‘Oh Danny Boy’

By Herbert Vego

 

“Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling

From glen to glen and down the mountainside

The summer’s gone and all the roses falling

It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.”

As to why the late Danny Fajardo would often sing “Danny Boy” to us his barkada whenever we were “karaokeing” at the defunct Army & Navy Club in Manila, it was not only because it stressed his nickname; it was also because of its poignant tune and lyrics on the power of love transcending the finality of death.

I write about Danny now because today (September 9) marks the second anniversary of his death.

While sitting down to write this, I remember that night when our common friend Rodolfo “JR” Jarumahum Jr. called to say, “Wala na si DF.”

“DF” how we called Daniel G. Fajardo, the founder of Panay News, where I had been editor-in-chief and columnist.

It was hard to believe that Danny had not survived an emergency heart bypass surgery in a renowned hospital in Metro Manila.  Barely one week had passed since JR and I shared coffee and bread with him at Hotel del Rio.

Today, Danny Fajardo still lives in our memory because of his pioneering upliftment of the local print media. As publisher of what used to be a weak weekly that has turned into a strong daily, he had charted a tough journey.

I cherish the thought that a stroke of serendipity had triggered our working partnership through thick and thin.  It was his wife Maria, my classmate from grade 5 to first-year college, who had bonded that union.

By the time he died at 72, Danny had transformed his weekly paper into a daily; and had nurtured it as the breeding ground for many other past and present local editors and journalists, including this writer and Lemuel Fernandez.

Fernandez, incidentally, has gone a long way, having founded his own paper, the Daily Guardian, which became the “starting point” for editor-in-chief Francis Allan Angelo.

I had already spent 11 years as a journalist in Manila when Danny and Mary wired me to come to Iloilo City to edit the weekly tabloid that they were putting up in April 1981.

The paper began as a “squatter” in Danny’s insurance agency at Ong Bun Building on Ledesma Street. At that time, there were already three English weeklies here which were surviving on paid legal notices from the local courts of law. A new competitor would have to wait for one year before qualifying for the raffle of such ads.

We had to look for commercial ads. To attract advertisers, our paper should attract readers first.

“If you could sell refrigerator to the Eskimos,” Danny would motivate his sales staff, “then you have what it takes to sell subscriptions.”

Danny and I challenged our reporters to “become an alternative press aimed at expanding the frontiers of press freedom.” Even if then President Ferdinand Marcos had already lifted martial law, no other local newspaper dared to criticize him.

By the time Danny died two years ago, Panay News and the Daily Guardian had become friendly competitors in purveying daily news and opinions via the print and internet media.

Goodbye, Danny Boy. Thank you for playing the role of father to the present generation of newspapermen all over Western Visayas.

We imagine you reciting from memory this Bible verse from 2 Timothy 4:7, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

-oOo-

WHAT is the difference between “Oplan Valeria” and “Oplan Kakas Jumper”?

Nothing. Both refer to the same action being taken by Iloilo City’s energy distributor, MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power). It’s all about dismantling “jumpers” or illegal electrical connections.

MORE Power’s crackdown on power pilferage has resulted in the identification and demolition of more than 30,000 illegal connections. That is almost half of the 65,000 legal ones.

That big number proves that Panay Electric Co. (PECO), the previous distribution utility, had allowed the malpractice resulting in systems loss charged to paying customers.

PECO, as respondent of a P630-million class suit for overbilling, was ordered by the ERC to refund the claimants of the said amount.

The anomaly was one of the reasons why the House franchise committee rejected the application of PECO for renewal of franchise.

The crackdown aims not only to eliminate the power pilferers but also to “legalize” them into the mainstream of low-load customers. They thus safeguard themselves from the long arm of the anti-pilferage law.

So far, six recidivist pilferers have already been charged in court with power pilferage, a crime punishable by reclusion temporal (imprisonment of 12 years and 1 day to 20 years) or a fine ranging from P50,000 to P100,000, or both.

Totoo pala ang sinabi ni Katodo Jonathan that crime does not pay.