HE was a battered young dreamer who frequently got a beating from an illiterate father who only aspired to see his son become one of the best auto mechanics in a sleepy little city down south. He stowed away to escape the wrath of an angry father, went to nearly a dozen schools and took on some of the oddest jobs before deciding to jump into the rat race in the big city.
“My life as a young adult was wayward. My father was a driver who didn’t know how to read and write. My mother was a market vendor. It was my older sister who watched over me. I learned to smoke in my first year in high school and eventually learned to drink alcohol. My father and I often argued because he wanted me to become a mechanic which I never really liked. He used to beat me up real hard so I had to leave the house in numerous occasions and escape,” recalled Mario Teodoro “Ted” Failon Etong, one of giant network ABS-CBN’s most successful radio and television anchors, about his ordeal in the hands of an unforgiving father.
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