By Mortz C. Ortigoza
The photo caption from the Page's Pampanga and Clark Historical Image and Event says:
"Who misses this old look of Visiting Control Center circa 1980s at Clark Air Base? I'm sure lots of Angeleños did pass here once or twice in that era. I still remember that every year during the Filipino-American Friendship Day, everyone can pass here without getting your I.D".
The caption or the poser did make a spur of the moment for this
I did not experience seeing the U.S base in Clark during the time of the Yankees in the 1980s and early 1990's before force majeure called Mount Pinatubo's explosion saw them absconding the place.
"Parang kang sa America," folks in Baguio and Dagupan quipped to me when American bases became a topic.
But I regularly entered the American base at Camp John Hay in Baguio City in the late 1980's while working as a civilian employee of the nearby Philippines Military Academy.
The first time I set my foot at the well-manicured Gringos' grassland was when my boss at the Public Information Office (PIO) Colonel Rodolfo Alviar -- a cranky old man with salt and pepper hair, excellent English (a rarity among the military), and a cousin of the Dictator McCoy -- brought me there where he played golf with his American and Filipino counterparts.
This lanky Ilonggo was awed then seeing pretty American women brisk walking and jogging at the moutainous rest and recreation camp with their sports bra at that six o'clock meeting in the green.
"Geez, I ain't see Filipinas clad with "contraption like they have," I quipped to myself.
Filipinas running with a sports bra in the other parts of the country during that time could be arrested by cops with an "Alarm and Scandal" criminal case being thrown to them, hahaha!
I regularly ingressed John Hay later --- under the seaching eyes of those camouflage and blue beret wearing white and black caucasian military police (MP) at the main gate near the Loakan Road with their barking German sheepherd and dobermann --- to attend my regular Sunday worship in the Evangelical Church with my mostly Gringo brethren and sistren wielding their Holy Bibles and Broadman Hymnals . First time to see the American Chaplain and his devotees provided snacks to us remorseful sinners with those gratis cookies, juice, and brewed coffee in a giant aluminum coffee urn. My Evangelical church at the PMA did not have these stuffs then like what the Americans provide.
Other regular itinerararies there for this yokel was to go to the ice cream house and buy those 35 cents (of course could be converted to peso) of ice cream in a cone and went to the nearby store that sell those American Stars and Stripes Newspaper (broadsheet for the American soldiers in the Far East Asia).
I was also a member of the library at the John Hay where I loaned books (just like great Fil-Am writer Carlos Bulosan borrowing hardbounds there in the early 1900's from his American lady librarian pal, hehehe!) for a week or two to read for my free time at my house at the side of the Bowling House in Del Pilar.
John Hay Air Station, more commonly known as Camp John Hay according to Wikipedia, was a military installation in Baguio, Philippines.
The site was a major hill station used for rest and recreation, or R&R, for personnel and dependents of the United States Armed Forces in the Philippines as well as United States Department of Defense employees and their dependents. It was last run by the United States Air Force as a communications station.
With an average elevation of 5,000 feet (1,500 m), Camp John Hay – and Baguio in general – is much cooler and less humid than the rest of the Philippine Islands (later known as the Republic of the Philippines from 1946), thereby providing a more familiar mild climate the typical American soldier knows back home. The facility housed The American Residence as well as broadcasting facilities of the Voice of America.
"Do you have a computer skill?" the American chief of the Voice of America posed to me on the sidelines of the worship service in John Hay?
That was in the late 1980's and computer then to this brown little brother was still Greek.
If I was then literate - just like now - to do computer stuffs and my deftness with artificial intelligence like Dola and Gemini, hahaha!, that stout Bible verses quoting Gringo probably brought me already in the Land of the Milk and Honey after Pinatubo flushed out the Yanks between years 1991 and 1992.
And probably this present writer married a blonde or a brunette there, sanamagan!
And probably I ain't singing Colin Blunstone scintillating song's Miles Away now because I'll be miles away from the Islas de los Ladrones (Islands of Thieves), as what those earlier Spanish discoverers called the Philippines.
Miles, by the way, is the name of the pretty Missus of this writer, hahaha!
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