Photo by Jaime Campos
This
article was written by Neal Cruz for the Amihan magazine in 2012
The Varsitarian
helped me finish a journalism course (Litt. B.) at the University of Santo
Tomas. Without it, I would most likely have dropped out, as I would not have
been able to afford the expense. I was a working student – although I had no
regular job yet. I supported myself by freelancing for the national magazines.
As a high school student at the St. James Academy in
Malabon, run by the Maryknoll Sisters, I started writing short stories. My
Literature teacher, Sr. Stephen Marie, encouraged me to write. It was she who
told me to take up journalism at UST.
Before I graduated from St. James, I wrote a short story on
the Hukbalahap uprising then raging in Central Luzon. It was about a farmer
whom the Huks tried to recruit. He refused; he did not want to get involved. He
just wanted to be left in peace to cultivate his small farm to support his
finally. Finally, the Huks shot him in the back while he was plowing his field.
The final paragraphs described how he felt, what went through his mind, as his
blood and life ebbed out of him.
I submitted it to the Philippines
Free Press while I was still a senior high school but I was already a
freshman at the UST Faculty of Philosophy and Letters when it was published.
For that story, I was paid the handsome amount of P50!
P50 is almost nothing today (it can hardly pay for one
hamburger sandwich at a fast food chain) but at that time, in the mid-1950s, it
was a huge amount. Consider this for comparison: At that time, outstanding
painters like Carlos V. Francisco and Vicente Manansala, now both National
Artists, were paid only P50 for painting covers for This Week Magazine. When I interviewed Fernando Amorsolo, also a National
Artist now, at his home at España Extension in Quezon City, he was selling
several of his small oil studies of landscapes for only P50 each, but I could
not afford to buy even one. Now those paintings are worth hundreds of thousands
of pesos.
Anyway, when the Varsitarian announced its literary contests,
I submitted my short story, titled “To Work in Peace”, and it won second prize.
I won, if memory serves me right, P100.
Encouraged by that win, I submitted three entries in the
Varsitarian contests the next year: two short stories and one essay.
They all won: a first and a third in the short story
category and a first in the essay category. I won a total of P 550! At that
time, it was something like winning a minor prize in the lotto today.
The two short stories were later published by This Week, the Sunday magazine of The Manila Chronicle. the Varsitarian
prize moneys and the money paid to me by the magazines paid for my tuition,
books, and other expenses.
The next year, I took the examinations for applicants to the
“V” editorial staff. I became Literary Editor. This is where the “V” really
helped me. Staff members were given scholarships and monthly stipends. Mine
was, I think, P30 a month. That will hardly buy a pack of cigarettes today, but
at that time, it was enough to get by. Shows us how inflation has eroded the
value of the peso. The exchange rate then was P2 to $1; now it is down to more
than P40 to $1.
As I gained more experience in the “V”, I wrote articles for
the different national magazines. The fees paid me, for them, plus the
scholarship at UST and the stipends paid by the “V” were enough not only for my
school needs but also to treat my barkada to mami-siopao at Ma Mon Luk whenever
I had a story or article published.
Also because of my experience at the printing press of the “V”,
as well as for my published works, I was hired by the Manila Chronicle as Literary Editor of This Week Magazine. My barkada at Philets and the Varsitarian at UST,
namely Juan T. Gatbonton (who was the “V” Literary Editor before me), Arnold
Moss, Lito Molina and Amante Paredes (who were reporters of the “V”), were also
hired to become associate editors of This Week Magazine. This Week became the
number one magazine at that time, considered until today as “the golden age of
magazine publishing.”
That feat would not have been possible without the training,
financial help and confidence that the Varsitarian gave us as well as the
guidance of our professors. We owe everything to the “V” and to them.
