STAR vignettes

Everytime the DAILY STAR marks an anniversary, we reminisce on the events that led to the launching of this daily newspaper. Looking back, we can hardly believe how daring and foolhardy we had been when we decided that what we would put up must be a DAILY newspaper. At the time we believed that the signals in the heavens were all in our favor: The night we made the final decision was March 10, 1982, and astronomers had announced that this was the night when the stars planets had aligned on the same quadrant. A sign from heaven itself, indeed!

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Moving swiftly, we all took our shares in the preparations for the launching of what we unanimously decided to call the DAILY STAR. Investments from the media community and from local civic clubs found us with a collection of about P120,000 which we thought was BIG money already! And so on April 12, Easter Sunday, the first issue of the Visayan DAILY STAR hit the streets. In our euphoria, we did not realize - or refused to accept - that what money we had would not last us more than a few days. How we surmounted that, we ourselves can hardly believe, and can only credit everything to Divine Intervention.

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Now that we have come through 25 years of putting out the STAR, we again reminisce on all the vicissitudes of those years. A prominent memory is how we literally went through fire and water in those years. Our first office at Luzuriaga Street burned down in a little more than a week, and all our documents and little equipment and furniture disappeared. That was the start of our first "move", because in those early years, we had to transfer nine times: from Ace Printers, to the Goldenfield Commercial Complex, to the NPC Building, to the Regent Building, to the SPCMA Building, to the Kilayko Building at San Juan Street, to the Paglaum Canteen former site at Libertad Street, and, finally, to our own structure at Araneta Street, where we now operate.

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What are the vignettes of those years that will always be unforgettable to us? Our trials by water came when typhoons struck the city and flooded our office at Libertad Street. Records, files, equipment, all got soaked or totally destroyed, printing machines refused to work. I particularly remember how I had to bring to the office all my hair dryers and we took turns blowing hot air into the motors of our Solna machine. And they worked! Accompanied by prayers and supplications, of course.

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We recall, too, how typhoon Ruping - or was it Nitang? - blew down electric poles all over the city and we had no electric power for more than a month. I especially remember pleading with the late Mr. Benjamin Lopue Sr. to borrow his extra generator and had to accompany the team dragging the monstrous equipment through the city streets to our printing office. Dear Ben Lopue, he let the generator stay with us for almost a year, and that is why we try to patronize his stores as much as we can until now.

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How could we not think of the terrible - but news-rich - days of the insurgency and how we walked the tightrope while covering both the military and the New People's Army? Or the kidnappings of Japanese Fumio Misono in Murcia and of American Tim Swanson in Silay? Ah, but those incidents gave us more opportunities to hobnob with our foreign colleagues, often getting smug with them because we knew the territory better. Their dramatic releases by the NPA captors sent us running to in Murcia in the morning, and to Patag, Silay in the afternoon, trekking through hilly areas and wading through creeks!

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Of course nothing could beat the days of the Negros Nine, when two Columban Missionaries and their fellow Filipino priest and six lay workers were charged with the killing of the Kabankalan town mayor. There we really cut our teeth on the hard news, which involved going back and forth to Kabankalan, interviewing the accused in jail, dealing with all the foreign correspondents covering the news here, attending court hearings and getting our bylines published in Irish and Australian dailies. How can I forget that I had to make my almost brand-new Toyota Liftback travel up to Oringao and Tabugon, farflung barangays of Kabankalan?

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Ah, but we had our grand moments of triumphs, too, like when we got our first "Most Outstanding Provincial Newspaper of the Country" award in 1991, several others from the Philippine Press Institute and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in between, and, the latest, most exciting (for me, personally), being an awardee again of the Rotary Club of Manila in 2003, in the company of such journalism icons as Amando Doronila, Jessica Sojo, Howie Severino, Jerry Esplanada, and the late Max Soliven and Teodoro Benigno. Oh, we did get our highs in those 25 years, you know!*

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