There is a saying that “Parents often see themselves or realize their ambitions through their children.” This is true with Tony passing the PMA exam, which I took twice but failed.
However, as a “consuelo de bobo,” I can say that I did not become a PMA cadet but I became a PMA professor! Praise the Lord. And with Tony as my student in the first year and fourth year of his stay in the PMA from 1959 to 1963.
He was only 16 when he took the exam in 1958 and was 17 when he entered as a plebe in 1959.
After he passed the exam, we rose up very early every morning and jogged down the road to the sentry post at the PMA gate, then up to the gym, where we did push-ups and chin-ups.
We jogged back home and under our quarters I pummeled his stomach with fist blows until it became red and tough!
Tony was always a very obedient and dutiful boy. During my trial in Quezon City for the case filed by Mrs. Flor, I met Norma in Crame and she asked me to let Betty and Tony write her as pen-pals.
I told Betty and Tony to write Norma, which Tony did, and they became pen-pals until they got engaged to get married.
He brought a big suitcase upon reporting, with only a few underwears in it, so that when they let the plebes run up and down the PMA stairs he did not have a hard time, unlike those from the provinces having heavy suitcases.
But he almost failed in the physical exam because he was ¼ inch under-height. I pulled strings in the G.H.Q., where I was assigned as Legal and Action Officer of the Secretary of National Defense.
Col. Ciceron de la Cruz, the Commanding General, jokingly said: “Before he goes for physical exam again, hit him in the head and the lump will make up the ¼ inch.” But I said: “They might measure him horizontally instead of vertically.”
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