Smitten in La Loma, Watching Stars Go By
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La Loma, Quezon City (Photo by Judge Floro, Wikimedia Commons)
I would choose the glass-paned middle window which gave a panoramic view of people, streets, houses, neighbors, peddlers on bikes or walking by with their wares on their backs or in small carts. It thrilled me no end to invent tales, real and imagined, for each person: how they lived; who their children were; what they were thinking; or their wishes, dreams and ambitions.
Our neighborhood was full of cinematic types.
A few blocks away on the southeast side, in a bungalow built like a small Spanish casa, which I later saw as the style of most ’50s homes in Hollywood, lived the 1920s basketball phenom (116 points in one game!), bodabil star and stage impresario Lou Salvador Sr. He was a huge man born to a Spanish father and a German mestiza mother. His gorgeous-looking children, one time or another, would become movie icons themselves. Youngest son, Lou Salvador, Jr., then a thin, strapping teen, would emerge a matinee idol with his “Stateside” James Dean-look and swagger.
Lou Salvador, Jr. (Source: Francis Tria/flickr.com)
There were Lou Jr.’s other siblings who became movie thespians and famous on their own: Leroy Salvador, Chona Sandoval, Mina Aragon, Alona Alegre, Phillip Salvador, and Ross Rival. The Salvadors lived on Cadig Street, close to the quiet Don Manuel Agregado Street, which was a few blocks away from Ipo Street where we lived. Many streets in La Loma were named after Philippine mountains, situated as it was in Paang Bundok, on the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains.
All in all, according to Wikipedia, Lou Sr. sired 102 children. They could not have all lived in that white and stucco bungalow on Cadig Street but were probably born somewhere else in the lush and fecund islands of the Philippine archipelago. When I last looked online, our 7,107 islands have grown by 534 islands, and now comes to a whopping 7, 641 islands.
On another street south, Labo Street, lived Eddie del Mar, a handsome actor from Pampanga who would portray Jose Rizal in his many incarnations, winning in 1957 the FAMAS award for best actor for portraying our national hero in Ang Buhay at Pag-ibig ni Dr. Jose Rizal. This was the year before we moved to an apartment building that del Mar owned beside his big two-storey house while our house was being built.
Eddie del Mar (Photo courtesy of CCP)
In the mornings, I would see him in his chauffeured car, being whisked for his movie appointments and film shoots. He was serious-looking but affable, and would break into a smile when he saw us from the back seat of his car as his driver navigated his way out of their kalachuchi (frangipani) tree-shaded driveway.
It was his 12-year-old eldest son, though, who I was smitten with, mainly because he inherited his father’s patrician bearing, aquiline nose and fair skin. It feels weirder still that I would be writing this note on Eddie del Mar’s 100th birthday, October 12th. It turns out that this son was named after Crisostomo, the main character in Jose Rizal’s novel, Noli Me Tangere.
Eddie del Mar, whose real name was Eduardo Sangalang Magat, had studied to become a doctor but would eventually be remembered as a thespian of historical movies: Ang Buhay at Pag-ibig ni Dr. Jose Rizal, Sisa, Kilabot sa Makiling, Noli Me Tangere, Sino ang Matapang, and Ang Supremo: Andres Bonifacio, along with 50 other films. In fact, Eddie del Mar would seek films that touched on the patriotic and the heroic. Had nationalist senator Claro Mayo Recto not died in 1960, del Mar reportedly would have made his biopic.
Ang Buhay at Pag-Ibig bi Dr. Jose RIzal
Had the names of La Loma’s streets rubbed off on Eddie del Mar’s nationalist sentiments? We had Maria Clara Street (where I spent my first two years of high school in an annex of E. Rodriguez Jr. High School and soaked in Juan Laya’s Diwang Kayumanggi and heroes of the Philippine Revolution), Laong Laan (the nom de guerre of Jose Rizal), Pi y Margal (my favorite name because of its rhyme and use of the i and y, although I hadn’t figured yet then what his role in Philippine history was), Dapitan (in Zamboanga where Rizal was sent into exile before he was executed in Bagumbayan or Luneta), Calamba (Rizal’s birthplace in Laguna) as well as Cristostomo Ibarra, Sisa, Basilio, and Simoun from Rizal’s two novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.
E. Rodriguez, Jr. High School (Source; facebook page of E. Rodriguez, Jr. High School)
Further north, close to the Mayon public market was the small police station, which would be used in many police procedural shoots for Fernando Poe Jr., Zaldy Zshornack, Jose Romulo and Carlos Padilla crime-busting capers.
A few blocks northeast, on Kanlaon, was the local Catholic parish—Our Lady of Lourdes Church—run by the Capuchin Fathers. I stood there in awe while Sampaguita Pictures glamour stars Gloria Romero and Juancho Gutierrez walked to the altar several times for movie wedding scenes, before they eventually tied the knot in real life.
Since my classes were held in the morning, I would dash off to Lourdes Church after school and wait and kneel in one of the pews while the movie crew shot their footage.
National Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes (Photo by Mike Laagan, Wikimedia Commons)
With my palms folded in prayer, I would close my eyes tight and pray that the cameraman would turn and focus his lens on my fervent-and-brimming-with-innocence supplicant pose, and perhaps include the footage in the movie. I also saw to it that my face always creased into a smile whenever the klieg lights clicked just in case that happened. It never did.
Patria Rivera
Based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Patria Rivera writes of Philippine movie icons who used to live and shoot films in her neighborhood—La Loma—in Quezon City.
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