Newspapers and civilization

An American in Manila

The moist heat of Luzon was bearable in the still of morning. Starting school at sunrise meant I got home in the early afternoon and had the rest of the sweltering day to relax. Hopping off the bus in front of our home at 34 Cambridge Circle, I rushed through the door, tossed my book bag onto a chair, and reached for the Stars and Stripes. Flopping onto the sofa, I would quickly flip to the ball scores, then devour the comics, and later skim the bold black headlines shouting about the war. There was a lot going on in 1968.

I learned the habit of news-reading by following the Stars and Stripes. This well-put together tabloid became my pipeline to the greater world of culture, commerce and conflict. I followed the Dodgers: Don Drysdale pitched six consecutive shutouts that year; and Yankees: Mickey Mantle’s final season. I got caught up in the daily doings of the comics page characters: Maggie and Jiggs in Bringing Up Father, Oop and Ooola in Alley Oop, Blondie and Dagwood in Blondie, Charlie Brown and Lucy in Peanuts, Mandrake the Magician, Katzenjammer Kids—all of them, even Mary Worth. I ventured into the business pages memorizing the thirty companies in the Dow Jones industrial index. Why? Curiosity, and to prepare my eleven-year-old brain for the big future of grand possibilities.

Unless a typhoon blew in, or an election turned to a riot, local news didn’t make the Stars and Stripes. That came from the Bulletin, where the Filipino love of nicknames and acronyms was on exuberant display. “FM and FL grace Fil-Am night,” which decoded to Ferdinand Marcos and first lady Imelda Marcos attend opening at Philippine-American Center. Sports coverage included play-by-play for jai alai matches, which I failed to grasp, but still found engaging to read through.

Newspapers were a constant presence at breakfast tables, the dentist’s office, the library, the corner sari-sari and cigarette shop; sure. They were also seen in society’s upper reaches: hotels, airports, banks, clubs, embassies. International executives arrived at their desks to find the morning’s Stars and Stripes, Manila Bulletin and Asian Wall Street Journal. Fanned out next to the de rigueur steaming cup of freshly-brewed java (actual Java), crisp, untouched, ready for reading, the papers practically vibrated with developments, scoops, and scandals. And, implicitly, for the careful reader, the papers held the potential for revealing that subtle-but-important fact, one that could be acted upon to gain an edge over the competition.

He’s well-informed meant the gentleman read newspapers and books and talked to people. Women of the same habit were said to be formidable.

Launched during the Civil War and published daily since WWII, Stars and Stripes is the newspaper of record for the U.S. military. The primary editions are Pacific Stars and Stripes and European Stars and Stripes. The parade of history is captured in its pages.

Manila Bulletin began life in 1900 as a shipping journal. It survived world wars, the Japanese occupation and the martial presidency of Ferdinand Marcos. It holds on as a leading English-language journal serving metropolitan Manila.