John Gokongwei’s legacies for Cebu
Past Forward
By Jobers Bersales
Cebu Daily News
January 24, 2008

Exactly 40 years after German President Heinrich Luebke came to Cebu to break ground for the country’s first modern engineering education complex, the USC Technological Center in Talamban, billionaire entrepreneur John Gokongwei will fulfill his commitment to help in the development of world-class engineering in the country when he will also break ground for the Gokongwei Brothers Foundation Engineering Conference Center, also at USC Talamban Campus. To be built very near the College of Architecture and Fine Arts Building, the center will have an even loftier view of Cebu, Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue cities than all other buildings there. I am told that the center is just a beginning in the desire of the Gokongwei Brothers Foundation to raise the level of engineering education and research in the country to international standards.

Whenever John Gokongwei is asked to speak about the success behind his financial empire that now spans China and the whole of Southeast Asia, he never skips a beat in acknowledging that it all began in Cebu, where he faced the many trials that led to the uphill climb to become the force to be reckoned with in international retailing, agro-industry, food and beverage, air transportation and travel facilities, and petrochemicals.

Of the many colorful events in his life, I always take to heart the two things that I consider of special import from where I stand. The first is his being an alumnus of the USC Boys High School and, in 2004, of the entire university as well when USC conferred on him an honorary degree that made him the first and only doctor in the science of business and enterprise development in the country today. The groundbreaking incidentally coincides with the inauguration of a new building at USC main campus, the Ernest Hoerdemann Law and Business School later in the afternoon.

The second one has to do with his recollection of happy boyhood years watching movies with classmates at Vision Theater, one of the movie houses owned by his father whose sudden and untimely death in 1939 led to an early end to the innocence of youth and plunged him at a tender age of 13 into the world of cutthroat retail business amidst the clouds of war in the horizon.

Vision Theater, which shook prudish and conservative Cebu when it opened in the 1930s because of its pediment profuse with reliefs of nude Greek figures made by the Italian sculpture Dante Guidetti, survived the times, standing as the only structure left relatively unscathed in the wartime destruction of Cebu City in 1945. Still bearing its old name, the theater is today home to a lowlier kind of trade, the sale of pirated DVDs and VCDs on its ground floor and a billiard hall where the grand orchestra used to be. Hidden behind this seedy façade however are remarkably preserved remnants of its life as popular movie house of Cebu’s pre- and post-war public, that is, until uptown commercial success drained the life of Colon Street in the late 1980s.

I asked the new heritage group called Hambin or Hamiling Binilin to explore the possibility of reaching out to Mr. John to ask for his help in purchasing Vision Theater and converting it into a performing arts center, a museum of Visayan cinematography, or some other cultural beacon to symbolize the survival of the old (silent movies and talkies) and the emergence of new media (digital filmmaking, animation, virtual reality imagery). The price is probably steep. But I am sure Mr. John will be all too happy to see that the movie house of his father and of his happy tender years survived the war and the agonizing death of trade and commerce on Colon, not to live in the infamy of pirated videos but to rise and reclaim an honorable place in Cebu’s cultural history and landscape.