By HERBERT VEGO
ON a rainy day, my nieces asked me to regale them with tales of my childhood days. Having turned into a senior citizen, I am retelling a few of those tales here, hoping that this “young once” could impart a lesson to today’s young ones.
My earliest childhood memory took me back to age three in the year 1953 in San Pedro, a barrio in San Jose, Antique. My youngest brother Walter, probably three months old, was aching from a rare skin disease. Since the nearest doctor was five kilometers away, we could only reach him by borrowing a private transportation.
There was only one man in San Pedro who owned a car, a certain Palermo. It was available for hire during emergency situations. In fact, Palermo himself would drive us to the doctor for Walter’s treatment.
But dermatology in 1953 had barely gone beyond the “primitive” stage. The prescribed ointment failed to save my brother, who died at the age of six months.
The trips to the doctor on borrowed car must have motivated my father to buy his own second-hand jeepney. It cost him three thousand pesos, a princely price at that time.
“From now on,” my father told the family, “we will go where we want to, when we want to.”
We went to a photography studio for my first studio shot. I cried on being left alone on a chair in front of a big camera, until my father handed me his fountain pen. I was toying with the pen when the black cloth-draped camera clicked.
Of course, I did not know then that it was symbolic of what I would eventually do for a living – write, write, write.
To regain his investment on our jeepney and earn, too, Tatay registered it as a “public utility” vehicle. It was the first passenger jeepney plying the seven-kilometer San Pedro-San Jose route. It could accommodate 12 passengers at 10 centavos per passenger. Our competitor was a bigger but dilapidated bus.
One day, my Lola Maria gave me a silver 10-centavo coin. She said I could trade it for bread or candy. So I ran to the corner store and pointed at a jar full of rounded candies called dulce de limon. The smiling storekeeper wrapped 20 of them and handed me a bigger-sized five-centavo coin as change.
In my innocence I thought that I would always get a change each time I bought with a coin. But I got none the next time I took my coin to the same store for the same dulce de limon. Anyway, it taught me a lesson on the perishable value of money.
The biggest-sized coin at the time had the smallest value. One centavo, bigger than today’s five pesos, could buy a piece of wrapped candy.
I was five years old when I sat in a grade-one classroom as “visitor.” Nursery and kindergarten schools were unheard of yet.
In 1956 at age six, I was in the same classroom, my mom having enrolled me in grade one. The only grade-one textbook at that time was Pepe and Pilar.
Our school supplies were cheap. Seven pieces of pad paper cost only five centavos.
We did not have to buy books in public schools. The government lent us all our textbooks, returnable at the end of the school year, to be relent to the next batch.
Inflation was a slow process as prices remained constant for a decade or more. In the mid 1950s and until the mid-1960s, gasoline cost 30 centavos per liter. I should remember because I worked as our jeepney conductor during summer vacations.
I remember that a bus ride from San Jose to Iloilo City cost only a peso.
The minimum wage of government employees at that time was P120 per month, and that was good enough.
We practiced “business” in first year high school in 1962. Each day, a group of us freshmen at the Antique High School would be assigned by our Economics teacher, Miss Diana Grasparil, to man the school’s retail store. One day, she read to us a letter from a soft drink company announcing price increase – from 10 centavos to 15 centavos per bottle.
“Class,” she told us. “This is just the beginning of bad news for your parents. Their income would buy lesser goods.”
I had thought of asking my parents to raise my weekly allowance, which was a peso and 50 centavos, but changed my mind out of pity for them.
Miss Grasparil’s words ring truer today than in those days. We earn much more money than our parents did, but for much lesser goods. I wish prices have not changed and we have the same amount of money that we have now./PN
