Against all odds
April 11, 2005 | 12:00am
I’ve just re-read the book Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. In this luminous memoir, McCourt writes about the travails of his childhood with remarkable humor and compassion. He describes how he endured poverty and near starvation while growing up in Ireland. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus is another famous personality who grew up in the poorest human condition. His father, an agricultural laborer, was killed in action when Albert was the working-class district of Belcourt. His widowed mother earned money to bring up her two sons as a charwoman, a term which means stay-out housekeeper. Camus overcame his poverty by writing outstanding lyrical and philosophical essays, plays and novels. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
We all have such inspiring stories to tell. I’d like to tell you mine.
My father died as a war victim when I was 14 years old, leaving me, my widowed mother, and my handicapped brother with nothing save a few hectares of farmland where we got a tenant’s share of 10 cavans of rice after the harvest season. Seeing no hope in our predicament, I decided to hitchhike to Manila to seek my future, with a promise to send part of my wages to my mother and brother when I had a job.
I arrived in Manila after 22 hours of grueling travel. With only 10 centavos in my pocket, I bought from a street vendor a small pack of fried peanuts for dinner. Tired and exhausted, I fell asleep on the porch of Singalong church.
I walked the next morning in the streets of Singalong district where I met and befriended a staff sergeant in a US Army truck company. To my surprise, he arranged to hire me as the unit’s mess boy. My job was to help in the kitchen, clean the latrines, and dismantle and oil the carbines and other army firearms. The sergeant taught me a lot of things, like driving a six-by-six truck from Singalong to Antipolo. One day, he gave me a pair of boxing gloves and made me spar with him on several occasions.
When the US Army moved out of Singalong, I got a job as a restaurant waiter and went to high school at nights. As most school records were burned during the war, I took a qualifying entrance examination and was admitted as a fourth year student. Skipping second and third years, I got my high school diploma as first honor and I enrolled in the college of liberal arts in Letran as a full scholar.
In Letran, ROTC was compulsory. We had to wear khaki, West Point uniforms. No one ever guessed that I wore the same khaki uniform in school every day, and on Friday evenings, I washed my uniform, dried it with an electric fan, and ironed it in the morning in time for our ROTC drill at Plaza Lawton. Finishing first year AB in Letran, I shifted to UST as a junior in journalism and took up public relations as a one-semester subject. Little did I dream that one day I would embrace PR with passion and hang on to it as a way of life.
I finished high school in just two years and my undergraduate degree in journalism in UST in three years, cum laude.
After college, after a brief stint teaching high school English in Sta. Catalina College, Calbayog, Samar, I came back to the city, became a cub reporter of the Manila Times, and later, a staff correspondent of International News Service (INS).
It was while working at INS that my determination was put to the test. I was already married at 19, so I had to face my responsibility as a husband and soon-to-be father. My P150 a month salary was so meager I had to keep a very tight budget. My young wife had to learn how to market with no more than P2 a day for vegetables and some slices of meat.
We rented a one-room apartment in Libertad, Pasay, where we had a common bathroom with the neighbors, and where water was so scanty it trickled only after 12 midnight. We cooked our food in our room using a P2 coil and clay burner.
My work at INS was from 5 to 10 in the morning, then from 7 to 10 at night. Our office was at the TVT building on F. Torres St. in Sta. Cruz, so I had to take a 4 a.m. bus every day to catch the 5 a.m. news transcriptions from San Francisco and distribute the foreign news by teletype to INS subscribers. That gave me only five hours of sleep every day, from three to four in the mornings and one to four in the afternoons.
While at INS, I met the right people from the US Embassy who advised me to apply for a Fulbright & Smith Mundt scholarship. The judges must have been impressed when they asked my why I wanted to take up radio and TV. I said I wanted help propagate democratic ideals, whatever that means. I won the award, went to Boston University, and left behind my then pregnant wife. In one year, I obtained my MS in ComArts major in PR and radio-TV.
I had barely settled as the first program director of the first commercial TV station in the Philippines when I was called by Philosophy & Letters dean Fr. Alfredo Panizo of UST to teach PR to a bunch of young students including Jullie Yap Daza, Kit Tatad, Greg Cendaña, Pat Gonzales, Joe Burgos, Jake Macasaet, Andy del Rosario, Bert Lumauig and many others who made their own marks in journalism and politics.
Following a year with Alto Broadcasting System, the company that set up DZAQ-TV, I went into advertising. I was advertising manager of a giant agri-chemicals firm and a large pharmaceutical company. For eight years, I was a director of the Philippine Association of National Advertisers and was chairman of the second Ad Congress held in Bacolod in 1971.
Soon my name began to be associated with public relations, so I thought I would go after small-time clients. When you add up my trivial retainer fees plus my meager UST salary, it was enough to make me own a three-bedroom bungalow in Philamlife Homes, Quezon City under a 25-year installment plan.
When I joined Esso Standard Fertilizer (ESFAC), and later Mobil Oil Philippines, PR had become my compulsive passion. In ESFAC, for instance, I helped raise our average nationwide rice yield from 30 cavans to more than 80 cavans per hectare by working with then Agriculture Secretary Bong Tangco to introduce Masagana 99. Our PR media campaign convinced me that integrated PR is an effective instrument for social change.
When Mobil Oil was sold to Caltex, it was time to set up my own PR consultancy. I was editorial director, billing clerk, account executive, janitor, messenger and secretary all at the same time. With just me and only one client in 1988, we grew by leaps and bounds. By 1994, we had 76 employees and 20 prestigious clients.
Today, together with my daughters Monique and Audrey and my son Norman, we own 70 percent of Euro RSCG Philippines and Agatep Associates, while Euro RSCG Worldwide owns a minority stake in both companies.
Unlike author Frank McCourt, I never complained about my childhood poverty. While I didn’t have enough money, I was wealthy in spirit, in the helpful people I associated with, and in my confidence that I could overcome all hardships. I have a positive outlook of things, most especially my outlook of public relations.
I believe PR is an important as medicine, engineering, law and education. These disciplines all have a role to play in making this world a better place to live in.
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