This was how President Arroyo and her elder sister Cielo Macapagal- Salgado described their father, the late President Diosdado Macapagal, who would have turned 94 yesterday.
"He loved simple living. My mother was at the same time very frugal, so it was easy for us to practice simple living," the President said in an interview with journalists at the airport named after the late president here.
Before the interview, Mrs. Arroyo viewed a bust of her father and a family picture taken during his presidency, at the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport where she led the laying of a time capsule in one of the foundations of a proposed P2-billion passenger terminal.
"If he were alive and still healthy today, I suppose he’d still be writing and teaching," said Mrs. Salgado in a separate interview with The STAR.
"He was very loving, very thoughtful. He was always the first to greet us during our birthdays and he attended all the graduation ceremonies of my children," she recalled.
Macapagal, known as the "poor boy from Lubao," was born to poor farming parents in Barangay San Nicolas in Lubao in this province on Sept. 28, 1910. He worked his way through college and was elected congressman for two consecutive terms, from 1949 to 1954 and from 1954 to 1957, before he was elected vice president to Carlos Garcia in 1957. He was elected president in 1961 at the age of 52, and died on April 27, 1997.
The President is known to echo her father’s sagely advice: "Do your best and let God take care of the rest."
In these difficult times however, Mrs. Arroyo stressed her father’s desire for "simple living" which he and his family practiced.
Mrs. Salgado recalled that after her father’s presidency, he would unfailingly go to the houses of his married children to share lunch with them during weekends.
"He was an ordinary person to all of us, because he had always wanted simplicity," she said.
To preserve and promote the moral and philosophical legacies of her father, Mrs. Salgado has already donated her house and lot in Lubao to the National Historical Institute for transformation into the Diosdado Macapagal library and museum.
"Buboy (younger brother Diosdado Jr.) is gathering all my dad’s memorabilia for the museum, but we are sourcing more funds. Perhaps we will complete the project after these hard times," she said, adding that Sen. Ramon Magsaysay Jr. has promised to help.
"My dad’s most valuable legacy to the Filipino people is his honesty and his love for God and the common man. I think his honesty is really a legacy," she said.
Mrs. Salgado recalled that her father was a man of good humor. "He was fond of waving to the crowd. Even while traveling in his car, he would pull down the window and wave.
"Then one time we noticed... he kept waving when we were passing by a cemetery and so we called his attention to this. He said that it was well for him to wave, since even dead people do vote," she said with laughter.
Macapagal is known in history as the father of land reform, having enacted the Agrarian Reform Code which abolished the share-cropping tenancy and the replacement of the lease-hold system.
He is also known to have initiated the so-called Maphilindo (Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia), precursor of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
It was during his presidency that negotiations on the term of the US military bases in the country were completed, reducing the stay of the bases here to 25 years.