Do you know Danny Purple?

You are not really from UP if you do not know Danny Purple. This is what Mike Aventajado will tell you if you first meet him and claim you are from UP.

I first saw Danny Purple while he was crossing Highway 54 (which now is known simply as EDSA) diagonally from Philam subdivision to the vacant lot where SM North now stands. He was wearing a red long-sleeved shirt and a pair of low-waisted blue jeans, a white Stetson hat and what looked like a 45-caliber pistol tucked into his back underneath his belt. Tall and fair-skinned, he looked like a Texan cowboy that was transported and somehow got lost in the still underpopulated Quezon City of the early ‘60s.

The next time I saw him he was standing under one of the flame trees lined up in front the Liberal Arts building, sans the Stetson hat and gun, and acting as if he was patiently waiting for something or someone. It was around 11 a.m. and soon he strode to the middle of the road in front of the building and stretched out his arms. A bright-red Thunderbird convertible soon came into view and had to stop as Danny Purple was blocking the way. The driver was RJ Jacinto, lead guitarist of the Riots, who was probably on his way to nearby Ateneo. Danny was not acting like a traffic policeman and was motioning to RJ to go back to where he came from without saying a single word. Poor RJ had no choice except to back up and make a U-turn. Danny apparently had observed that RJ had been regularly taking a shortcut through UP regularly.

Danny, stories in Diliman say, used to be a student but had to spend some time in the National Mental Hospital in Mandaluyong. Son of a UP law professor, he was reputedly a poet and was generally tolerated by every one of the students and was considered harmless. He was supposedly very much in love with Maria Kalaw Katigbak, and his unrequited love led to his insanity.

He loved hanging around with the members of the Alpha Phi Omega and the Beta Sigma fraternities, too. These two fraternities who always imagined themselves as mortal enemies of the Upsilon Sigma Phi fraternity appealed to Danny Purple. He, too, after all, had an axe to grind against Vic Navasero, an Upsilonian who was also rumored to have been courting Miss Katigbak. Vic Navasero had the advantage of being in the same social circle as Miss Katigbak as her sorority, the Sigma Delta Phi, was the Upsilon Sigma Phi’s sister sorority.

Actually, Vic Navasero was studying agriculture in the UP Los Baños campus. He had the same build as Danny Purple and also had Caucasian features. Being a member of the Varsity basketball team, he was often in Diliman and was a well-known campus figure, too.  In 1958 Vic Navasero won the walkathon event from Padre Faura to Diliman held in celebration of the university’s golden jubilee.

Mike Aventajado’s litmus test on the authenticity of UP alumnus always works. Nobody from UP does not know Danny Purple.

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