I enrolled at the University of Santo Tomas in 1944; the school then was in its old campus in Intramuros, close to the Santo Domingo Church. The main campus in España was the interment camp of Allied civilians, mostly Americans. After the first air raid by American carrier planes in September 1944, all classes in Manila were closed and in October that year, with Manila already starving, the country in shambles, my mother, a cousin and I walked all the way from Manila to my hometown Rosales, Pangasinan, where we waited for the Liberation. In January 1945, I joined the American Army as a civilian employee, and left the Army in October 1945. The following year, when Santo Tomas opened, I enrolled in the college of Liberal Arts as a preparatory medicine student.
How did I get to join the Varsitarian?
Miss Paz Latorena whom I already knew was a first rate writer was teaching English and I purposely enrolled in her class. On our first day, she made us write on a theme whose title I do not remember. It was not difficult—so when I finished it in 15 minutes, I asked if it was all right for me to leave. She said, yes.
The following session, she called my name and told me to see her after the class. She said I should take the examination for the Varsitarian that forthcoming week, and that I must not fail to do it. And that was how I joined the Varsitarian, first as assistant literary editor, together with Dolores Locsin, The literary editor at the time was Albert Card—an American veteran studying under the GI bill of rights.
In those days, there were separate entrances for men and women and separate classes as well, but not in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters because we were so few, the Varsitarian office was in the ground floor, the huge room at the right of the main entrance in the main building. Voz Estudiantil, the paper in Spanish shared the office with us. The Varsi Adviser was Francisco Cuerva, and the Varsitarian moderator was Fr. Florencio Muñoz who was also the University secretary; he was succeeded by Fr. Francisco Villacorta. It was the age of the typewriter, the flatbed press and the linotype. When we put the paper to bed, we really put it to bed in the flatbed press at the UST Printing Press which was then at the corner of P. Noval and España. There we often worked late at night, and got our fingers dirty with printer’s ink while we helped the printers set up the pages with the cuts and the proofs fresh from the linotypes.
When there were huge blanks that needed material, we typed out the stories right there. In those days, there was indeed a close working relationship between the editorial staff and the printers.
My first editor-in-chief was Eleno Mencias who was a medical student, then came Santiago Artiaga who wrote a column, Tiago Tiaga. He was in law, and finally, Manuel V. Salak. He was taking up Law. And on the fourth year in the staff, I became editor-in-chief, with Constante Roldan as my managing editor. I remember Cenon Rivera who was staff artist, then J. Elizalde Navarro, who lived by himself in a small ground floor apartment near the University. I often visited him and we reminisced about the war, and talked about art. He was then very much under the influence of Carlos V. Francisco.
Pepino Vinzons Asis, alumni editor—in the eighties, he visited me at my bookshop. He had become a priest and was in a poor parish somewhere in Bicol. We talked about the priesthood, its hardships I had hoped he would visit again.
There were several fixtures in the Varsitarian, the first of course, was Francisco Cuyerva who was the publications director and the office manager, Enrique Lumba who was responsible for running the office. I had no typewriter and he permitted me to work in the office at lunchtime or late in the evening typing out my manuscripts. Then there was Mike Evangelista who was alumni editor, who was also a very good proof reader, and Benny Buenaventura—the hippie poet and perennial student, who continually gave us his poems—some of them publishable. I was walking behind him once on the way out of the campus to España and he was talking to himself. I moved closer and realized he was reciting Shakespeare.
In the Varsitarian, Ben Rodriguez, Tedoro Benigno, Mary Ruff Tagle, and Eugenia Duran Apostol wrote short stories, and Adoracion Trinidad contributed poetry. Juan Gatbonton and Neal Cruz were reporters. Delia Coronel who was the coed editor became a nun and in Marawi, she translated the Maranao epic, The Darangen, for which she has yet to be fully honored.
My first formal dinner was tendered by the Father Rector, Angel Blas, for the new Varsitarian staff in 1946 at Carbungco’s—the only posh restaurant shortly after World War II. And so there we were, before that fancy dinner table arrangement, the different kinds of forks and knives. I did not know the sequence so I watched the priests, and followed their example. The red and white wine—that was easy enough. The soup and the fish, too. Then the brandy after dinner. I wondered why it was not so generously poured as the wines and so I gulped it, not sipped it, and almost choked.
I remember Johnny Frivaldo and our meeting with Father Villacorta, how he had asked for more pay for us staffers and more scholarships—which Father Villacorta granted. To prove his point, Johnny lifted one of his shoes which had a hole in the sole. Johnny was a very good politician, as his career later proved.
And Gloria Garchetorena, and Celso Carunungan—as literary editors they made a beautiful and a hard-working pair. Celso could write those complex and profound sentences—but he elected to write simply as was the fad in those days with Carlos Bulosan, and William Saroyan.
And since I was then an avid follower of William Faulkner, I tried to write differently, in a manner prolix and confused, one page, one sentence of convoluted thinking.
I recall only too well how once, Manuel Salak, who was then Varsi editor, and Manila Times reporter had inquired about one essay that I wrote. He said, it was beautifully written, but what did I want to say? I thought the words were by themselves explicit.My most important lesson in writing was given to me by Fr. Juan Labrador, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. This was sometime in 1947, I think. NVM Gonzalez was then editing the Saturday Evening News Magazine and he had used one of my short stories.
Father Labrador took me to the canteen—the building at the left of the main building. The ground floor was for students, the second floor for the faculty. We had mami and siopao. He asked me to look out of the window and tell him what I saw. I said, the high school girls playing softball. He said, suppose I put curtains on both sides of the window, what will you see? I said, the curtains and the girls playing softball. Then he leaned forward and asked, Suppose I covered the entire window with beautiful curtains, what do you see?
I said, the curtains, Father.
He said, that is writing. Never cover the window with curtains, no matter how beautiful. Leave something clear so that your reader can see what is beyond the window.
His eyes twinkled, Besides, you will always be a second rate Faulkner. You can be a first rate Jose.
So, goodbye William Faulkner. And shortly after, Miss Latorena dropped by the Varsi office. She had read my latest short story and she said, now I was not just telling stories but writing them.
The happiest days of my youth were spent at Santo Tomas. Thanks to the Varsitarian, I had a small pay and a scholarship as well. And most of all, although it was not at the campus where I met her, it was at UST where my future wife was studying, too. When I first met her, I asked if she had read me. She said, no. Did she not read Varsitarian at all?
Again, she said, no.
It was a monumental put down, but it did not faze me. V

Francisco Sionil Jose is the National Artist for Literature. He is one of the most widely-read Filipino writers in English. His works, most famous of which are the Rosales Saga, had been translated in 22 other languages. He founded the Philippine Center of International PEN (Poets and Playwrights, Essayists, Novelists) in 1957 and became the Varsitarian editor-in-chief from 1948-1949.

THE PHONED-IN request for a feature for the Varsitarian’s 80th anniversary coffee-table book came in the afternoon of the 17th last December.
Initially, I hedged: Gosh, that would be a 60-year looking back! I had not been doing much writing lately and I was not about to submit to one more hassle with deadline anxieties, now that I was done with a near-lifetime battle with the journalist’s numbers-terrorizer.
But the caller bargained with time concessions. 10 days, she was suggesting. You could turn in your piece on January 7.
The number stirred an ambivalence, pushing me to a tentative, uneasy commitment. Was it urging me to revisit the past for an uneasy providential coming to terms with an unresolved what-might-have-been?
O sige, I finally said, January 7.

* * *

1948-1949
This was the year I was the Varsitarian literary editor, my second stint with the staff. There were two others serving as assistant literary editors, both male. He was one of them.
But I hardly ran into him, conflicting class schedules, heavy duty at the UST press, bonding with my own coterie of girl-classmates. Even in this big little college we fondly called (then) Philets, it was a wonder out paths rarely crossed. Until…
December 27. At the UP Padre Faura annual lantern parade to which a UP friend had invited me. There was a dance going on at the roof deck of one of the buildings. But my friend was not the dancing type. We talked. (What a waste of good music!)
Suddenly, he was standing before me, asking for a dance. Why was he there? I guess it’s one of life’s imponderables. But I took his proffered hand and I didn’t regret doing so.
The courtship was brief. For by school year’s end, he was to leave for the United States to pursue post-graduate studies at the Columbia University. He had previously brought me to meet his family and friends at his birthday party in January 7.
We kept up a correspondence across the miles. He wrote letters, sent greeting cards, books, music pieces, photographs of himself with Columbia schoolmates. He closed his letters with “As always”.
But that was not how things were meant to be for long. On my end, the mail was becoming irregular. Until it petered out.
After more than a year, I had married someone else.

* * *

1969
She had been standing before my desk, wordlessly watching while I worked on the magazine layout spread out on my desk. I was sorting out the photographs I had taken of the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant at Miami Beach, Florida which I had covered at the Manila Times correspondent-chaperone of Gloria Diaz for the Binibining Pilipinas franchise holder. The previous week, my firsthand coverage of that historic event – rushed within a 2-hour deadline – had been on the newspaper’s front page the day after our arrival from the US.
Yes, I asked, looking up from the pile of photographs spread out on the table.
I’m supposed to interview you, Ma’am, she said, fingering one of the pictures to be used for the STM 3-part series I had yet to write. I was assigned to write a report for our college paper.
What about, I asked, looking down again on the layout littered with galley proofs, photos, blue pencil, paper clips…
About the first ever Philippine triumph in the Miss Universe pageant, my visitor replied. But I have instructions not to focus on the pageant winner. Our publications director had told me to single out the chaperone. An inside story on this, uh, journalistic first by a former Thomasian/Varsitarian alumna. She deserves that much credit, he said.
And who is your publication director, I asked, without looking up.
The Varsitarian publications director, ma’am. And the girl spoke his name.
I never got around to reading that Varsitarian interview by its star reporter, Jennie Ilustre, by the way…

* * *

1970
The invitation was for an early afternoon session with the candidates for the Varsitarian editor-in-chief post for the coming year.
He would be there with the incumbent Fr. Rector and the V’s founding father, Mr. Jose Villa Panganiban.
We read the aspirants’ written work. We asked questions and then we graded them. My choice was a certain Antonio Lopez. But he didn’t get the majority vote. He was very disappointed. My parting words to him were: You didn’t make it here, but you’ll make it on the national scene. Mark my word, I said. Years later he was to rise to become an influential journalist in business circles.
Meanwhile at the merienda following the judging session, I was introduced to some guests who had come around to toast the new V ed. One of them was his wife. Her name: Sari Palanca.

* * *

1987
The call was from Teresita Añover-Rodriguez. Come around to my home, she said. There’s a package for you. You’ll have to pick it up yourself.
Teresita had been one of my closest college friends. We kept in touch after graduation. Phone calls, greeting cards at Christmas, Easter, birthdays, invitations to writers’ gathering arranged by the US embassy where she worled in the publications division.
I didn’t stay too long at the apartment. Besides I was curious about the package, especially after Teresita said, You’ll have to open it when you get home, in a rather mischievous tone.
When I tore the wrappings off, a small ivory handcrafted image nearly fell off. It was a figure of Blesses Lorenzo Ruiz. It came with a pamphlet containing an account of his life and martyrdom written by him as well as the country’s efforts through the then ambassador to the Vatican Antonio C. Delgado, as chronicled in his brief summary.
The pamphlet was one of several memorabilia marking Lorenzo’s beatification during rites here in Manila presided by Pope John Paul II. When I opened the pamphlet to the frontispiece, I read his dedication to me in his familiar scrawl and his signature. A hint of tears misted my eyes, remembering seeing him on television annotating the sanctification rites direct from the Vatican, that year, 1987.
This was the V’s publication director who had earlier been stripped of his position for having allowed the publication in the magazine a “risqué” photo of French cancan girls. But he had bounced back from that personal crisis, as the beautification and sanctification milestones verified. Yet, when devotees pray for San Lorenzo Ruiz’s intercession, when they sing the saint’s official hymn composed by Dom Benildus Maramba, the lyrics of which were written by this Varsitarian director, I wonder if the country realizes how much it owes to his dogged pursuit of the national quest.

