A Recollection as Centennial Draws Near

Capiz High School. The Summer of My Life.

by: Gregorio A. Atienza - Editor, The Script, Class 1963

Like most pre-teen boys in our town, I never experienced living away from my family. My parents enrolled me in elementary schools in Roxas where I have always felt safe and secure. Roxas was home with family and childhood friends. I suppose like other kids my age I grudgingly went to school eagerly looking forward to the summer vacation at the end of the school term.

Every year, we would split our summer break spending the first half at my paternal grandparents’ place in Jagnaya, Jamindan and the remainder at my mother’s folks in Ambilay, Panitan, Capiz.

Summer was always fun with siblings and cousins. Careening in the rice and cornfields that were dry and open during these months. Playing games, making pranks at gullible female cousins, unmindful of grown up cares, understanding little of life but fully living it. Much later, we understood it to be youth.

But the summer of 1959 was quite different for me. I graduated elementary that year. And while the ensuing summer offered the usual fun with cousins, the end of this particular summer meant the start of a school year away from home.

My parents had enrolled me in UP Iloilo (UPIC) for high school. This meant living away from home for the first time in my young life. I felt homesick at the instance they broke the news.

UPIC was a different world. New place, new friends and learning a new word. Challenge. But Iloilo was not home and UPIC was not the Alma Mater meant for me. My UPIC year went so fast, bringing me back home for the much-coveted summer of 1960.

The summer of 1960 was perhaps the most precious to me. This was coming home and staying for a much longer time after being away for the most part of the year. Of course I had occasional weekend visits to Roxas, but these only made me feel even more homesick with every trip back to Iloilo.

But more significantly, it was in the summer of 1960 that they broke news of the RE-OPENING OF THE CAPIZ HIGH SCHOOL! The history of Capiz High School, its opening, closing and re-opening is a fabulous saga unto itself, colorful to tell. I will leave that to more learned historians more worthy than I to narrate. But for me in 1960 its re-opening meant another turning point in my life!

My parents decided to enroll me here and I was home at last. In Roxas with my family and friends, and in Capiz High School to where I would eagerly return from every summer break of my high school years--- so that today, I may proudly and lovingly call it my Alma Mater!