By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
My last meeting with the late Juanito Bolislis, a long time Tabuk resident, fellow journalist and a friend, which took place in his house in Calanan sometime in late 2015 was a somber occasion. He had lost his vibrance and had displayed signs that his memory was starting to fade. He was 88 then.
For sometime after I left him, I struggled to come to terms with the reality that so many events and details in the life of Tabuk that only he could recall and write about are lost forever. I have always been in awe of the prodigious memory of Manong Juanito. All the three articles he submitted to the Tabuk Life were about events which took place more than half a century earlier and it was as though he was recalling an event that happened very recently. To illustrate the power of Manong Juanito’s memory, let me quote from my column on the 10th anniversary of the Tabuk Life last quarter of 2016: “Of his outputs, I like ‘The story of the Pasonglao Bridge’ which details the history of the Pasonglao Bridge which has since been renamed Canao Bridge the most. The article which saw print in our maiden issue put on record a unique and impressive engineering feat which found its way into an international engineering magazine: how an inadvertently unaligned bridge pier was moved to the proper spot by digging it out and moving it with the use of six mechanical jacks…”
A couple of times more after his third and last article in the Tabuk Life which was about the official visit of then Mt. Province Governor Bado Dangwa to Apayao in 1953 and which appeared in the September-December 2007 issue, we turned to the memory of Manong Juanito. Those were when we researched on the history of the White Carabao statue back in 2012 and also when we pieced together the histories of our 42 barangays in 2015. For the first article which saw print in the second quarter of 2012, Manong Juanito corroborated the allegation that the construction of the White Carabao has something to do with the popularity contest which was won by Rowena Bagtang. He recalled that Provincial Veterinarian Carlos Bagtang who was his former teacher at the La Trinidad Agricultural High School (now Benguet State University) and the father of Rowena had spoken to him about the project when he bumped into him in Tabuk sometime during that period. He also remembered seeing the statue lying on the roadside during the construction.
Manong Juanito was the source of 90 percent of the account of how barangay Calanan came to be which we run in the first quarter issue of 2016. Staff member Darwin Serion elicited the information from him just a few months before I discovered that he had lost his power to reconstruct the past.
Through the years there were a lot of interesting stories and details from the past of Tabuk which he shared to me which could have been developed into articles. In one conversation, he shared how an article he wrote about how the operations of the Batongbuhay Gold Mines was wreaking havoc on the farmlands in the Tabuk Valley had displeased the military. He also had his own account of the alleged large bird which used to be sighted in the second level of the Tabuk Valley up to the 50s. I have heard other Tabuk old timers talk about the now extinct creature. There were a lot more.
It never occurred to me to take down notes or to tape our conversations because my mindset was that he would get down to writing about the subjects himself in the end. I regret my lack of foresight. That’s specially so now that I recall it was not hidden from me that Manong Juanito was very busy with his farm in Conner, Apayao even in his advanced age.
On the personal level, time I had with Manong Juanito were always special. I will forever cherish the longest time we were together — that day we went to Gonogon, Bagumbayan to shoot a photo of him in the exact place where the Dangwa Tranco bus fell off the road into the Chico River bed on Valentine’s Day in 1953 which was the subject of one of his articles in the Tabuk Life.**
