Towards instilling a sense of Baguio history

BENCHWARMER

Ramon S. Dacawi 

BAGUIO CITY -- As we go to press this Friday afternoon, Baguio girl and anthropologist Patricia Okubo Afable is at the Baguio City National High School. She’s back in school  as resource – not guest – speaker on the 97^th founding anniversary of her alma mater.

The format is a symposium, not a formal foundation day program. Fittingly so,  for her sharing is not a formal address directly dwelling on the foundation day theme: “Sustaining Excellence in the 21^stCentury”.

For all intents and purposes, however, the sharing is to inspire interest in and to eventually develop and sustain community interest in its own history.

Hers is a sharing of bits of local history, that of her city and of her school. The sharing comes just when  alumni, faculty and the  present crop of students  of Dear Ole Baguio City High  are suddenly into research and discussion on when Baguio’s oldest existing public high school was founded. The research is for the school’s centennial three years from now, if only the authenticity of its founding in 1916 can be verified.

It was an honor spending almost a whole morning the other week with Patricia in her home at P. Burgos, to discuss over coffee her sharing on invitation of school principal, Dr. Elma Donaal. P. Burgos is home to many Baguio journalists.  That’s where her mother, the irrepressible columnist CecilleAfable, the dean of Baguio media, used to host powwows for us, provincial reporters.

Patricia, a research associate in the Asian Cultural History Program, Museum of National History of the Smithsonian Institution, came home with brothers Andy and Yongyong to mark the first anniversary of Mother Cecille’s passing on to the great newsroom in the sky on Independence Day last year.

Andy, who, like Patricia, is based in the United States, ribbed us when he overheard we were discussing some vignettes of Baguio history. “Baguio history,” he said, “is imagined in Maryland”, referring to his sister’s address in the U.S.

His was actually a compliment for the exhaustive research work and writing Patricia had done and is still doing about local history and Igorot culture. Among her books and publications are “Japanese Pioneers in the Northern Philippine Highlands: A Centennial Tribute”, “Journeys from Bontoc to the Western Fairs, 1904-1915” (about the BontocIgorots who were exhibited in the 1904 St. Louis Fair), and “Notes on Ibaloy Cultural History” that provided essence to the Ibaloy dictionary compiled by missionary Lee Ballard and published the other year.

After her mother’s memorial last year, Patricia generously had somebody deliver to me a copy of “Japanese Pioneers”. Last March, she checked by e-mail whether I received it, after Dr. Alex Fangonil, her classmate at the City High and fellow expatriate, told her we met when he came home early this year.

While here, Dr. Fangonil took time to visit the city cemetery, to take a photo of the epitaph of Engr. Eusebius J. Halsema, the first mayor of Baguio. He rued that the epitaph that both of us agreed was apt – Baguio is his monument -, had been carelessly changed.

Afterwards, Manong Alex, a Baguio boy with a keen sense of and passion for local history,  e-mailed me a pre-war map of  Baguio showing the location of “Topside” somewhere withint he present-day Good Shepherd Convent at Mines View Park. Topside, as noted by Patricia in “Japanese Pioneers…”, was the elegant home of Governor-General William Cameron Forbes he had ordered built in 1906. To build it, Patricia said, eight Japanese masons used granite mined in the vicinity.

Patricia wrote that “the Forbes and the Worcester houses were among the first to be built to showcase Baguio (before 1910) and they were built of substantial materials, but even the city itself at that time had no interest in preserving them as models of some sort”.

She also noted that “the house that RoquePeredo built in 1915 along Navy Road will be 100 years old soon. I know the Peredo family is preparing a reunion to celebrate this. I wish I had known about it while doing research on the Japanese settlers’ book”.

“Now that I have your ear,” she continued, “I think you will be interested to know that the plaques for the two Asin Road tunnels make the big mistake of saying that they go back to the Spanish period.

Actually, they were built to accommodate the cable/cog railway that had been planned from Aringay through Galiano and Asin to Baguio. I don’t have the exact dates, but this is between 1910 and 1914, when the city was looking for alternatives to the erosion-prone Kennon Rd. and had not mustered the political will to fix Naguilian Rd.  (this was the old Spanish horse trail, right?) for heavy vehicular traffic (My Japanese relatives worked on these tunnels, so the stories are old ones.)

Listening to Patricia  and to Dr. Fangonil (who also resides in Maryland) whenever any of the two comes home, made me realize that some Baguio boys and girls now living abroad actually never left home, if only for their contributions to the city’s development. In the case of these two graduates of City High, it is researching, studying,  interpreting and sharing  Baguio history for posterity. (e-mail:mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments.)