"May my heart be like Yours": Thanks, Prof Ingles, UP professor emeritus

Thanks, Prof Ingles
By Chelo Banal-Formoso
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 20:14:00 10/04/2009
Filed Under: Education, People, Media

MANILA, Philippines – If you’ve gone through the school system for at least 15 years and you’ve no fond memories of a teacher – not even one – you’ve been had. You should ask for your money back.

I happen to have had wonderful teachers to whom I’m grateful but for now let me go for the gold and acknowledge to the UP journalism professor who made possible my first paid byline: Raul R. Ingles.

For our Feature Writing class back in the day when the College of Mass Communications was still an institute, Ingles would diligently bring in sample stories from different newspapers and magazines for us to dissect, paragraph by paragraph, error by error, much like they do in a writing workshop.

I hardly participated in the discussions. This being college, I took advantage of the lack of restrictions and read during class –magazines, paperbacks and other print material that were not required reading yet seemed as essential to me as the breath of life. But despite my attention deficit, I managed to learn how to size up a good feature story from Ingles.

Unlike a writing workshop, we didn’t critique one another’s work in his class. I don’t think he had it in him to make us go through the humiliation. At our college, Professor Raul Ingles was the lamb to Dean Armando Malay’s lion. He was the soft-spoken advocate of soft news; on the other hand, in a booming voice, Malay taught us the rudiments of writing hard news. Ingles was the venerable poet and Malay, the swarthy veteran newspaperman.

Prof Ingles came to class always properly dressed, his hair always neatly combed. He was a gentleman of the first order. He moved without brashness, in measured steps, like poetry.

Since this was a writing class, he required us to write different kinds of feature stories. For the first-person feature, I submitted a story about life in a large family – how my mother was hard put trying to find 11 different colors of toothbrushes, how when I learned to tie my shoelaces I had two sets to tie, mine and my next sibling’s, how I became an expert at apportioning a bag of M&Ms equally among us nine children… like that.

The following class meeting, Ingles announced he had submitted to the Philippine Free Press for publication one of the stories turned in by the students. He wouldn’t say whose. Let it be a surprise, he said.

One of our classmates, Nonoy Colayco, happened to be working at Free Press so the guys pressed him to take a peek at the next issue to find out whose paper it was the prof had submitted.

Well, it turned out to be mine. That byline, my first in a nationally circulated magazine – with pay I must point out – got me hooked on journalism. I realize now what it is that good teachers like Raul Ingles do: They give you a larger vision of yourself.

Years later, it didn’t surprise me to learn that Ingles tended a garden on the rooftop of his home. If he had the patience and the grace to nurture a fresh batch of journalism students year after year from 1969 to his retirement with the rank of professor emeritus, it would be in his nature to grow plants and trees on top of a building in San Juan.

For the centennial anniversary of the University of the Philippines, Ingles researched and compiled a day-by-day journal of the year when the state university was founded. If you’ve been a student of Prof Ingles, go and get yourself a copy of “1908: The Way It Really Was” and you’ll see how he effectively turned the human interest angle of journalism into history.