* * *

1988
The day’s newspapers carried an account of how he had been rendered comatose by an aneurysm attack. I went to see him at the Cardinal Santos Hospital. But like other visitors, I could only get a glimpse of his figure through the window of the ICU room. But I got to meet his wife Sari and I said I was sorry about what had happened to him and that I knew how she felt because my own only sister was also comatose and I could not find the courage to finally end her misery.
But Sari later made the difficult decision and before long, he was lying in state at the Mt. Carmel Church on Broadway street where a throng of friends, colleagues, priests, admirers, the country’s officialdom had crowded the huge place to listen to the glowing eulogies.
A couple of months later, my own sister passed away after I also came to terms with the difficult decision to release her.
At her wake, one evening, a messenger came around with a big basket of pastries. When I inquired about the sender, the messenger stepped aside to give way to Sari, dressed in her widow’s weeds. We embraced. We sobbed in each other’s arms. She communicated quietly – everything that had to be said through all the years of angst and hope, and deep sisterhood.
My V story had come full circle, at last. V

Gloria Garchitorena-Goloy was born in 1927 in Manila, Gloria Garchitorena-Goloy finished Litt. B in Journalism, cum laude, at the University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, serving as associate editor of the Varsitarian from 1949-1950.

Florian Garcia served as Varsitarian Circle writer from 2004-2006 and acting Circle editor in 2006. She was a former account executive at Guerilla Advertising.

In the last half of the 19th century, the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche famously declared, “God is dead.” Not so, it turned out. By 1900, Nietzche, not God, was dead. Still, the 20th century tried to sustain his vision of the Ubermensch (superman) by doing everything to banish God and the love of God from public view, especially in the First World. The result was what the Catholic convert and brilliant editor of First Things, Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, has called, in his book of the same title, the “Naked Public Square.”
Nowhere was this more evident than in the United States, a country built under a “sacred canopy,” to borrow Peter Berger’s phrase, and where more than one hundred years ago Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic Democracy in America, saw religion as “the first political institution.” There, public prayer was banned in schools and other public institutions on constitutional grounds and suddenly it was no longer politically correct for one to be seen praying in public. The Europeans for their part decided that having to acknowledge their Christian roots in the European Constitution would run counter to the secular vision of Europe.
As that most violent of all centuries ended, many felt the movement against God had finally succeeded. Much of the Christian world had been dechristianized and paganized; the consumerist market had won, and materialism had become the dominant way of life after the collapse of the Soviet empire, and atheistic and materialistic communism was formally declared to have lost. In its millennium issue, The Economist of London, one of the most influential secular magazines in the Western world, was bold enough to run an obituary of God. But again, as Mark Twain would have said, news of God’s death was grossly exaggerated.
Towards the end of 2007, the Economist admitted its mistake. In its Nov. 3, 2007 special review of religion and public life, the magazine reported that far from turning away from religion, more and more people had been turning to it in the last hundred years. From 1900 to 2005, the magazine noted, the number of people identified with the world’s four biggest religions—-Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism— had risen from 67 percent to 73 percent of world population. Evidently, the number of believers continues to rise. But so also the intensity of the ideological attack on God and religious belief. Gone are the great religious wars, but the war against religion itself has arrived. Science and technology has become the bearer of the New Age, proclaiming a way of life without God, or with God totally on the outside. With man now able to make another man (in test tubes), his relationship to himself has been fundamentally altered, so wrote Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI). Post-modern man now looks upon himself as “his own product — no longer a gift of nature, or of the Creator God.”
It is a crisis —a world crisis— of man’s truth. Men and women no longer seem to know what and who they are –whether in relation to themselves or in relation to others, most especially the Wholly Other, God. Whereas Christianity, according to Sheed, produced a civilization that listened to God while looking at man, post-modernity simply shattered its ear drums. Albert Camus once wrote: “I wonder what the future will say of modern man. A single sentence will suffice: ‘he fornicated and read the papers’.” That dim view of postmodern man has apparently arrived. Filled with self-love, he seems, forsooth, to have left no space for anyone or anything else. T. S. Eliot looks into it more deeply in ‘Choruses from The Rock’:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycle of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

Examine our social discourse, our politics, our economics, etc. We seem to have replaced the first principle of practical reason (synderesis) which bids man to do good and avoid evil, with the pleasure principle, the driving force behind the “sexual revolution” and in particular what Pope Benedict XVI calls the “dogma of hedonism,” which has sought to turn everything upside down. American sitcoms, soap operas and movies, observes the philosopher Peter Kreeft, never glorify murder or rape or stealing or even lying. But they never fail to glorify fornication, adultery, sodomy, abortion, etc. They tell you to control your drug addictions, and your gun addictions, and your smoking addictions and even your overeating addictions, but never your sex addictions, he writes. Everything has been or is being deconstructed with sex—marriage, family, culture, man himself.
You deconstruct when you try to show that certain universally held concepts are not truly universal after all. Nietzche invented this technique, but the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was its last acknowledged master until his death in 2004. In one interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, Derrida proposed that the word “marriage” be deleted from the French civil code to clear the juridical path for homosexual unions. That failed to take off, yet same-sex “marriage” is today performed in at least five countries; civil unions, domestic partnerships, common law contracts, pacts of common interests, civil pacts of solidarity, etc. grant to homosexual couples benefits akin to those associated with marriage in at least 23 countries, including parts of the United States.
Within the United Nations system, the term “reproductive rights” has become the mantra that threatens to divinize the killing of millions of unborn children each year. So while Western activists denounce “genital mutilation” in some African tribes as barbaric, “fetal mutilation” – the mutilation of the fetus – has become the crowning glory of the legal system of at least 149 countries, and counting, starting with the near-mighty G-8.
That millions of unborn children are killed every year in the name of a false right and a false freedom cannot be an expression of man’s love even of himself. It is a desecration of man and his preeminent place in the natural order of created beings and things. But no monstrous crime can ever turn God against man. God has not revoked his promise to Abraham in the Book of Genesis, that if there be but ten righteous men in Sodom, “I will not destroy it” (Gen 18:32); in the fullness of time, the Father sent His only begotten Son to redeem the whole of mankind from sin. Thus, Benedict XVI assures us in his first encyclical that Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), and again, in his second one, Spe salvi facti sumus (In hope we were saved), that we have a “God who has loved us and who continues to love us ‘to the end,’ until all ‘is accomplished’.” And that, “if we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we ‘live’.”
There are no seasonal truths. Every moment is an opportune time for fallen and redeemed man to see how he has lived the Love of Christ, the only Love that, in Dante’s words, “moves the Sun and the other stars.” The world has tried to bury this Love in endless ways that put the pleasure of the senses above everything else. This is not, and cannot be for those who listen attentively to the voice of reason, even though they may not yet know Christ.
Unaided by anything supernatural, they can see by the use of natural reason alone that the dogma of hedonism contradicts the very reason for their earthly existence; man is not a mere mound of clay molded and plugged into an energy field built by science, nor a coming together of various sensual appetites; he is body and soul fused together by the breath of God, and ordered to an end higher than himself. Moved by faith, hope, and charity, the individual Christian will see beyond natural reason’s ability to see, and he will see himself as an imperfect being capable of being perfected only by the grace of God. His real life is in God; he dies forever outside of the living God. V

Former senator Francisco “Kit” Tatad graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Science in Philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. He became literary editor, and later contributing editor, of the Varsitarian in 1962.

Am here where nothing is everything,
where the stillpoint of our exploration
is exploring beginnings turned
into navel gazing. Where am I?

Am here where mornings crack
into a shiver of twilights breaking
into days and nights, songs and echoes –
whimpers of regret and frenzied halloing
achieved after couplings of living and dying,
of starting and ending, of suns and shadows.

Am in a circle at last
where the hole defines life’s next of kin.
I have come.

Am here where I am going.
Is anybody home?

Albert Casuga joined the Varsitarian in the 60s as a reporter and subsequently served as assistant news editor and assistant literary editor. At UST, he was the first editor of the JAS (Journal of Arts and Sciences) of the UST College Arts and Letters, and the editor of the Graduate School Journal. The poems above are from his upcoming book, A Theory of Echoes and Other Poems (Selected Poems), to be published by the UST Publishing House.

2001-2002 Varsitarian artist Ronaldo Reyes currently works as a freelance book illustrator and special effects artist at Ignite Media, Inc., who worked on movies like “Angel,” “Quija,” and 2007 Metro Manila Film Festival Best Picture “Resiklo.”

Inside this poem
I am trying to find out
what went wrong: everything is
in sepia, as it should be
in dreams where we see
in black and white, but then
something keeps on staining

everything orange. My grandfather
drags a dead leg towards his bed,
and I know am not born yet, only
I sit here on a couch forming
Le Guin’s brown wounded,
waiting for grandfather to turn
into a tree, which has always been
a probable ending, I think,
but then he interrupts me, begins
another story, Have you ever seen
so many tall bright windows?

Natasha Gamalinda joined the Varsitarian during her Junior year as a Literature major in AB. She was a literary writer during her first year, and literary editor in her second year. She’s currently pursuing her masterals in creative writing at the UP.

