Covering the essential Ka Blas
FROM the trenches in Manila’s chaotic media and labor front, to a serene afternoon by Lake Geneve, Ka Blas Fajardo Ople, the larger-than-life former Senate President, foreign affairs secretary, labor secretary, Constitution framer, was, to me, someone who never strayed from what I would call the essential Blas F. Ople.
Down to earth. Madaling kausap. Humble despite his intelligence and his largely self-fueled education.
He was a few years younger than my father, Calixto Fernandez Jr., also a journalist like him, when they were starting out in the pre-martial law stable of the Timesmirror-taliba. My father covered City Hall and court news, and in the afternoons was made to close some pages. And Ka Blas? Having displayed his ability to write well on almost any topic as a result of his expansive reading habits, he was tapped to write editorials besides covering the news.
They were the quintessential hard-nosed journalists of their generation—hard-working, intelligent, tireless, tough interviewers but soft-hearted when writing about common folk and the marginalized. And they were excellent story tellers, especially when sharing booze with each other and their peers at the end of a long, hard day.
Ka Blas improved constantly on this last skill, thus making himself the perfect source for journalists when he went on to be a public servant, with several incarnations. I didn’t have the chance to cover him in his long years as labor secretary; and later as foreign affairs secretary. But in between those two
Cabinet positions, he was a senator for many years, and it was during those years that we covered him with all the gusto that star-struck reporters had.
Ka Blas was a dream interviewee. He said the best things, used the right words, told stories in an engaging manner, and, unlike other news sources who just liked to hear their voices, he kept one eye out on the interviewer. If he noticed you’re
not writing as fast as he spoke, he would deliberately slow down or repeat some key words. He seemed to keep that unique talent of journalists to read notes backwards, so that – we sensed it in the Senate beat – he could read what we were writing down even though he had an inverted view of our notebook.
Because he was such a voracious reader, understandably his vocabulary was robust. He loved using such multi-syllabic words to journalists such as impregnable, intermittent, transmogrified, and, his most memorable – interregnum. We thought he deliberately used those words to play a prank on us, to force us to run to the dictionary.
If his English vocabulary was robust, so was his cabinet of Filipino words. The true son of Bulacan used the most colorful and precise words. Reporters especially remember some of his favorites— “gulugod” for spine and “kabuktutan” for anomalies. But he also used street words occasionally, and this we found amusing. On the sidelines of the ILO assembly in Geneva in the late nineties, we joined him on a brief boat ride, where he wore his new pair of shoes---we had toured the Bally plant the day before, and got a couple of pairs at factory price. But as we were navigating for space near the berthing line, a boat accidentally hit a post, creating a wave that sprayed water on ours. The Senate President’s precious new shoes got wet with the spray. He grinned, but you could sense the disappointment as he wondered aloud, “Sino bang nakaisip ng katarantaduhang ito [Whose idiotic idea was this]?”
Of course, covering Ople without his smoking habit would not be a complete recollection of the man. If you wanted to get up close and get his private views or advance reading of a tough legislative measure or divisive issue, the best time to do that was during his famous cigarette break at the corridor near the men’s room in the old Senate building on P. Burgos. But of course, you’d have to be able to stand the feeling of a game cock being prepped with puffs of smoke.
I have covered presidents, generals, Cabinet secretaries, mayors and local warlords. But no one compares with Blas Ople. Ka Blas, Amang, and “Batman” to Senator Boy Herrera’s “Robin.” He went by various monikers but had a singular style that no one else in Philippine public service could perhaps ever match. Happy birthday, Ka Blas!