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30-YEAR SERVICE AWARDEES
‘There will always be room for a good newspaper’ HOORAY! On Thursday, Philippine Daily Inquirer honored 57 employees for their work and service to the company over the years. They included 4 employees who had worked for 30 years, 6 who had worked for 25 years, 20 for 20 years, 4 for 15 years, 14 for 10 years and 9 for 5 years. Their scope of work cut across the various departments and operations of the Inquirer—from editorial to marketing and advertising, and financial and general services. Those who had worked for more than 20 years admit to having spent the best years of their lives with Inquirer. Read their stories in this section.
By Artemio T. Engracia Jr. News Editor
F
or the past five years, I’ve been looking forward to this; at the same time I’ve been dreading this moment. It is therefore with mixed emotions that I speak here in behalf of the three other loyal Inquirer employees—Ely Fugaban, Cynthia Balana and Tino Tejero—who have devoted a good portion of their lives—30 years at least—in the service of this company. This speech signals my emancipation from the slavery of deadlines, from the daily grind of newspaper work, and from a lifelong addiction to this substance called news. Finally, I will soon be able to drive my car with music, not news, on the radio, and have dinner with my
family on a daily basis. For the past 45 years, I never got to be home for most of the holidays, Christmas in particular. I was never home when the kids would come home from school, and I was never of help with their homework. I hope it’s not too late to make up for lost time. Otherwise, as one retiring journalist once said, I will just be another pretty face with plenty of money to buy maintenance medicines with. I have long dreaded this moment, for I will soon be bidding goodbye to my other family—the Inquirer and the dedicated men and women who, for more than three decades, turned what was once a ragtag operation into an organization that, as I have said many times before, has become the yardstick by which all other media—print, broad-
cast or online—are measured. Many years ago, I attended the party to commemorate the 50-year journalism career of the respected editor Rod Reyes. I wondered then if I would ever reach that milestone, the way I once wondered if I would ever finish an Ironman Triathlon. Today, I’m five years away from that milestone, and I’m determined to reach that summit one way or the other. Loyal service Also today, I want to reintroduce to you the three other Inquirer employees who had rendered 30 years of loyal service to the company. Ely Fugaban of DPU was part of the editorial team that I organized when the Inquirer bowling tournament switched from duckpin to tenpins years ago. I asked a
friend of mine to teach the team the rudiments of tenpin bowling and I’m proud to say that Ely and the other members of that team went on to become among the Inquirer’s top bowlers. Ely was as dedicated as a bowler as he was as an Inquirer worker. I never saw much of Tino Tejero in the last 30 years. Although we shared the same newsroom, it’s no exaggeration to say that we shared no more than 30 words in conversation for 30 years. I heard he would sneak into the office and work well into the night when everyone else had gone home to sleep. Once, Letty Magsanoc, our beloved editor in chief, asked Tino to join the newsdesk but he refused. His reason: Life is too short to be correcting other people’s mistakes. Tino, as you probably know by now, is a man of
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Artemio T. Engracia Jr.