AS A HIGH school senior in convent school, I dreamt of going to UP for college. My entire barkada had decided to go there.
But my parents decided that I was going to UST. They had been taken in by all that propaganda about the atheists and communists in Diliman, which was part of the campaign against UP mounted by the priests and nuns in Catholic schools like mine. Though I hated this, and added it to my mental list of things to hold against them, it never occurred to me to rebel.
So, a few months short of 16, I found myself a freshman in UST’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (Philets). I was told this was where students who wanted to be writers went, to major in either philosophy or journalism. There were no creative writing programs then.
Philets was a tiny laid-back college, and it turned out was one of the happiest seasons in my life. UST was still run by Spanish friars; but the Philets Dean, Father Alfredo Panizo, was a true intellectual, and a bohemian at heart. Most of the faculty had been Philets themselves, and were practicing newspapermen or advertising executives. At least a third of the students were working students, already on their way to successful careers in media, advertising, or the new field of public relations. This soon cured me of any feelings of self-importance I might have acquired from my early successes in the small pond I had come from.
The university’s official student paper was The Varsitarian, which affected a format borrowed from Time magazine, except that it had a literary section of which it was extremely proud, since many of the country’s major writers (like Frankie Sionil Jose, Johnny Gatbonton, Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta, Rolando Tiño, Bienvenido Lumbera, etc.) had first seen print there. I didn’t dare set my sights so high. I applied instead to be a reporter in the Blue Quill, my college’s paper, where many V staffers got their start. It was one of the best decisions of my life, because its editor-in-chief was Joe Burgos (who said he was an upperclassman, when he had the time for it). Joe was already an excellent editor, and knocked off whatever nonsense was still left in me, by simply assuming we were all already professional journalists like himself.
Julie Daza, the Varsitarian’s first woman assistant editor, a Philets senior (who was also working for the Evening News), encouraged me to try for the V. It was the best training for a career in journalism later, she said. Jean Pope, the V’s co-eds editor, a Philets junior (and a writer for a popular section in the Manila Times called, I think, “Crew Cuts and Pony Tails”), also told me I should be in the V. But I liked the Quill and decided to stay one more year.
Toward the end of my sophomore year, I took the V exam, and was accepted as features editor. The paper’s moderator was Father Jose Cuesta, O.P., and its Technical Adviser was Dr. Vic Rosales. Father Cuesta read every inch of copy before passing it on to Dr. Rosales, who did the hands-on managing. Fr. Cuesta had a deep, growling bass and a formidable scowl which quite intimidated me; but I was later to realize he was actually a gentle soul. And Dr. Rosales, who was married to one of my teachers in Philets, eventually became a good friend.
My editor-in-chief was Jean Pope, the first woman to hold the post. Felicito Bautista was news editor with Cirilo Bautista as his assistant; Kit Tatad, literary editor with Albert Casuga as his assistant; Tish Bautista, co-eds editor; Eli Ang Barroso, alumni editor; Bayani de Leon, Filipino editor with Marietta Dichoso as his assistant; Demosthenes Roja (an engineering student), sports editor; and Remedios Baquiren (a fine arts student), art editor, with Danny Dalena as her “alternate.” Among the reporters were Ben Afuang, the Cuasay brothers (who were medical students and whose older brother Ramon, also a doctor, had been a V editor) Orlando and Nestor, and Arabella Gonzalez.
Our newsroom was on the ground floor of the Main Building, which looked so old that at first I thought it had been transferred, stone by stone, from Intramuros to España, like the Arch of Centuries. It was a dark, cavernous, smoke-filled room, saved from gloominess by the floor-to-ceiling doors on both sides of the room, overlooking grassy quadrangles. There were slow-moving, fat-bladed fans suspended from the tall ceiling, enormous wooden desks for the editors, equipped with swivel chairs, heavy manual typewriters, and ashtrays, all of which qualified as antiques even then. There were also smaller wooden tables with mismatched chairs and even older typewriters for the reporters. And lining the walls behind the desks were wooden cabinets, with cloudy glass doors. These were crammed with sheets of both clean and used newsprint, copy awaiting copyediting, proofs awaiting proofreading, old V issues, typewriter ribbons, and sundry personal effects like paperbacks, umbrellas, jackets and half-eaten sandwiches. It was a mess. And we loved it. We were stepping into a tradition!
The printing press was at the far edge of the campus, on the corner of España and P. Noval. One had to cross the football field to get to it, moving in a diagonal line and passing the chapel on one’s way. The linotype machines, and little Mang Narcing, who was the very soul of patience, occupied the first floor. After the corrected proofs were done, they went to the tiny offset department on the mezzanine. Section editors were responsible for putting their own pages to bed, although the editor-in-chief would go over all final proofs again afterwards. So for a few days each month, we all smelled of printer’s ink and suffered from eye strain.
We took an oath before the Rector Magnificus, swearing to “uphold and preserve the ideals” of UST, and were handed a typewritten list of 13 “Rules,” which included “maintaining order and discipline in the office at all times” and “using the typewriters and the telephone exclusive for official business.”
And we did take our jobs very seriously, putting in many long hours on our own writing and on the editing of submitted materials. The magazine came out once a month, each issue with around 60-70 pages. I think we were paid an allowance, though it can’t have been a big amount. But by the time I was a senior, the V had become more important to me than my studies, and I think, most of my fellow staff members felt the same way (except maybe for Theni Roja and the Cuasays). This may have been because we were all getting ready for the next stage in our life.
I realize now that the work habits that I picked up in that office have stood me in good stead all my life. To this day I can set aside personal problems and personal taste, and produce a competently written story on assignment, using the number of words specified and submitting it on time. This is what being a professional journalist means to me, and I learned it in the Varsitarian.
But all that aside, I think we spent that much time in the office because we liked it there. We felt at home there. We had grown attached to the ratty furniture and the battered typewriters and the old-fashioned ceiling fans and the cigarette smoke and the mess. Of course we also enjoyed each other’s company tremendously. Many of my fellow staffers had been my friends in Philets to begin with, and the V strengthened those bonds. These many years after, my memories of that office are among the warmest I have of my old school.
Jean (who by then was in graduate school and already assistant editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, I think) and Cito did another year with the V. Jun Pangilinan took over news; and Danny Dalena became art editor. Theni and I stayed on with sports and features respectively; Norma Miraflor joined us as literary editor with Nestor Cuasay as her assistant; Jake Macasaet came in as cadets editor; Roger Sikat took over Pilipino with Marietta Dichoso as his assistant; Tish became religion editor; Susan Santamaria and Daisy Uy took over co-eds. And Fely Consignado, Rey Datu and Luningning Salazar were among our reporters.
At 19, I had not yet decided what I would do with my life after graduation. The choices seemed to be to go to graduate school abroad or accept the offer of a part time job with the Manila Chronicle, for which I had been writing a weekly youth page column since sophomore year. In any case, I figured there was no harm in taking the V exam again, and applied for the position of assistant editor.
When the results were released, I was stunned to learn that I was being offered editor-in-chief. I emphatically did not want to be editor-in-chief! To begin with I didn’t think I could do the job. Secondly, I didn’t want to be boss. Especially not female boss to a staff of mainly male writers, among whom were some who clearly wanted the position since they had applied for it. I had been brought up thinking that # 1 would always be a man. And as long as I was convinced of his being a superior being, I had no problems with that.
Father Cuesta and Father Panizo actually paid my parents a visit to get their help in convincing me to take the job. Their idea was to name Cito Bautista and Manny Azarcon, executive editor and managing editor respectively. “They can do the leg work and the press work,” Father Cuesta said to my parents. “Since she’s a girl, she will need help with things like that.”
To make a long story short, I accepted the job. For a long time I believed that I had simply succumbed to pressure. But now I think I may well have been simply in denial. Maybe I really wanted the job. What do I know?
Having decided to take it on, I told myself that my first step ought to be to ensure the cooperation of the men who would be part of my team. Should I play the Helpless Female card? Or should I put on a Tough Woman act? I need not have worried. Cito and Manny were both fine editors and perfect gentlemen. Jun stayed on as news editor, and Tish as co-eds editor. Norma took over features; Nestor took over literary, with Rita Gadi as his assistant. The other section editors were Anastacio de Guia Jose Ser Sahagun, Ma. Concepcion Zamora and Ofelia Reyes. And among the new reporters was Bernardo Bernardo (who would become editor-in-chief after Jun, who would replace me) My art director was Ramon Dellosa, who had been hand-picked by Danny. It was a good team.
This was before the university campuses became battlegrounds. Though UP’s students had always been politicized, and the Collegian, always oriented toward national events, UST was still cocooned in an age of innocence. Today, going over my old copies of the 12 issues of that year when I sat behind the editor’s desk, I feel acute embarrassment. The First Quarter Storm was only a few years away. Our personal dreams and private struggles were about to take a backseat to politics. But we were blissfully ignorant of it. I think now that the best thing about my editorials was the art work by Mon Dellosa on the margins.
In 1964, the university had set up a new College of Science, and merged Liberal Arts and Philets to form the new Faculty of Arts and Letters. Mine had been the last Philets graduating class. The new college needed teachers, and I was asked to teach one undergraduate literature course, which with incredible temerity, I actually agreed to do. I had also enrolled in the graduate school. This meant that I was studying, and holding down three jobs—assistant women’s editor for Graphic Magazine, part time teacher, and editor of the V. Somehow, it all worked out. Youth makes everything possible.
I have seen the high-tech Varsitarian offices of today and I know that the UST Press is very state-of-the-art. I also know from Lito Zulueta that the staff attends regular training seminars with leading professionals as resource persons. I assume that all this progress has made our young successors better at their jobs than we were in the old days. Certainly they must be more efficient, less dreamy, more in touch not just with the rest of the country, but with the rest of the world, as, indeed, which young person today isn’t?
But I wonder if they’ll look back on this season in their life with as much nostalgic delight as I look back on Philets and the Varsitarian of my time. V

Known as the pioneer of creative non-fiction, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo was the editor in chief of the Varsitarian from 1964-1965. She received both her Bachelor of Philosophy and MA in Literature from the University of Santo Tomas. She is currently the Vice President for Public Affairs of the University of the Philippines.

SO HOW did we, a rambunctious group of some 20 over-caffeinated staffers just biding our time before springing the Great Filipino Novel on the world (or so we thought), manage with two manual typewriters, one rotary dial phone, and a weekly stipend of P5 to P10 for reporters and from P40 to P50 for the editors?
Well, you could say we were having too much fun to actually notice we were in boot camp.
While two of us were banging away stories on the antiquated machines, the rest were goofing around and needed no persuasion to become impromptu models for the staff photographers’ class assignments. The more loquacious gathered in a chattering circle that would later evolve into the Chismis Sisterhood, now on its 31st year and counting.
When the phone didn’t work (or once, when it was actually stolen), we would sprint off for face to face interviews with our sources just one or two colleges away, mini skirts flying, platform clogs skittering. By the middle of the first sem, several couples would discreetly pair off in quiet corners, hounded by hoots of warning against ‘similar activities,” a reference to the amorous goings-on in the College of Pharmacy’s Botanical Garden nearby.
Payday meant a riotous celebration at Tropical Hut on Espana, where a hefty burger was all of P4, including a drink. For the more moneyed editors, a short jeepney ride to Central Market meant shopping for wedge shoes, the latest fashion of the day and a definite splurge at P10 a pair.
Back then, you could say we already practiced pack journalism. Even as romantic pairs, we strolled around the campus in a pack, distinguished by our willingness to strike a pose at the merest sight of an SLR, quick to spot a photo-op and quicker still to corral a staff photog to immortalize us in film. The youthful shots would prove fortuitous. Many many moons later, we would haul them out before disbelieving progeny to prove that once upon a time, we had waistlines and a sense of fun. Or at least, enough gumption to imagine ourselves as Hilda Koronel’s “Ligaya,” striking a breathtaking sunset pose at Maligaya Beach, Batangas, for that groundbreaking movie, “Maynila, Sa Kuko ng Liwanag.” Twenty years after, armed with journalistic commitment to hew closely to truth, accuracy and objectivity, we attempted to re create the pose—to horrified reviews. “Brazen, shameless, heinous,” were some of the words used. Don’t you just love it when your kids show off their new enriched vocabulary?
But well, that was work.
For fun, we hied off to Batangas where we promptly appropriated the beach for “similar activities,” to the consternation of our publications director and the relentless flashlight patrol of his assistant. Christmas meant stay-in parties where Salsa was served on the dance floor, and men in skirts served as entertainment. Gift-giving varied from pathetic plants to second-hand books to plaster figurines, the meager offerings wrapped in kilometric paeans rife with poetry and signs of early poverty. “Dinaan sa dedication” would become our collective cry for years and we didn’t mind one bit.
Outside the campus, the realities of martial law lurked, a sinister shadow that would confront us many years later. But back then in the mid-70s, cocooned in the V office, it was just us, the weekly deadlines and the next photo-op in a world as heedless and self-contained as one’s youthful dreams. V
Josephine “Pennie” Azarcon-De la Cruz is the executive editor of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. She graduated magna cum laude and Rector’s Awardee in Journalism from the University of Sto. Tomas and was Associate Editor and News Editor of the Varsitarian during her college years.

Ms. Dela Cruz has won several awards in Journalism, among them two AIDS Media Awards in 2000, a DOST Science & Technology award, a National Book Award for best anthology, a Golden Quill Award for best travel story, two citations for gender-sensitive journalism. and a Silver Star award from the Women’s Health Foundation for health reporting.

Royce Mar H. Nicdao graduated from the College of Architecture in 2007. He was a Varsitarian artist from 2005 to 2007.

