By BEHN FER. HORTALEZA, JR

IT TOOK, I guess, a full shocking minute, with me staring at the text message from our NMPC “partner” Vicky Isiderio, last Friday, August 25, noontime before the news really sank: my one and true boss in the information job, Greg S. Cendana was dead. A victim of heart attack.

“Minister Cendana”, as those of us at the old NMPC and most Pangasinan media friends call him, was once a powerful man who never allowed power to get into his head. He remained humble and was always ready to help anyone who came to him, be he friend or foe, young or old, rich or poor. His one true “fault” is kindness, for it left him open to all sorts of scheming characters throughout his public life, men and women who would praise him to high heavens and show fawning affection for him, then quickly stab him when his back is turned.

I know. I worked with him a full ten years, maybe more, counting my first days at NMPC when he was yet that office’s director, and shared his thoughts on many occasions in both open and confidential situations even long after he left government service. With PNA bureau chief Ding Micua, former DZMQ station manager Alex Duque, Dagupan immigration bureau chief Bert Garcia and old NMPC colleague Philip Siapno, “Sir Greg” or “Manong Oyo” would ask us over for lunch or merienda at Siapno’s or elsewhere he fancies in the city to relive old times every now and then.

Each time, all of us in his company agree and comment that he doesn’t seem to age a bit – while we, the younger ones grapple with our own wearing-down signs, flabs, sags, sandy hairs, wrinkles, warts and all. The Minister obviously simply enjoyed life, while we fought and struggled in order to find the joy in it. .

He was ever the compleat PR man. Minister Cendana, even minus the trappings of the power and authority he once had in Malacanang corridors, never forgot to look after his newsmen-wards’ welfare like a doting father and offer help to their problems whenever he was in town. No other (former) official does that, I mean, really go out of his way to use his old connections to make life a little easier for friends in distress. In this, he was a cut above the rest.

The then opposition to the Marcos rule may have derided him for his alleged “news management” tactics but to the man, it was just a job he was asked to do, and he had to do it well. The popular movie actor line “trabaho lang, walang personalan” aptly describes his philosophy when he acts to defend the Establishment in those tumultuous years as he so dedicatedly did. It was no wonder to us in media who knew him that he was among the last, if not the very last, to leave the Marcos Palace then already under siege.

The story is told that the “Minister” or “Triple 3” (his two-way radio code), that fateful final night when the mob was closing in on the Palace and after all the other Marcos lieutenants had spirited themselves out, had to do a quick-change act as an old woman leaving the Malacanang grounds to escape the maddened rioters. We never had an independent confirmation of this until today. Frankly, I doubt it.

As he bids this good earth farewell forever, I think the inscription to best capture the man’s deeds on earth in his epitaph would be: “He was such a good man.”

Goodbye, sir and Godspeed!