Grammar School and Beyond

“Excelsior!” ends Lolo’s profile in his high school yearbook. “Ever upward,” it means in Latin, or, in everyday parlance, “onward and upward.”

The motto certainly befits a man who took his first job at the age of sixteen and didn’t retire until seventy years later, on his 86th birthday; who had multiple careers and conquered each; and who faced his challenges with skill, ingenuity, courage, and humor.

Carlos P. Romulo’s profile in the 1916 yearbook of the Manila High School. He was eighteen and a senior. The Manila High School, which still exists today, was established in 1906.

I’m guessing it was inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem (1841), which was taught as part of the American school curriculum for many years. Lolo learned English from Hattie A. Grove, after all, an American who came over to the Philippines with 539 other teachers in 1901 (the Thomasites) as part of a program by President William McKinley to educate the newly colonized Filipinos.

According to the Philippine Department of Education, Mrs. Grove was assigned to Camiling, Tarlac, from 1901, in charge of Central School. Leo J. Grove, her husband, is listed as a supervising teacher.

“Our teachers, Mr. and Mrs. Grove, were frequent guests in our home,” CPR recalls in I Walked with Heroes. “While Mr. Leo J. Grove seemed relaxed and amiable there, I could not lose my dread of him, because he represented the mathematics I could not master in school.

“But Mrs. Grove was my first English teacher in the Camiling grammar school, and to me she represented the magic world of books. It was due to her skill as a teacher that much of that magic rubbed off on me. I was a shining star in her class, and one of the dullest in her husband’s.

“She was quick to recognize my love of words and helped my interest along.

“She introduced fields of reading I might never have known but for her. Years after I had left school and much I had learned was forgotten I remembered the Groves, and I even remembered the American town from which they came—Ovid, Michigan.

“I thought a great deal about them after I escaped from Bataan and came to America. I wrote a letter to them addressed to Ovid but it was returned, address unknown.

“Then, in this same year 1942, the Pulitzer prize was given me at Columbia University, and in my speech of acceptance I said that the real winner of the prize was my first English teacher, Hattie Grove, who had taught a small Filipino pupil to value the beauty of the English language.

The Romulos moved to Manila in 1914, when Carlos was sixteen years old. They bought and moved into a house in Intramuros at 266 Calle Cabildo. Prior to the move, Carlos attended the Tarlac Provincial High School, the country’s first public school, which was established on September 1, 1902, in Tarlac City, by Thomasite Frank Russell White.

“The speech was publicized rather widely and I hoped it would flush the Groves out of hiding wherever they were, but still no answer came.

“Then, a few years ago, my speaking engagements included one at Miami. Just as I was about to leave for Florida a letter came from Delray Beach in that state. It was Hattie Grove. She wrote that and Mr. Grove had retired and he was in a wheelchair.

“I telephoned ahead to the Miami committee, and as soon as I arrived a car was waiting to take me to Delray. I brought the Groves back to Miami, where that night at the dinner at which I was to speak they were guests of honor.

“We sat at the head of the table and there was a great deal to be said before the speeches began. We had not met since, I believe, 1912, in the Camiling grammar school.

“‘Why did you not get in touch with me?’ I demanded, when I learned they had followed my career and saved every clipping concerning me.

“They explained they had not wanted to bother me. ‘But we are so proud of you and of all you have done,’ they kept saying.

“It was an emotional reunion. When I rose to speak I repeated what I had said the day I had accepted the Pulitzer prize, that Mrs. Grove, not I, was the true winner of the honor. The audience gave her a standing ovation and she was in tears. But she got up on her feet like a champion and made a wonderful little speech.

“She wound up saying, ‘I am eighty-two years old and this is the happiest moment of my life!’”1

1 I Walked with Heroes, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), pp. 49 – 50.

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Aquino Assassination

Opposition leader Benigno Aquino’s assassination in August 1983 ushered in the Philippine People Power Revolution of 1986. His killing, probably by government agents, generated intense public opposition to Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship and made it possible for his widow, Corazon Aquino, to rise to power.

General Romulo died only two months before Aquino became chief executive and Marcos went into exile. In his final days, all too aware of Filipinos’ growing discontent, Romulo worried that the nation—bankrupt and fast deteriorating—was headed for a bloody revolution. This letter, written by Romulo’s third son, Ricardo, discourages him from resigning from public service, as doing so at such a critical juncture would have had negative repercussions on the already battered economy.