THE EARLY 1970s were a turning point, in more ways than one, for the Varsitarian.
It was the time the paper gradually shifted from letterpress printing to what was then considered as modern, offset printing technology.
From doing things the medieval way, which saw us conducting our presswork amid gigantic, greasy, heavyweight and monstrous-looking typesetting machines, one side of which contained fearsome, boiling metal, we discovered new technology in the form of IBM Selectric printwheel.
The shift in the physical plant was a transition matched only by a brewing clamor for change that was the rallying cry in many a campus demonstration at the time.
Demo or no demo, primitive printing or high water, we walked, marched, or ran, across the football field, depending on the exigency, from the Varsi office at the Main Building to the UST Press at the corner of Espana Boulevard and Padre Noval Street, where now stands the College of Fine Arts and Design.
Such brisk walks, under driving rain or sweltering heat, served as our excursions to a life in print, a journey we have chosen to embrace as a career years later.
The years I spent in the Varsi, beginning in 1970 when I was a freshman in my first semester at the university, had been marked with changes and challenges. Between them was a campus life filled with joy and inspiration I’d only be too happy to pay for on top of my tuition. The Varsi years were the best years of my student life, often confusing me as to the real reason I was in the university in the first place, competing as they did with my pursuit for academic excellence.
As journalism majors, we attended classes in the evening, starting at 5 p.m. With no classes in the morning, we’d show up daily, without fail, at the V office at 8 a.m. anyhow, to write our stories, make calls, or simply hang out to eat fried, skewered sweet bananas.
The good old V office, on what is now the Security Bank, was probably the most liberal, carefree office in the entire university, where artists, writers, and photographers gathered as kindred spirits who spoke a common language and shared a common dream.
We sure had our quarrels and petty fights over stories, pictures, illustrations that came in late, sketchy, hazy, or not at all. The Varsitarian at that time had two editions. The tabloid was published weekly while the magazine came out quarterly.
Between the two editions, the staff, numbering about 30, practically ran in circles as we tried to beat our deadlines at the same time that we fulfilled our academic requirements.
It was a great balancing act that we learned early on, forming the basis of our excellent multi-tasking skills years later. The years at the V taught us discipline much faster than any lesson in Moral Theology or the ROTC ever did.
Behind the frenzy of putting out a 12-page weekly newspaper, the Varsitarian staff enjoyed great camaraderie and friendship. It was fostered and cemented by constant togetherness, marked by those long walks to the printing press, the endless sharing of food and drinks and gossip, not to mention, romantic undertones and sexual overtures in the case of some. Blame it also on the sometimes lazy and always frenetic moments at the newsroom, a general feeling of brotherhood, or sisterhood as the case may be, or both, that connected the staff members into one family.
Perhaps, it was because we were strengthened by the same set of qualifying exams, the same grueling interviews that made us turn to one another in search of a little comfort. The idle time spent together in the newsroom between classes yielded some of the most sensational romances ever told inside the dark room of the Photo Section.
Maybe, our ties stemmed from the great bonding that transpired between and among staffers while some of us got reprimanded, embarrassed, or scolded in public by slave-driving editors like Rosalinda de Leon, Carolina Nuñez and Maria Corazon Evangelista, as they copyread our stories, as they howled over a missing information, a wrong caption or head, or lapses in grammar and spelling.
It didn’t matter if one was a reporter or a photographer, a section editor or an artist, an office secretary or an editor-in-chief. Everyone felt a certain one-ness, a bond with one another that fell short of an actual fraternity, minus the trimmings, the Greek letters, and the initiation rites. There was competition for excellence in one level and deep friendship in another. That’s the Varsitarian spirit that I know and remember only too well.
Years later, upon my return to the vast campus as a teacher, I would encounter some students who were on the V staff. I would ask them how things were at the V, and they would amuse me with stories that were just like the stories our friends and colleagues then, shared, cried, and laughed over.
I could sense that the Varsi spirit, at 80, has not changed at all. It has been nurtured and transplanted, like a nylon thread, from one generation to another, resulting in a common bond that links past and present Varsitarians together. The staffers still toil long and hard on their stories even as they look forward to those all-night long Christmas parties and 5-day holidays on some beach in the summer, the better to bond and close ranks with.
The young staffers also still enjoy hanging out at the V office, which is now in more posh surroundings. The Journ majors still come to the office at least eight hours ahead of their first class, which now happens to be my feature writing class.
The previous year’s Varsi staffers would come by and visit regularly, as if they never said goodbye, as if they couldn’t say goodbye to an institution that was also home and comforting bosom to them, their youthful dreams, idealism, talent, artistry.
We felt exactly the same way more than 30 years ago, when our young lives revolved around our beloved Varsi, and those long walks to the ancient printing press that left us muddied on some days and soiled by printer’s ink on other days.
Looking back, those years, those long walks across the footbal field and longer nights doing presswork, strengthened our character, made firm our resolve to be enlightened media persons, nourished and inspired by the Varsitarian’s high standards of excellence, forged by the Varsi spirit that has defined our youth and which has not escaped us at all. V

Nestor G. Cuartero has a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Santo Tomas where he teaches and is also the coordinator of its Journalism department. A longtime editor at the Manila Bulletin, he has won top awards in journalism from the Instituto Cervantes and the Pambansang Akademya ng Telebisyon sa Agham at Sining. His stories come out regularly in Bulletin publications including Philippine Panorama and Tempo. He joined the Varsitarian as a reporter, then rose from the ranks as Circle editor and managing editor when he graduated in 1974.

I WAS in high school when the First Quarter Storm broke out, and in the natural, inevitable course of events, I joined an anti-government student organization. Because I was editing my school’s student paper, I was naturally assigned to the “propaganda” section, delivering press releases to the different newspaper offices.
I remember walking through a narrow, filthy and muddy street then climbing a steep flight of stairs and emerging onto the city room of the Manila Times. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and ears. The room was teeming with people and desks and paper – in piles on the dusty desks, balled up and crumpled on the floor, spewing forth from the clattering telex machines. The noise level was also astonishing, with raised voices competing against typewriters going clickety-clack. But I was smitten – with the Times and with journalism. I went off to college determined to be working with the Times after graduation.
Of course, I didn’t reckon with Martial Law being declared just a few months later. I also didn’t reckon with having my other dream of studying in U.P. being dashed to pieces, on account of my intrepid mother’s conspiring to hide the notice of admission until well after the deadline. I ended up in the Royal and Pontifical University, telling myself I would be fine because the best journalists in the country had studied there. Even so, I was miserable, plotting ways to transfer to U.P. as soon as my mother’s back was turned.
And then, just before my freshman year was over, I took the competitive exams for The Varsitarian, UST’s student publication. Reading the V had been a source of comfort during my first year, and whetted my competitive instincts. When I passed the tests and the interview, I forgot all about my plans to transfer.

