My Inquirer story

Pam Pastor’s “My Inquirer Story” in the Lifestyle section made me look back on my own. My first Inquirer Opinion column appeared on July 17, 1991. That makes “Looking Back” the second oldest Inquirer OpEd column, next to Ceres Doyo’s “Human Face.” At 33, going on 34 years, this column is older than the editorial assistants, Ange and Maxine, who dutifully put it to bed twice a week. However, my Inquirer story didn’t begin with this column. It goes back four years to my articles in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. The first appeared on July 6, 1987, dating my relationship with the Inquirer to 37 years and counting.

Fate put me in a Spanish language oral exam at Ateneo with Kara Magsanoc. We both passed and became friends ever since. Kara introduced me to her mother, Letty Jimenez Magsanoc (LJM), and it helped that a handful of her staffers at Mr. & Ms. Special Edition were batchmates at Ateneo. In the days that the Senate was deciding whether to keep US military bases in the Philippines or not, I wrote about the Spanish and Philippine-American wars that brought these to our shores. Email was not even a dream at the time and I submitted a physical copy of my article to LJM at the Inquirer office in the old Madrid Restaurant on Edsa. She went over the edited copy with me in a room filled with tacky gold-painted statues and high-back chairs of the once most popular restaurant in Manila. When the Inquirer moved to the old Far East Bank building in Intramuros, I submitted a copy there, too. Those few articles were formative because beyond the red editorial markings came lessons in how to tell a story. Letty would show how a paragraph in the middle of the article could move to the beginning or end and make the storytelling stronger. She would encircle a word or two and ask, “What exactly do you mean?” She would then propose other words that made the sentence better. A pity that this close, hands-on instruction will not be experienced by a generation that sends their copy in my email.

I started writing, at the tail end of the first Marcos administration, for Weekend Magazine, the Sunday supplement to the pro-government Philippines Daily Express. I think I was hired because I made history engaging. It was also considered “safe” and non-political, though I was to learn later that one could actually comment on the present by using the past. I also wrote under pseudonyms for: Veritas, Mr. & Ms. and Newday. “Looking Back” first appeared in the Lifestyle pages of the Daily Globe on Oct. 15, 1987. LJM once told me that Philippine history is too important to be consigned to the Lifestyle pages. She advised me to speak to the editors and request that the column be moved to the OpEd page. I sat on this because the OpEd columnists were way older than me. They wrote serious commentaries on the present, not the past. When LJM followed up, I explained that I had prime space in the back-page of the newspaper. I even had space for the archival photographs I dug up during my research. LJM then asked, “How will people take you seriously, if your column appears beside a photo of Dolphy?”

In 1991, when LJM invited me to join the Inquirer as a columnist, all it took to formalize the matter was a handshake with founding publisher Eugenia D. Apostol. The Inquirer office was then on Romualdez Street near Paco Park. All I remember of that office was the news desk was dominated by a terrifying sign that declared: “Deadlines wait for no one.—EDA.” I pronounce the same words each semester in class, telling my freshmen students that they do not need a blue moon, a good mood, or a particular pen to write. Their only inspiration is the deadline.

This column went off-air for six months when I was a Benedictine novice. A guest columnist took my place and the column resumed in January 1994. I made up for lost time by writing two 100-day countdowns for the front-pages of the Inquirer. First for the 1998 Philippine Centennial of Independence and again in 1999 for the coming of the new millennium. With daily deadlines added to my twice-weekly column deadlines, this is something you should never try at home. It is something I will never do again. Aside from OpEd, I also began two short-lived columns for the Lifestyle section: (H)ISTORYA and SANTO. Both were 300 words long. (H)istorya was for historical material that were too engaging to waste, but not enough to be developed into a column of 800 words. Santo was on obscure, quirky saints we were not told about in school or in church.

As I approach four decades of writing for the Inquirer, I wonder what comes next. I am a relic of the analog age. Someone who typed manually, submitted hard copies. This generation will not know the smell of newsprint with the morning coffee or experience the hassle of ink stains newsprint left on the fingers. It is more convenient to read online today, but then this is my Inquirer story. What’s yours?

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu