That night my colleagues couldn’t stop heaping their gallows humor on me. They remembered too well the times Joe Luna— that’s how we the newsroom mortals called him—made sport of my journalistic naïvete and early lack of skills. He had been my newsroom tormentor. But that night, I already realized that this slight figure, who suffered from an ailment that wasted his body, was my teacher.
One of my teachers.
Perhaps a remembrance of teachers past will go past the head of my kids’ generation who is not as fearful, or at least mindful, of authority. When you try to teach them a lesson or two, you get the feeling that they regard learning as merely optional—take it or leave it. Your voice of experience is just that—a voice—which
One night after putting the paper to bed, as we were winding down, Letty Magsanoc told me something I will not forget—“When you have power, you don’t need to show it.”
could be drowned out by their iPods. They may or may not pluck out their ear plugs as you talk to them—again that’s their prerogative. They don’t quake in their boots, like we did, before a figure of authority.
“When you’re asked to jump, don’t ask why, just ask how high!” That was the dictum we lived by in our career (perhaps, we still
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