Obituaries

Gegantoca, 68
Veteran Bicol journalist and Philippine Daily Inquirer contributor Carlos “Tio Caling” S. Gegantoca died on May 5.  He was 68.

Gegantoca was also a columnist of the Bicol Chronicle and the Weekly Digest.  He was president of the Albay-Legazpi Press Association Inc. and also a professor at the Bicol University Graduate School.

Johnson, 71
Philippine Daily Inquirer photographer Betoy Johnson died on May 1.  He was 71.

Johnson worked as a photo correspondent for one year in the Inquirer before becoming a full-time photographer.  He started his career in J. Walter Thompson Advertising agency in the ’60s.  He also worked for NOW Magazine in the ’70s and later joined the defunct Newsday as a staff photographer.

Pramoedya, 81
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, died in East Jakarta on April 30.  He was 81.

A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pramoedya was also acknowledged as one of Indonesia’s literary giants. His politically charged writings were usually censored by the Indonesian government.

Rosenthal, 84
New York Times’s A.M. “Abe” Rosenthal died on May 11, following a stroke that caused complications.  He was 84.

Rosenthal spent most of his working life at the New York Times.  Under his watch, the paper left a mark in the United States’s newspaper reporting when it published the “Pentagon Papers,” a history of America’s secret involvement in Vietnam.

He began his newspaper career as a campus stringer while attending the City College of New York.  He worked as police reporter, foreign correspondent, managing editor, and finally executive editor of the New York Times, a post he held for nine years.  He also wrote the column “On My Mind” after his stint as executive editor.

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