The banner story on the day my Mom was in labor before delivering me at 7:37 p.m.: the legendary Manila mayor Arsenio Lacson filed charges against a twenty-something city councilor named Ernesto Maceda, for allegedly diverting money meant for city hall staff salaries. Their feud caused Lacson to call Maceda “so young yet so corrupt,” a description that stuck even after over 40 years.

As someone in the news on the day I was born, Maceda became an interview subject for our documentary. Nearly everyone else in the news in 1961 is dead. Maceda on the other hand is still very much in fighting form. When I asked him about the case, he wasn’t pleased. Among the things he said:

I am very unhappy about the fact that you had to resurrect this issue… That’s precisely why I have been suffering all these years. That’s 50 (sic) years ago, and you’re still flashing back to it… Every election, media and politicians resurrect it. Even assuming I was guilty 50 years ago, that doesn’t mean to say I haven’t changed at all.

But that’s politics. Even a politician of Maceda’s skills couldn’t sweep that incident into the dustbin of history, despite a propaganda strategy that later projected him as Mr. Expose. I wonder if any of the young politicians in the news today – Defensor, Escudero, Remulla, Cayetano, etc. – will regret anything 40 years from now.

Beneath the Maceda-Lacson feud story in the Times was a page one piece about Vice President Diosdado Macapagal campaigning for president in Mindanao. He was attacking the corruption in the Carlos Garcia administration (Mac would of course win the election that November and serve for one term before a certain Ferdinand Marcos defeated him in 1965).

Mac is still known for having been “incorruptible”. Wonder what he would think of the mess his daughter is in. Gloria always evokes her father’s memory and reminds one and all that she is proud to bear his name. Forty years from now, will her grandchildren be proud to bear the Arroyo name? What would it be more associated with, “incorruptible” or “corruptible”? Or would it be most famous for a voice on the world’s leading ring tone in the year 2005, “Hello, Garci…”

Trivia from the front page of the Manila Chronicle on July 18, 1961: Marilyn Monroe had just had gall bladder surgery and a Filipino surgeon had assisted in cutting up that curvaceous bod.

Our documentary, Kaarawan, is airing after Saksi, the late night newscast, on Monday, July 18, 1961 (unofficial tip: it will probably air in the first hour of July 19).