Ermin Garcia: Unsung hero in his own land of birth

By Al S. Mendoza

 

JULY is Sunday PUNCH month.

Just right.

Emerging from austere, inauspicious, times, the Sunday PUNCH was born in July 1956, when the wounds of war had yet to fully heal.

Hesitation still stalked the land.

Tentative was both the folk’s and folks’ steps.

Plans hung in the balance.

But from the war rubble as life was still crawling creakily back to normalcy came one intrepid soul creeping, if crazily I’d take that anytime at all, into the city’s consciousness for one singular stroke of history.

Ermin Garcia was only 35 years old when he founded the Sunday PUNCH, a weekly read of modest beginnings but, hey, the “pocket paper” would boisterously bloom into the Bible of Pangasinan’s news buffs and, eventually, all of Ilocandia.

Without a doubt, Ermin Garcia was a daring dreamer, a terrific trailblazer, whose place in Pangasinan’s pantheon of immortals is as secure as The Beatles’ spot in music lore.

I admire and even continue to swoon over Ermin Garcia, who dived into an abyss when other frontiers would have unmistakably yielded him more profitable results, given that obviously he had gifts not being of the ordinary.

Aren’t writers (Ermin Garcia was a distinguished literati) creative enough to come up with the unthinkable and subsequently produce a fortune from the most unlikely of situations – such as from the ruins of rift?

Every tragedy, like war that scars us for life, has always been the mother of opportunity, right?

But Ermin Garcia surrendered – seemingly willingly – to the itch to eke out a living out of the pen, becoming like a bee stuck forever to a flower’s nectar, falling prey to a fatal attraction between moth and lamp.

How many times has it been said that never is there wealth in the written word?

But in so doing, in putting up a newspaper instead of a utilizing his talents in picking up potential wads of bills, Ermin Garcia proved that a celebration of life is not merely one being awash with cash.

More importantly than that, living your dream is the ultimate – even if it meant offering your life to fulfill that dream.

Almost 10 years after his historic hop to his daredevil dream, on May 20, 1066, Ermin Garcia was killed defending his dream – shot three times at point-blank range by a crooked politician whose pernicious payroll-padding ways was about to be exposed by the Sunday PUNCH.

Ninoy Aquino, the father of President P-Noy, was also shot and killed by political rivals and the country’s national airport is now named after him.

Aurora Quezon, the widow of President Quezon, was also shot and killed by her husband’s political rivals and a province is now named after her.

But, sadly if not pathetically, Ermin Garcia, the father of the hard-hitting Sunday PUNCH owner-columnist Ermin F. Garcia Jr., doesn’t even have a street – neither in Dagupan nor Pangasinan – that bears his name.

What have our honorable politicians done, been doing, all these years?

Here’s another case of a hero not being accorded a hero’s worth in his own land of birth.

Jesus of Nazareth was Ermin Garcia of Dagupan?

The Pilates of Pangasinan, please raise your hands.

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