Philippine education blues
July 15, 2006 | 12:00am
The rainy season always brings back memories of elementary school, flooding and the not-too-consistent policies of the Department of Education on calling off classes due to the not-too-accurate weather predictions of the time. So what has changed?
Much too much has been said anyway on the subject of our deteriorating educational system, the sorry lack of classrooms (unless of course you fit 250 students in five shifts into one classroom), the exodus of teachers for domestic worker jobs abroad, etc. etc.
When you mention the term Philippine education, I used to think of another institution altogether, albeit one that has disappeared – the Philippine Education Company. PECO, as the firm was more popularly known, was the place to go for school supplies, books, magazines and even toys up to the early 1960s. National Book Store was just a fledgling operation then, and specialty bookstores, like Fully Booked and Ink & Stone, were still a few decades in the future.
PECO was also one of the last establishments to operate out of the old Escolta district – actually on Farnecio St. off Arlegui. I remember my father taking us there as kids. We hopped into his trusty old 180D Mercedes Benz with the sun roof (we were not rich but we rode in style) and motored all the way from Project 4 to downtown Manila to get to the store.
The place looked rather like a warehouse by today’s retail design standards. In fact, the old ’60s buildings actually were three warehouses on a hectare of land. The original PECO shop at 101 Escolta Ave. was long gone by the time I visited. The high ceilings and musty smell of old stocks of stationery, books and merchandize paint a vivid background memory of those jaunts. My dad bought us model airplanes and school supplies there, and I remember being fascinated by the miles and miles of merchandise on the industrial-looking racks. No promo banners, sales displays or fancy POS collaterals here, just plain old products under glass or on the shelves. But there were fewer shoppers in the ’60s compared to the heyday of PECO.
Time was when PECO was the only place to go for foreign books and magazines. In the pre- and post-war period, they had the monopoly on these goods, school supplies, teaching aids, architectural paraphernalia and toys. At its peak, PECO sold 640,000 copies of 1,000 foreign magazine titles a month!
PECO was founded by Verne Miller, a Thomasite schoolteacher, who landed in the Philippines in 1901. A graduate of Rutgers College, Miller spent six years in the Philippine education system as a classroom teacher before going up in the ranks as high school principal and eventually division superintendent. He resigned his post in 1907 to edit The Philippine Teacher, which was then located at 90 Escolta St. right above a barbershop. Soon he made a success of the magazine and bought majority of business. He changed the publication’s name to The Philippine Education Magazine and started a book distribution company peddling dictionaries.
The business boomed. The company was reincorporated as the Philippine Education Company and expanded into a large property at 101 Escolta St. as a retail store with a Spanish-type warehouse on Castillejos St. nearby.
Miller started selling imported books, magazines, teaching aids and then widened his offerings to Frank & Co rubber stamps, stationery, general supplies and – did I mention – toys. PECO was already an established name in the 1920s when Miller expanded yet even more into more publishing with Manila Publishing Company which offered book sets on installment, the Rosenstock (Manila) City Directory, which compiled business data, and the McCollough Printing Company, PECO’s most profitable business in the late ’30s and after the war.
By the ’30s, Miller was so busy he had to hand over his original magazine to David G Gunnell, also a former teacher. A graduate of the University of Colorado, Gunnell edited the Philippine Education Magazine and made it the recommended magazine for teachers until 1940. He joined PECO main operations that year and became its vice president and treasurer. PECO was a household name by the 1930s and, by the onset of the Second World War, its fleet of trucks with the triangular PECO logo was ubiquitous throughout the islands.
The war broke out in 1941, and the Japanese Army took the trucks and fuel. Gunnell was incarcerated at the UST with most of the other American civilians. I can’t seem to find out what happened to Miller, but Gunnell survived the war. PECO’s buildings were also miraculously saved from destruction during the Liberation, and Gunnell , along with a cadre of pre-war PECO men, put the company back on its feet.
The business environment improved and profits returned for PECO until the mid-’50s when dollar shortages and import controls reduced the company’s ability to deliver goods to the market. Their magazine sales dropped to only 40,000 a month with only 58 titles available or permitted. The contents of the magazines were also an issue to post-war conservative Manilans. The celebrated case was that of an issue of the American magazine Pageant. Word circulated that a controversial article, "The Sexual Behavior of the American Female," was coming out in the magazine, which was a best seller at PECO. The Holy Name Society got the Bureau of Customs to rule the magazine as obscene and therefore subject to burning. The magazines were impounded at the ports and rotted as the case dragged in the courts.
Gunnel ran the company until the 1960s when he was in his 80s. This was the period that I had first patronized the store with my father. In the late ’60s, the old Manila complex was gone and PECO moved to the Makati Commercial Center. (It was at the one-storey Post Office building that they relocated to. I frequented the store there. My dad got me my first magazine subscription through that store – to Popular Mechanics). It was smaller but the magazine offerings improved in the late Sixties and Seventies. A nearby bookstore, Erehwon, was another favorite.
Eventually, other bookstores bloomed. National, Goodwill and other shops and department stores relegated PECO’s one-shop operation to the margins of the retail world. It disappeared completely in the late ’70s. I do not know whether it’s still around, but Philippine education will never be the same again without PECO.
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