RJR letter about the Aquino assasination page 1
RJR letter about the Aquino assasination page 2
At the time Ricardo wrote the letter, many of Romulo’s anti-Marcos friends and associates were urging him to resign. At the same time, the government was pressuring him to defend Marcos. Concerned about the vilification that would certainly be directed at his father if he did in fact resign, and its effect on him given his advanced age (Romulo was eighty-five at the time), Ricardo counseled him, essentially, to try to stay out of the fray.

(The quote at the end of the letter is from a famous homily entitled Second Spring by John Henry Cardinal Newman of England.)

Romulo took his son’s advice and did not resign immediately despite his poor health. He did, however, start to take steps to retire, which culminated in his December resignation letter (below). He also made known his resentment that Aquino’s assassination destroyed all his work in the US promoting Philippine interests, refused to sign a paid New York Times advertisement defending the Marcos government, and he paid his respects at Aquino’s wake.

“Whoever committed the murder made a big mistake,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post, while undergoing dialysis, in December 1983. “Whoever maneuvered that crude way is blameworthy. My only hope is that the guilty party is discovered and properly punished.”

CPR resignation letter page 1

CPR resignation letter page 2

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To Love Again

General Romulo’s forty-four-year marriage to Virginia Llamas ended abruptly in January 1968 when she died of leukemia. It had been a happy marriage that produced four sons.

“I glory in the knowledge that I have had the happiest married life,” he wrote, as he began a new romance with American writer Beth Day.

Beth and Rommy (as he was known to his close friends, particularly in the United States) first met in 1958, when she came to see him on assignment for The Reader’s Digest. At the time Beth was married to Donald Day, and the General was Philippine Ambassador to the United States, living in Washington, D.C., with his wife and three youngest boys.

In 1960, New York City, they met briefly again for lunch to discuss another piece Beth was working on—but it wasn’t until October 17, 1972, that their story really began, both having been widowed.

A photo presented by Governor Sison of Lingayen. A sign behind the couple reads “Happy Birthday our beloved Miss Beth Day. May you love the Philippines as your very own. May 24, 1974”

“After having lost you for more than twelve years,” he wrote in January 1973, when Beth came to Manila for a visit, “it was a glorious night at La Côte Basque, when you entered through the revolving doors . . . and in that unforgettable ‘enchanted evening’ I saw in you the golden shaft to give my twilight days the glow that I hoped would give me back the happiness that I thought I would never recover.”

The General had hosted the dinner in honor of Ambassador and Mrs. George Bush. Among the guests were Ambassador Toru Nakagawa of Japan, Mr. and Mrs. Norman Cousins, Philippine Ambassador Narciso Reyes, and Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wangeman (of the Waldorf-Astoria).

Present, too, was Mrs. Mariles Romulo, widow of the General’s eldest son, with her son Mike. Sixteen at the time, Mike recalls his grandfather stealing glances of Beth all throughout the dinner. So love-struck was he, says Mike, that when they got back to the Waldorf Towers, “Lolo grabbed me and waltzed me around the living room, pretending I was Beth!”

By mid-February Beth was back in New York City—but not without the promise of marriage. “He proposed to me in the Manila Cathedral,” Beth recalls, “because that’s where his father proposed to his mother.”

They did not announce their engagement publicly, however, since President Marcos strongly opposed the idea of the Philippines’ Secretary of Foreign Affairs having a foreign affair.

While Beth continued to write and get her affairs in order in New York, Rommy courted her through letters, gifts, and phone calls. “Listen to the grating sound of my broken record,” he wrote. “I love you today more than yesterday and today less than tomorrow.”

General Romulo, 80, married Beth Day on September 8, 1978, in a private ceremony at the Pasay City home of the Parsons. They toasted with champagne in sterling silver goblets—a wedding gift from the Chief Justice and his wife.

Beth was back by the end of May 1973, this time for the long haul. With a new book contract and a suite at the Manila Hilton, she was prepared to devote herself entirely to him. “I cannot think of a better raison d’être for my own life at this time than to dedicate what talents I possess as a human being to making you happy,” she wrote.

They were married on September 8, 1978, in a private civil ceremony officiated by Chief Justice Fred Ruiz Castro. She wore a pink chiffon dress, and the only ones present were the wife of the Chief Justice and the couple’s close friends Katsy and Chick Parsons, who hosted the afternoon ceremony in their living room. After the US Bases Agreement was signed the following February, a negotiation for which the General had to remain non-partisan (i.e., not married to an American), they got married again—without guests or fanfare—at the residence of the Papal Nuncio.

Cardinal Sin had in fact offered to marry them, but the General had protested, “I don’t want to be married in the house of Sin!”

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