PEOPLE POWWOW | Alive and kicking at 36

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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Thursday, April 6, 2017
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TOMORROW, Panay News will mark its 36th anniversary – counting from its first issue dated April 7, 1981. Having written about each anniversary every year, I wonder, “What more could I write about without being redundant?”  

That’s impossible in a recollection piece such as this. I can only avoid plagiarizing myself by revising previous accounts and by adding hitherto untold trivia, such as the fact that the hundreds of men and women who man the offices of Panay News today were not yet been born in 1981. I am a stranger to them during rare occasions that we gather together.

Serendipity has stuck me with this paper and its founders – spouses Daniel and Maria Faiardo – for 36 years.

The former Maria Santillan was my classmate from Grade 5 to first year college. She was our valedictorian at San Pedro Elementary School; and salutatorian in high school at the Antique National School in San Jose, Antique.

She was managing editor while I was news editor of our school organ, The Madia-as. Little did we know back then (1966) that we were training for a working partnership.

I was already a working journalist in Manila when I learned that she had married a salesman, Danny, and that they were both working for a pre-need company holding office in Makati. The first and only time I went there, only Mary was around.

It was only by coincidence that I met Danny for the first time in 1973. He was with her and their first baby in a bus plying the San Jose, Antique-Iloilo City route. I was in the same bus with my wife and our three-month-old son.

It was not until 1980 that I purposely met Danny at Aloha Hotel in Manila to solicit an advertisement for a monthly magazine. He did not disappoint me.

The opportunity for me to return the favor presented itself in April 1981 when I received a telegram from Mary. She and Danny would like to have me as full-time editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper they had just launched. I nodded, accepting the offer as a gamble that could either push me up or pull me down, since I had already established myself as newspaper reporter and publicist in Manila for 11 years.

The first day I reported to Panay News’ office at Ong Bun Building on Ledesma  Street, I met Mary’s sister Vicky Santillan-Primero (now deceased), a college professor who was sitting as temporary editor in lieu of the first editor, Jerry Taclino, who had unexpectedly resigned.

It was Jerry – a “brother” in religious faith – who had convinced Danny to go into newspaper business. I wonder today whether Panay News could have sprung without Jerry. Until then, Danny was both a bus operator and an insurance agent.  

We had no paid reporters.  Instead, we relied on Danny’s insurance employees and Mary’s siblings – notably Edith and Oscar – to contribute stories and solicit ads.

Four of the Fajardo children were still either in the elementary grades or below school age. Two remained to be born.

With no printing press of our own, we had to engage the services of printing presses, determined to break readers’ and advertisers’ resistance to the local newspapers.

For lodging, we rented a room at the house of “Kano” on Quezon Street.

Every morning, Danny and I would walk around the block to insert a free copy of the paper under every parking vehicle’s windshield wiper.

“There will come a time,” he told me, “when they will look for the paper and buy it.”

That time has come many times over. This paper has gone a long way from that fledgling lulubog-lilitaw weekly to the best-selling regional daily. This is the only daily in Western Visayas that utilizes the high-speed Goss web press. By the time the sun rises, this paper would have reached thousands of subscribers and newsstands all over the region.

Danny and Mary have rested on their laurels, having fully relegated the management of the paper to their children.

The editorial wheel now runs smoother under a younger crop of professional journalists spearheaded by Rex Maestrecampo and Daryl Lasafin as editor-in-chief and managing editor, respectively.

As for me, it’s good enough that I still write a column thrice a week – proof that, at 67, I am not teetering on the brink of senility. (hvego@yahoo.com/PN)

 

 

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