The Howie I know, and the people he remembers

Howie Severino has been my boss and mentor, but I have also come to know him as a father to Alon and as a husband to Atty. Ipat Luna. In the nearly 19 years I have known him, I have seen these different sides of his life. Across the years, he has always had my respect and admiration.

Seventeen years ago, he hired me for my first job, as a journalist at GMA News. I was new to the profession when he asked me to revise a profile more than 10 times.

That is something you remember about your first boss.

But my memories of Howie extend beyond the newsroom. I learned how to write Alibata from him. I visited him in his home made of bamboo. Through the years, I came to know more than the journalist whose name appeared on stories and whose face was familiar to television audiences.

One quality has remained unmistakable: Howie pays attention to details.

As a young journalist working through those revisions, I encountered that exacting side of him early. Looking back, I appreciate how much care writing about another person requires. A profile needs facts, certainly, but it also needs the details that help a reader see a person rather than just a name or a position.

That memory gives me a particularly personal way into his first book of essays, "People I Knew (And Some I Didn’t But Wrote About Them Anyway)."

Here is the journalist who once sent me back to a profile repeatedly, gathering his own accounts of people whose lives he wanted to put into words.

Writing about him now, I appreciate the difficulty of the assignment. How do you capture someone you have known for almost two decades without reducing him to the role in which you first met?

Before he was the Howie we know

“When I was 19, I went to see Ninoy Aquino in his modest office in exile…”

So begins the collection, with a young Howie meeting someone whose name would become inseparable from Philippine history.

There is something inviting about that opening. Before the familiar television presence, the documentaries and the years of newsroom leadership, there was a 19-year-old walking into an office to meet a man.

For someone who first knew Howie as a more experienced journalist, it is an interesting shift in perspective. The person who would later help shape other journalists’ work was once young himself, having encounters he would eventually find reason to revisit.

The book began with tributes to friends, first published online shortly after their deaths.

“I didn’t want to just express my sadness, but write about what was worth remembering about them,” Howie recalls.

That distinction gives the collection its purpose. An expression of grief tells us something about the person left behind. Remembering what someone did, believed in or brought into other people’s lives turns the attention back to the person who has gone.

Writer Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, then director of UST’s Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies, encouraged Howie to collect the personal essays and arranged a meeting with the UST Publishing House. He returned to his archives, adding profiles previously published mostly on GMA News Online and GMA Regional TV.

Pieces written for particular moments could now be encountered together, by readers who might know some of the subjects well and be meeting others for the first time.

The people who stayed with him

The collection brings together people who occupied different places in public life and in Howie’s own.

There are his GMA colleagues Mike Enriquez, whose image appears on the cover, and Cesar Apolinario. There are Ninoy, Cory and Noynoy Aquino; former President Fidel V. Ramos; former Senator Letty Shahani; Commission on Human Rights chair Chito Gascon; and former Foreign Secretary Roberto Romulo, all of whom he knew.

The arts bring another set of encounters: filmmaker Lino Brocka, with whom Howie shared jail time with; theater luminary Floy Quintos; writer Mario Miclat; painter Jaime de Guzman; and comedian Tado Jimenez.

The collection also makes room for people from his everyday life, including a security guard at his former townhouse who rode a bicycle to work each day.

Then there are those acknowledged by the title’s wry parenthesis. Howie never met Nora Aunor, Uncle Bob Stewart, Kobe Bryant or former President Ramon Magsaysay, but each had an unexpected impact on his life.

There is an appealing openness in that choice. We do not need to have shared a conversation with someone for them to become part of our personal history. An artist’s work, a broadcaster’s presence or an athlete’s career can accompany us through years of our lives without that person ever knowing our name.

Taken together, these subjects offer different points of entry into the author’s life, through the people he met, worked with, watched and remembered.

Howie explains in his introduction that the collection was not curated according to his subjects’ importance, or even his affection for them.

“My book simply reflects the various ways one can choose to remember others through words.”

The writing takes different forms, too. One chapter is in Filipino, another in poetry. Some pieces are full-length reportage; others are barely longer than a photograph’s caption.

I like the freedom that range suggests. Not every remembrance has to account for an entire life. Sometimes, a particular encounter is what we have to offer. Sometimes, a detail is worth keeping because it is the part we were there to notice.

What I remember

My connection to the author begins with a sentence simple enough to fit into a caption: He hired me for my first job 17 years ago.

But the years that followed have given me more to say.

The Alibata lesson and the visit to his bamboo home belong in my account of him just as much as those early newsroom revisions. So do the occasions when I saw him as a husband and a father. They have made my picture of him fuller than a list of professional accomplishments could.

I would not claim that knowing someone for nearly 19 years means knowing every side of him. It does, however, make you conscious of how much a single description leaves out.

That is what makes this collection personally interesting to me. While Howie gathers his accounts of others, I find myself considering the account I would write of him. Which moments would I choose? What would help someone who has never met him understand why he has my admiration?

His attention to detail would certainly be part of it. I remember it from the beginning of my working life, when I was learning what the job required and he expected me to keep working on a piece.

Now, writing about the boss, mentor, husband and father I have come to know, I understand why the first version might not be enough.

Published by UST Publishing House, “People I Knew (And Some I Didn’t But Wrote About Them Anyway)” was launched on September 11 at the Manila International Book Fair at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay. An additional book signing was announced for the evening of Saturday, September 12.

-Atty. Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo is the Chief Technology Officer of Paraluman News  and the founder of Arkipelago Analytics, Build Initiative Foundation, and Night Owl AI.