Benjamin Defensor, atypical editor, 82
BENJIE DEFENSOR was not the stereotypical editor of his time, a character caricatured with only moderate exaggeration as cantankerous, oppressive, and unpleasable, who regards his subordinates as his absolute inferiors and knows only one way to make them serve him better—torture.
Benjie is actually nice, and I have an idea why. One normally comes to newspaper editorship older; in Benjie’s case, while he had the suitable years and experience, he had a heart that remained young enough to keep its gaiety and openness.
He came on my paper The Manila Chronicle as its managing editor in my second year, in 1968. Actually he had worked as a sportswriter there, but left to join a business paper, and then another. Before sports writing, with an aeronautics certificate from the University of Oklahoma, he had worked as an air controller. But it was a newspaper job he really sought—he had majored in English and minored in Math for his Bachelor of Science in Education.
As our managing editor, he led us—copy editors, rewrite persons, and headline and caption writers—in putting the paper together. He set the work pace, a fast one; he always sent the paper to the press well ahead of deadline. How the proofreaders managed to make out his physician’s scrawl, I presupposingly ascribed to some study of pharmacy.
For us new and younger members of the staff, his gracious home, made by sweet Mencie (gone these three years now) and enlivened by six children (one to be added yet), was a clubhouse of sorts—we partied there. I don’t know that any other editor would have tolerated such a presumptuous invasion. Worse for the tyrannical tradition of editorships, Benjie didn’t for one moment seem not one of us. He was in fact an “in” person.
In 1971 Benjie, Rod Reyes, the Chronicle editor-in-chief, Johnny Ordoveza, the production manager, and I met in Hong Kong, where I had been seconded to a new news enterprise in which our publisher had a stake. Benjie was passing through on his way home from Harvard, in Boston, Mass., where he had taken up his yearlong Nieman Fellowship.
He appeared, presumably, Bostonized. He had his hair brushed down to his shoulders. He wore a crazily printed shirt with a long, pointy collar that flowed down to the chest from a high, stiff band and sleeves that billowed at the three-button cuffs. Tapering around the waist, the shirt opened three buttons down, allowing a peek into a clean, hairless Asian chest; it disappeared at the hips into a pair of superfluously wide-belted tight pants that flared at the bottom, around a pair of square-toed Dingo boots. A leather bag hung from a shoulder.
We four filed into the elevator to climb four floors to a popular restaurant for lunch. Benjie, gaily attired, and Johnny, with his tidy good looks, went in first and found themselves pushed in the crush against the elevator back wall and stared at by prissy territorial subjects of the British queen. Benjie further scandalized them by speaking his natural falsetto.
We all came out laughing, Benjie the shrillest in fact—we perfectly knew how laughably wrong they were.
Learning he had joined the ultraconservative Roman Catholic brotherhood Opus Dei, I was rather incredulous but, seeing him again, I wasn’t so worried—not for him or for myself anyway: his falsetto dripped not with the slightest hint of proselytizing; in fact, it remained as generously peppered with swear words as ever. He also had kept his ponytail—he did finally let it go in 2004, but not to signal any retreat from progressivism; he simply felt 74 was a good age to do it (recalling a similar case with the British novelist Frederick Forsyth: Asked why he had decided to retire after his 10th book, he replied that 10 seemed to him a good number).
He did become a frequenter churchgoer, though, said Tet, his sixth child, my favorite, from whom I got my updates about him. It was Tet who texted me about the surgery he had had to replace a valve in his heart—his good heart—and his peaceful passing a fortnight later.
He was 82.
I will remember him well. Those were such fun times.Thank you — for this great eulogy. -Tina (Ocampo) Mercado
Thanks you Vergel. I read it over and over. You practically echoed my experience with during the three years I was sharing a room with him at the Center for Research and Communications.