I looked around campus but I didn’t find it.
At the last grand alumni homecoming reunion of my high school (Baguio City High School) last May, I went out of my way to look for an old white 1963 Willy’s jeepwagon that I had hoped would just be lying somewhere around the schoolyard.
I felt a profound sense of sadness when I couldn’t find her. They had scrapped the Old Girl.
I wasn’t expecting to find anything in mint condition. Even way back in 1978 in junior high, when our practical arts elective was Basic Automotive, she was already in pretty bad shape.
She was a rust bucket, covered in more patina than paint and all her four tires had very little tread left on them—but with a lot of cold patches from several shoddy vulcanizing work that we did whenever one of them went flat.
But this particular Willy’s jeep was quite a phenomenon. She’s a beat up old jalopy, she won’t win any races—but she’ll run FOREVER.
That’s because despite her unimpressive looks outside, under her hood purred a 2.4 liter Jeep Tornado 4-straight inline overhead cam (OHC) engine that eight sections of junior high school boys overhauled every year. That engine was as perfect as the day it came out of its Detroit, Michigan factory! (I do wonder HOW it ended up in City High).
I mean that engine was in one piece in June, stripped down to a hundred components from July to August, as Mr. Barrozo and Mr. Estocapio, our automotive teachers, explained the functions of the crankshaft, connecting rods, pistons, intake and exhaust valves, overhead camshaft, rocker arms, cylinder block and a hundred other parts. We spent hours cleaning up each part and lubing them back to original tolerances. We learned how to use and calibrate a torque wrench so there was not one bolt on her that was overtightened.
Then by September, under our teachers’ close supervision, all we eight sections of sub-amateur mechanics painstakingly put that engine back together in one piece—restoring it back to firing on all four pistons in perfect “tap dead center” timing.
Then for the last six weeks of the course from September to October, we took turns learning to drive that old jeep—just all within that very short 200-meter strip of road in front of the BCHS main building. It was the school driveway, which was also the flag ceremony grounds where we lined up in formation to sing the national anthem to start off each morning.
We weren’t allowed to take the jeep out on the city streets because she wasn’t street-legal. Meant for instructional purpose only, she wasn’t registered and didn’t have a license plate–but that wasn’t really the problem.
The problem was we were in junior high so oldest among us was 17, a year short of holding a driving license when you needed to be 18, back in the day!
“Basta dyan lang kayo sa harap ng school, huwag lalabas, pabalik balik lang kayo dyan!” Mr. Estocapio barked as we pushed off.
And I meant literally “push off”–she didn’t have a starter. We got her running by jamming Second gear in place, having four or five of our beefiest classmates push her to a slow roll while the guy at the wheel popped the clutch and the rest of us sidelined as spectators shouted “Gas! Gas!” We called the technique “kadyut.”
To her credit, the old girl ALWAYS sputtered to life. The guy at the wheel put her in neutral, pumped the brakes furiously (she wasn’t power-braked either) to bring her to a stop so the rest of the class, about 25 boys, could clamber aboard.
So our driving range was all of 200 meters from point A to point B, hundreds of times. We even had a term for it “From A to B and vice versa.” It wasn’t much driving really—the “road” was so short we could never really use any gear other than First and Reverse. Second gear was just for jumpstarting the Old Girl.
We had a name for her: MAROON. It was the official color of City High and also because “Maroon” was short for “maroon-runut,” the vernacular for “literally falling apart.” Ironically, though, Maroon was really white–her body color which we often topped up using house paint whenever we scratched her, which happened quite often. We were grateful that in 1978 the school frontage was lined with a live hedge of lantana bush–so when we struggled with her non-power steering and clipped those bushes, all Maroon suffered were light, shallow scratches.
She had a four-speed manual transmission–“REAL MEN drive stick!” we used to boast. So we didn’t exactly burn rubber but we perfected shifting gears and especially when to release the clutch so the thing didn’t choke or stall.
From the PracArts building where you shoved into first gear, you’d be right in front of the Home Economics building on the opposite end of the roadstrip before you could even hit 15KPH. Of course 15KPH is just a wild guess—the darned speedometer wasn’t working.
So you swerved right, stopping before you hit the canteen’s shaded walk, threw it in Reverse, aimed the jeep back towards PracArts building again—but you DON’T get to drive it back.
Why not? Because another kid took over from you—you see, you were not driving solo. The jeep was overloaded with twenty-five of your classmates, (three of them hanging off the back runningboard), each one waiting for his turn at the wheel.
Today, if I tell someone half my age that in City High automotive class we learned exactly how a four-stroke internal combustion engine worked that person probably won’t believe me. “They taught you that in City High??”
Yes, believe it or not. And that’s not all.
When we talk about the deterioration of education in the Philippines, we often associate it only with a decline in academic performance by high school students.
There’s more to it, in my opinion. There is also a steady erosion in non-academic content. Shifting paradigms about what constitutes “essential” subjects for modern high school students is leading to the gradual disappearance of practical skillsets that were standard in my generation.
Back in the day, we cycled through diverse vocational subjects under the Practical Arts curriculum.
In my freshman year (1977) “prac-arts” was Woodworking: BASIC in the first 2 grading periods, ADVANCED in the last two.
In our sophomore year (1978) prac-arts was Drafting and Survey-plotting for the first 2 grading periods, and Fine Arts/Portraiture in the last two.
In our junior year, this is when we had a taste of Basic Automotive in the first 2 grading periods, Practice Driving in the last 2.
In our senior year 1979, we went through Basic Electrical Circuits–where our projects were just a simple water heater and stove using NiChrome wire and salvaged pieces of asbestos plate.
Then, just before graduation, we stepped up to Advanced Electronics—where we assembled transistor radio kits and learned how to “burn” our own printed circuit boards (PCB’s).
I could almost hear some people saying, “I don’t believe you. How can so much vocational skills be squeezed in just four years of high school?”
Well, it’s PUBLIC high school, circa 1970s and 1980s—but don’t take my word for it.
Ask anyone who went to City High during those years—or just read some of the collaborating comments that I’m sure will pop up below.
God, I miss Maroon so much. >sigh!< *
About the Author
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”