San Francisco 1946

IARRIVED in San Francisco as a teenager in 1946 just after our independence. Up to that time I had lived all my life under the American flag. With the 1935 Commonwealth, the Filipino flag stood side by side with the American flag. At independence it stood alone. Now I was back under the American flag. San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities of the United States with its characteristic mission churches. Besides New York, it is the city to visit in the US Most of the other cities developed along the same lines so that if you see one you have seen almost all the others. San Francisco is cool in both meanings of the word. Forty miles in the valley, the temperature can have a difference of 40 degrees from San Francisco. Only once in eight to ten years does it snow in SF although it is cool almost all year round. The people have a friendly attitude and a tradition of class. In freshman class, our teacher brought us to a home in Nob Hill where we’re treated on some drama of good standing.

We arrived in August after the ceremonies on the 4th of July in Manila. Since classes had not yet started and I was coming from a war-torn area, the dean of the University of San Francisco himself interviewed me as I was applying to get into freshman class. One day I was passing by the auditorium as they were recruiting for the school annual debate and I auditioned. The English professor in charge took me in. My two companions were seniors and soon they realized I knew little about the labor laws which was the subject of the debate. They coached me and assigned me to the area of bombast. We won the debate so that at graduation time I had to rent a tuxedo, the only time I have ever worn one, to receive the debating prize. The other notable in freshman English was that I had a seatmate who was a tackle in the football team. He explained to me the intricacies of the game and its formations. He himself would come to class after a game, in spite of all the padding, with a lot of hematoma or black and blue welts.

Right after the war housing was tight. When we arrived in San Francisco we stayed for a couple of weeks with the Sulits. Mrs. Sulit, Estella Romuldes, was a close friend of my mother in Sta. Scholastica and my godmother. They had two sons, both teenagers. The older one brought me to my first US baseball game in Candlestick Park. I found the jeering and shouting by the audience new. The Sulit boy shouted his head off and enjoyed the game. Then we moved over to the Estevas. Don Jesus was one of the originators of the pera padala (money remittance). And even when the big companies got into the business, his customers kept loyal to him. Mrs. Esteva was a strong woman, the kind needed to survive in migration. At his passing, none of Don Jesus’ children were interested in the business. Then we moved to an apartment owned by Mrs. Hashim, a Filipina with a daughter and a nephew, Raymond Brodett, who went to school with me in USF. Then we were able to stay in a boarding house run by an Irish lady since my sisters were in a boarding school in Menlo Park. All went well till St. Patrick’s Day when some of the other residents went drunk and my father decided to move again. We finally got an apartment with the only condition that a boarder could keep his room in the front of the house. Aleppo was an old timer who had retired as Chief Stewart of a cruiser so he had a hefty pension. At night he worked as a drink mixer in a bar. Just as most Filipinos in San Francisco he had no family. The migration at the time was one male Filipino to seven female.

One Saturday he asked to go with him to South San Francisco where we entered a bungalow surround by a huge parking lot filled with cars. No one greeted us as we opened the door. Then Eligio knocked at a wall and it opened to a staircase leading to a basement filled with gamblers, 80% of whom were Filipinos but it was run with Chinese gambling games. There were a couple of Filipinas. I noticed something I did not expect. The Filipinos spent their money in what they called “blondies” or gambling since they had no families. He also recounted some stories like the time the Archbishop of San Francisco gave the Filipinos a recreation hall. On several occasions some bully would shoot the lights and they would have a rumble. At another time some Filipino passengers in the street car started shouting “A carabao is flying.” The other passengers had no idea of a carabao but this was his way of releasing tension.

The new migrants normally had their families except for the doctors in studies and the nurses, who were very popular in US hospitals because of their concern for their patients. Furthermore the Asian exclusion clause, which limited Filipinos to 250 individual, was revoked in 1947. We now have healthy Filipino communities both in the west coast, mostly California, and in the east cost of the US heavily in New Jersey.