“I’ll pump a bullet into your head if you claim that’s a bullet lede!”
His class was at 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and we started getting nervous at lunchtime. It was the ’80s, and pants with lots of buttons were in fashion. One of my female classmates was wearing those pants, and Beltran told the class, “Look at Santos’s pants. Obviously, she doesn’t trust anybody because look how many buttons she has to wear.” Sometimes he would bring examples of excellent journalism and pass photocopies around (there was no Internet then). Those pieces made me think, “Wow, it must be great to be a journalist.” Reading them made me realize why we had to go through that kind of training. Then he would talk about his exploits as a journalist. I remember him telling us that he was glad to have been jailed during martial law because that was the only time he got to read all the books he’d never read in his life. He told us how his newspaper found out that Marcos was plan- ning to declare martial law. They had this contact, a janitor, who would pass them the trash from a certain government office every night. From the scraps of paper, journalists pieced together the whole plot. Beltran also taught us that if you hold a piece of carbon paper up to the light, you can read the information that was copied on it (a technique that is no longer useful in the digital age). Journalism seemed so exciting. I had no plans of becoming a journalist. We had no journalists in our family. I thought I was going to take up law. I only took Journ 101 because I couldn’t get into any other class. Also, I dropped Math 11 because I was sure I couldn’t pass it.
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker