Toward the end of my stint at Times Journal , I was sent to do the “color” of the opening of Batasang Pambansa—meaning fashion, the women, the who’s who, and other such “soft” stuff of which news reporters would be clueless. By then I was already the Modern Living editor (as Family Journal had come to be called, not quite Lifestyle yet) for a good many years. I had gained a fair measure of self-confidence even as I kept in mind my place in the food chain. (I still wouldn’t demand to know why; I still just jumped.) Anyway I described what I could lay my eyes on in what would be Ferdinand Marcos’s last Batasan address—from the glitz and glam of the women (one wore what looked to be a 3-inch-high pearl choker, a literal stranglehold of fashion), to how many times a prominent assemblyman yawned in the course of Marcos’s speech. I cranked up my piece to meet an early deadline in the Batasan media office as Joe Luna, who by then was the Batasan’s media consultant, looked over my shoulders. When I finished, with a bit of trepidation, I handed the copy to him. He read it to the end, then grinned at me, “You got it.”
I sprang for the ladies’ room, this time to shed tears of joy.
It wasn’t all journalism that I learned from Joe Luna. After one exasperating morning he spent untangling an issue I had with a male editor who had been bugging me, he called me into his room and in a tone that was more perfunctory than fatherly, warned me about men—“Remember, when a married man tells you he can’t live without you, don’t believe him. He can.”
But Joe Luna was just one of many teachers to whom I owe a lifelong debt of gratitude. There were many others, and like
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