As the observance of an eventful Broadcasters Month and Cebu Press Freedom Week draws to a close, we must certainly have come to realize what a vital role the mass media has played in our lives and will continue to do as it further grows and develops.
As one who has lived through its early development from post-WWII years to the present, I hope to share with you my appreciation of it. A teacher taught me my ABCs in media, starting with radio broadcasting. In college before the war, I had early expressed my desire to a successful local American woman announcer (as broadcasters were called then), whom I admired and met through one of my teachers in the teacher training institute, Cebu Normal School. Wisely and kindly, she told me, “Young lady, if you meet the students I meet at the UP Cebu Junior College (where she also taught), you will understand when I tell you, return to the classroom and teach the young students how to speak English correctly.” English was then taught and widely used in schools, radio and newspapers.
And so, after graduation from a two-year teacher training course, I became a public grade school teacher while further working for my four-year BA in Education degree at the University of San Carlos, where my instructor in English, the late newsman and newspaper editor Angel Anden, informed me that a radio station was opening in downtown Cebu.
I auditioned as announcer at the first postwar radio station kzRC and got accepted as one of two radio announcers in Cebu. There was a male announcer and myself at kzRC, which was later named radio dyRC in a national rationalization of station call letters. In the pre-martial law life of radio dyRC in exactly 25 years from Sept. 21, 1947, through Sept. 21,1972, I learned the ropes in radio broadcasting from competent broadcast teachers, all talented veterans and experienced broadcasters in performance, direction and management.
I monitored the Voice of America and our sister station dzRH in Manila, which I had an opportunity to visit, observe operations and interact with fellow broadcasters. A three-month Smith-Mundt Leader grant for radio and television gave me further experience to observe and even participate in some programs in the United States. With increasing demands on working time, I reluctantly had to give up teaching for a while.
When broadcast stations in the country were shut down by the imposition of martial law on Sept. 21, 1972, I took another job in book sales, during which I was invited to teach speech improvement part-time at USC by a former co-teacher, by then dean of the College of Liberal Arts. While balancing part-time teaching and selling, I was invited by a book customer in charge of the information and public affairs department of the newly opened labor-union radio station dyYLA. After that, I had to give up sales, devoting time now back in teaching and broadcasting, my first loves.
At dyLA, then funded by the German foundation Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, I was engaged in training students and broadcasters in in proper dissemination of labor information and education. Those were the years I learned professional standards, now so much needed in today’s commercial broadcasting. It was in my early years at dyLA that the head and professor of the first Mass Media Communication program in Cebu at the University of the Philippines Cebu would bring her students to dyLA to use the station’s top facilities for recording and to observe broadcasting. That was when she offered me an opportunity to teach in that program.
I continued broadcasting and teaching part-time later at UP-Cebu until I had to leave upon the university’s enforced retirement age. During the disastrous bombings in Sept. 11, 2001, of the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon and the frustrated attempt, apparently, at the White House, I was retired from dyLA.
I left dyLA after 36 fruitful years with the station. However, I continue to handle a monthly program there, “Women’s Kapihan,” put up by the Legal Alternatives for Women Inc.
When Cebu Daily News started publication in February 1998, the editor in chief Eileen Mangubat invited me to write a column, this one that I continue to maintain communication with you, and for which I am deeply thankful to Eileen. With this weekly column, I stay in touch with current events. However, I still have to catch up with the new social media and fast-developing technological advances in mass communication.
Thanks to broadcast and print media, and its fellow practitioners, these keep me in touch with the world as a teacher, bearer of news and and communicator.
Until next week, when I take up on what has happened this week, may God continue to bless us, one and all!