*****

I HAVE always said that whatever I know of journalism I learned at the V. There were lessons never taught in our classrooms: how to type stories straight from rolls of newsprint that your editors tore off even as you were thinking of the next paragraph; how to read copy in reverse in negatives as they were being “stripped;” how to read documents upside down on the desks of your sources as you tried to win them over with your charms; how to traverse the huge football field and avoid getting hit by balls and players as you hurried to do press work. About the only lesson I failed was how to type and smoke at the same time, which many staffers mastered, accounting for our naked typewriters strewn with ash.
One subject I never expected was Food Appreciation 101, courtesy of Felix Bautista, our publications director whom everybody called “Sir.” At our very first meeting on the first day of “apprenticeship” during the school break, Sir brought us all to a restaurant in Chinatown, introducing my virgin palate to such exotica as pig intestines (which Sir jokingly introduced as “snake meat”), lumpia you made yourself from ground pork wrapped in lettuce leaves, and century eggs with seaweed. The culinary lessons, as well as tutorials on imbibing wine and margaritas, would continue after college, when I came to work for Sir at Cardinal Sin’s information office. People are still astonished when I tell them I learned the ways of the world at the dining table of Villa San Miguel.

*****

DISCOVERIES made within the Varsitarian offices and during our annual outings to Maligaya Beach in Batangas remain with me to this day. This was where I met the man who would be my husband, and where lifetime friendships were cemented within a noisy, catty, and strangely comforting Sisterhood.
We didn’t know what sort of careers awaited us when time came for us to leave the V. This was still Martial Law, remember, and all the respectable pre-Martial Law newspapers, including the Times, had been closed down. But this didn’t stop us – in the years I made my way from reporter, to news editor, to editor-in-chief – from trying to put out the best damned student paper in the country. One learning I came away with was that while Martial Law restrictions, and the administration’s eagle eyes, prevented us from out-and-out militancy; it was still possible to push the envelope, to couch articles in seemingly innocuous terms that still brought home the message. Another lesson: it is still important to serve your audience. You may want to use the power of your medium to serve your ideology, but your readers still needed and wanted to know about events like games and competitions, and the restless pondering of young souls in poetry and essays.

*****

MY FRIENDS and I – we all grew up inside the V. We learned how to write and to report, amid the bedlam of busy offices; how to meet our weekly deadlines; how to get along, make friends with editors and staffers and yet not allow the chummy relations to get in the way of work and following orders.
Those were the years, I believe, that set me off on the road to being a journalist, though that road would take many detours, cross many barriers, and entail much heartache. But if only for such a beginning, I am grateful to the V.

Former Varsitarian editor in chief and famed journalist Rina Jimenez-David led the all-female editorial board in 1975. At present, her column, “At Large,” appears in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

This article first came off the press in the January 8, 2008 issue of the Inquirer.

JUST RECENTLY, I was asked this question, “Did you regret having prematurely left Varsitarian?” After twenty two years from the incident, I pondered the question and said “Yes, I did.” Employing my hindsight, of course I regretted leaving. My only consolation is that I did not make any other relatively bigger personal mistakes.
But then my hindsight can never really accurately predict what might have happened had I stayed. I honestly do not know. I was young and impulsive during those years. It might be the most wonderful decision I could ever make, or it might have resulted to a bigger catastrophe I could not extricate myself from.
I had that insight in the light of my present work as a practicing attorney. A large part of my present work involves handling, litigating and counseling marriage nullity cases. In many times, when I interview female clients, I seem to see mirror images of myself. It is sometimes disturbing but it gives some insights of my youth. I thought that those cases helped me a lot in relationships. After all, being bruised (court battles could be very punishing) from handling several of these nullity cases made me realize that if there is one major decision I need to make right, it is how to choose the proper partner.
In those clients I interviewed, I saw the part of me that first came out as a young news reporter in Varsi. I saw in their dreams, in their hopes, in their intelligence and liveliness, the part of me that was so unashamedly young before real life destroyed those illusions.
I passed the qualifying examinations for V staffers on March 1986. I remembered that I was eighteen years old and was totally excited with going to the beach in Balayan. I had not been to the beach for a very long time. It was pretty exciting, coupled with the prospect that boys will be with us for the six-day trip.
At that time, I did not have much interactions with boys. I graduated from an exclusive girls’ school. When I was in my fourth year high school, the nun I confided with regularly told me to choose a college with boys in it. The purpose was not to have a boyfriend but to demystify boys. So I could learn to work in the real world which contains both sexes. Hence, the prospect of being in an outing with guys in close proximity made the whole thing exciting and dangerous at the same time.
Looking back, what made the whole Varsi thing very significant was not the romantic attachments, but the prospect of working and thinking with boys. Varsi gave me a perfect opportunity to do this. It made me measure up with them, which made me realize that I could be equally efficient in a different environment. This realization was very important later on when I entered law school, where I was involved in debates with predominantly males on a regular basis.
Being a news reporter had honed my data gathering skills. It had helped me to gather courage and make the proper interviews and write what I know. I particularly remembered the case of a guy named Corpus who was killed by the University security guards within the UST premises. It gave me a small peep into investigative reporting and police procedures. That became a very good foundation for my future career.
Admittedly, my stay in Varsi only took a few months. But it is enough for me. I made some good friends in the process. It felt good to be a part of something truly significant. In the end, I realized that I could write and probably be a good human being as well. V

Bernardita S. Fortuno used to work in the Varsitarian as news reporter in the first semester of 1986. While practicing law, Atty. Fortuno also writes a legal columnist titled “Casebook”: for Woman Today magazine. She is married to Tomas Rarela and is a mother to two boys, Mozart and Ernest.

Rogin “Djinn” Tallada is a 25-year-old graphic designer and artist. He graduated from the College of Fine Arts and Design in 2004, with a major in Painting. He was a Varsitarian artist from 2003 to 2004. His thesis, “Deboto,” depicting the Feast of the Nazarene, is displayed inside the Varsitarian office.