The Cebu heritage community lost an advocate and supporter last week in the untimely passing of my friend Gil ‘Boy’ Verallo. Known by the public as the president and chief executive officer of First Agro-Industrial Rural Bank Inc. (FairBank), Boy and his wife, Dinah Fernan Verallo, were my students in the Executive MBA Program of the University of San Carlos about a decade back. That was the first time I met them, strangely as it may seem, because like the two of them, my roots are from their hometown in Bogo City.
We were linked back a few years later with Boy’s participation in the heritage forum set up by Arnold Carl Sancover titled “Cebu Heritage Watch” on Skyscrapercity.com. You could immediately sense his love for his hometown of Bogo in his avatar named, “Taga-Bogo.” Those years in that forum marked a lively exchange of information about Cebu’s past which eventually culminated in the “Kabilin” television show that aired on Sugbo TV, the now-defunct channel that was started in 2010 by former Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia. Through that forum, one need not go anywhere if one needed to know more about Cebu’s past since the forum is archived on-line.
Although Boy is no longer with us, he has left a treasure of information that would have been lost with him as he returned to the Lord last Tuesday evening. I learned about his passing the following morning while we were in one of the meeting rooms named after National Artists in Painting at the top of the Bank of the Philippine Islands headquarters in Makati. We were there with Caloy Apuhin, manager of the BPI Cebu Mango Branch. The meeting had to do with Boy’s unstoppable passion, numismatics, since BPI is set to launch a book that he along with Caloy and I had originally planned to work on.
Illness out of a debilitating cancer that had metastasized and for which doctors originally gave him a year or less to live (he made it three), eventually forced him to back out of the project.
With his passing, I also personally lost an avid supporter of the archaeological excavations I pursued in Cebu on behalf of the University of San Carlos. During excavations we carried out in Paypay, Daanbantayan (November-December 2009) and the San Remigio project (in 2011, 2012 and this year), Boy would always drop by our site bringing large and fresh yellowfin and blackskip tuna for us to cook and end the ‘monotony’ of seeing nothing but skeletons and more skeletons. He also went out of his way and invited our Manila-based excavation partners from the National Museum to dine with his family in Bogo one weekend. Aware of his ailment, I made it a point never to tell him whenever we were in Bogo (less than 10 km from San Remigio) on weekend trips so as not to disturb his much-needed rest.
Boy was extremely generous when it came to sharing information and this is made obvious when one sees him on many of the nearly 30 episodes of Kabilin, which one can still access on YouTube. He spoke passionately about guerrilla and PNB emergency notes on one episode when such notes were discovered at the off-site storage of the Cebu Provincial Treasury. He also explained to me the strength of his faith through Bogo’s processional San Vicente Ferrer image made of wood and ivory that has been with the family since time immemorial. He showed us how the Verallo family prepared their carrozas for the Holy Week and the traditions that went with it. And he explained with gusto the Chinese heritage, his own in fact, of Bogo and how many of the successful entrepreneurs in Cebu City today take their roots from that northern Cebu town.
Boy’s fame did not start nor end with cultural heritage, however. Even US Ambassador Harry K. Thomas recognized his many efforts in micro-entrepreneurship by visiting him at Fairbank and speaking at an awarding ceremony for projects in micro-entrepreneurship carried out by the bank in 2011. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas often invited him to share his vast knowledge of the field with other rural bankers. As a town councilor, it was Boy who successfully steered efforts together with Mayor Reynaldo Dy and the town council, that eventually placed Bogo in the Hall of Fame of the National Clean and Green Project, winning for three consecutive years (from 1996 to 1998). Those huge trophies, now at the Bogo City Museum, are a testament to his untiring efforts, brought to an end by a treacherous disease.
Truly Cebu lost a man in the prime of his life. The Almighty had to call him back home to end the suffering that goes with cancer. It has now fallen on the shoulders of Dinah to carry the family and the many branches of Fairbank. I am, however, thankful that we who have known Boy have been left with the knowledge that in this life, we had been given the chance to meet a truly remarkable man.
Go to your rest now, Boy.