, and mouthed the most incredulous vision: "This place will become a university town, it will be known as the Educational Capital of the North." How he came to that absurd prediction is truly amazing. But he set out and established a teachers college in five rented rooms in the old Donida Building--later called Antipolo Building   (where Baguio Teahouse is today) and later on went across the block to rent the Lopez Building (now Mandarin Restaurant). His little pioneering liberal arts school went on to produce some of the finest local teachers. They not only embarked on teaching, some of them went on to establish their own schools--Fernando Bautista, Sr. started the Baguio Tech (later University of Baguio) and a small diminutive man named Galo Weygan established the Baguio School of Business and Technology (BSBT).   

The Lopez building (now housing CID Educational
Supply) became the second home of the Baguio
Colleges in the late 60s. The Lopezes' ABS-CBN
radio station also had its studio on the ground floor.  

As his hair turned grey, Benjamin Salvosa thought of another absurd idea--he disinherited all of his six children and donated all of his assets (meaning the entire school) to a foundation, called Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). That way he was assured that even after he died, the school would continue to exist in perpetuity rather than be split apart in what could have been a tense competition among heirs  for inheritance.

     BCF produced some of the finest lawyers, engineers, architects, accountants, journalists, criminologists, computer techies and, of course, teachers. But Benjamin Salvosa’s most cherished dream was to someday see a college of nursing and medicine added to the school. Tragically, he died before the dream was realized. He was ahead of his time, but his vision was even farther ahead of him.

     Fighting sentimental melancholy all the way, the name BCF was eventually retired. Benjamin Salvosa's baby was all grown up. It is now known as the University of the Cordilleras (UC), with an annex in Legarda Road that houses its Hotel and Restaurant Management and Tourism (HRMT) school. The department  is fondly referred to as the UC Legarda Annex or "UCLA."

The new EDS Building bears the initials of Ben
Salvosa's beloved wife and UC's first school
registrar, Evangeline Domingo Salvosa. 

Beside the original main building now stands the modern 10-storey EDS Building (named after Benjamin Salvosa’s wife, Evangeline Domingo). It houses the College of Nursing--the one department the old man wanted to see in his lifetime. It is also the home of the College of Law.

     One of his children once remarked, "I wish Daddy Ben were here today so he could see all of this," referring to the now sprawling modern campus. I’m a close friend of the Salvosa family, and I remarked back, "Actually, Daddy Ben did see  all of this before anyone else---way back in 1946."

     Benjamin Salvosa did not die within six months, as decreed by his doctors in 1946. This amused him no end, as he sat in his favorite leather swivel chair, looking out at a typical Baguio sunset from his penthouse (which has since been converted into a Research Center).

     "No doctor's diagnosis  can scare me, I am a collector of incurable diseases," he boasted as he pushed past 70,"the only incurable disease I still don't have is AIDS--but give me time...!" He predicted he would outlive all his doctors. As true as that is, that  prediction is probably his most inaccurate. It was way off.

     He did not only outlive his doctors, he outlived himself. Many years after his death in 1994, the legacy of this great man continues to live and breathe in every lawyer, engineer, architect, accountant, teacher and nurse that graduates from the University of the Cordilleras.  They all caught a "pioneering virus" from him. When they go home to their hometowns and see another bleak unpromising frontier, they will see a bright future for these towns as Benjamin Salvosa saw for Baguio City in 1946. 

     In his heydays as an academic, he authored four critically-acclaimed books: Turmoil in Asia, Reform or Revolution and Education for Freedom and Politics of Unfinished Revolutions.  He also published a weekly community newspaper called The Gold Ore. It was actually a student organ staffed by young activists waging a war of ideology against the martial law regime of Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos. Branded as "subversives" by the military, many of those student writers were days away from arrest as Marcos henchmen began rounding up critics of the government in the academic community in those turbulent martial law years. 

Widely regarded as Benjamin Salvosa's alter ego,  
the late great writer Jose Nicholas "Peppot" Ilagan
(shown here wearing his "Mao" hat) headlined a roster
of student activists of the late 70s that comprised  
the original militant core of writers of the Gold Ore.
On a more personal note, I consider  Peppot my true
mentor in journalism and the biggest influence in all
my writing--including in my legal briefs as a lawyer.    

    To protect the student activists writing for their student paper in the school he founded,  Ben Salvosa pulled a fast one against the military. He converted The Gold Ore overnight into a regular general circulation newspaper. Stuffing the newspaper's pages with fake advertisements he himself paid for, he put his own son Raydean ("Totoy") and daughter Nellie Nayda ("Nene") in the editorial staff. Operating with no  protection against potential military arrestors other than their publisher's highly-respected name Salvosa, the Gold Ore kept the flame of Philippine press freedom blazing for years of living literally on the edge.  The newspaper's  staffwriters line-up reads like a Who's Who in the militant Kabataang Makabayan (KM) movement back in the day: Edilberto Tenefrancia, Jose Nicholas "Peppot" Ilagan, Geronimo Evangelista, Jr., Carol Brady de Raedt, Domecio "DomC" Cimatu Jr., Eliral Refuerzo,  Nathan Alcantara, Leonora "Nonie" Padilla, Luisita "Jet" Supnet, Erik de Castro, Leo John "Blinky" Romero, Christopher Bartolo (and this blog writer)--even including a retired military man but noted critical writer Col. Bienvenido Bacquirin.  

    The paper went on to become one of the pioneers of the so-called "alternative press" movement and was a thorn in the side of the Marcos government for years.  The  long-anticipated crackdown  on anti-Marcos journalists did happen nationwide but mostly spared Benjamin Salvosa's diminutive little newspaper, The Gold Ore.  Businesswise the paper was a suicidal operation. To maintain the cover, Ben Salvosa  kept the newspaper looking like a legitimate newspaper, not just some  fold-up fly-by-night rebel publication. He went all the way setting up an entire printing press to produce 5,000 copies a week--which cost P10-a-copy to print and sold for only P5. Worse, Benjamin Salvosa gave away half the paper's circulation as free classroom reading material for political science classes in BCF for years.

    Needless to say, both the newspaper and the printing press made no money. After the EDSA People Power revolution in 1986, the Gold Ore went on limping for fourteen more years before finally closing down in 2000. Benjamin Salvosa's intrepid little fact-telling newspaper told many courageous stories--then finally rode into the sunset, its own inside story hardly ever told.    

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON