Ours was the only house in that area of Pandacan behind the Zamora Elementary School which was PAINTED! To Pat and me, it was a “dream house,” although it was located in the middle of a swamp full of KANGKONG and GABI plants.
I bought a lot of discarded crate boards and used them to build a foot bridge from our stairs up to the sidewalk. With those boards I made our table and bench and built our toilet separate from our house. Later on, I also built an adjacent bathroom, where we took a bath instead of in the kitchen.
This house was quite far from our Headquarters in Quezon City, but it was close to the Arellano Law College, where I was studying at night using my G.I. Education benefit. After school hours, at 10:00 P.M., I hiked across the Pandacan bridge for around 30 minutes to our house.
Later on, when I got my three years’ back pay, we rebuilt the house and installed our own water pipe inside our kitchen and newly built cement toilet and bath.
With the use of wood shavings and sawdust from a nearby lumber yard, we filled up the swamp until I could drive a jeep inside and used our yard as a badminton court. Tony supervised the filling by utilizing his friend’s labor once the sawdust was dumped from the trucks.
Tony and Betty tied towels to their necks and then jumped from our balcony to the sawdust below, like Superman and Batman.
It was in this home where I got promoted to Captain and became a Lawyer in 1950, to fulfill my mother’s ambition and my father’s ambition for me.
Here Jojo, Toots, and Bobby were conceived and born.
When I was assigned to Camp Crame, we had this house rented. When I was assigned to Baguio, we sold it. Pat was President, CIRCOLO ZAMORA CLUB and held Sta. Cruzan with Aida as Elena.
It was in Pandacan during the war where I worked as cochero of a carretela, and the people there, according to Pat, were saying, “That is the cochero’s wife,” when they saw her. I also became a Janitor, a Master Sergeant, a 2nd Lieutenant, a 1st Lieutenant, a Captain, and a Lawyer there in Pandacan. Our former house was demolished when a new road to the new bridge was built.
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