WITH 21 back-breaking years of going after the news, commenting on issues and putting together a decent advertising and marketing campaign behind us — and more of the same ahead of us — the The Pangasinan Star is surely on its way to attaining some kind of a legendary status. Pardon the boast, but we are entitled to it anyway, this being our anniversary issue.

Somehow, when an event, an institutional milestone like this comes around, we get to thinking how the The Pangasinan Star could have perished some years ago when the odds were firmly and incessantly stacked against its survival. The July 16, 1990 earthquake that sunk the building housing our former office on Perez Boulevard here in Dagupan City and made our spirits sag along with all Dagupenos on seeing our own homes crumbling and cracked, could well have killed the newspaper too.

But that wasn’t meant to be.

With advertisement at the time miserably down, coming too fewand far between, and the judicial notices, the very lifeblood of comunity newspapers, fetching only so much revenue for publishers, the business of newspapering was almost a suicidal mission. Only the printer’s ink in ourblood and the guts of our advertising team saw us through and kept the Star on the newsstands each week.

Today, one can hardly believe the successes achieved by this paper within its 21 years of existence . We can only give back all the glory to the One Above who carried the team through when the going went really rough. We can almost see the single set of footprints in the sand.

Happy Aniversary to us!

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Personally, in the light of a single, most unfortunate event besetting the Star today, we anticipate a rather deep change in the day-to-day operations soon, one that holds profound significance to the ideal team-building that we have installed thru the years.

With some lump in our throat, we cannot as yet disclose details; but if anything, it wou d make all the trials and difficulties we underwent just to make this newspaper survive this ong and this far, become suddenly one long chain of a beautiful memory. And this one we personally intend to keep in the recesses of our writer’s heart.

You don’t get our drift? We’re not making sense?

We guess it’s better that way… for the moment.

In fact, if we had a mind to it, we could probably write a best-seller. But then again, like we always say, only God guides the destinies of men and newspapers. It might not turn out to be such a good storybook… after all.