Robert Stewart

Remembering Uncle Bob Stewart HIGH GROUND By William M. Esposo Inq7.net 2006-04-21UPON coming home from my Holy Week break in Singapore, I was met by the sad news that Robert “Uncle Bob” Stewart, an icon and a pioneer of Philippine television who founded the Republic Broadcasting System (which is now the industry leader GMA Network Inc. and a parent company of INQ7.net) had passed away in Phoenix, Arizona, on April 6, 2006. To us baby boomers of the 1960s, Bob Stewart was everybody’s “Uncle” who hosted the daytime kiddies show “Uncle Bob’s Lucky 7 Club” over Channel 7. Bob Stewart also brought to local TV screens such foreign hit series as “Combat”, “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Mission Impossible.” We’d religiously watch “Combat” at 8:00 p.m. every Friday. There was hardly a kid in school then who could not hum the “Combat” intro tune. Bob Stewart, a former American war correspondent, opened a static-marred radio station on March 1, 1950 on Escolta, then the prime shopping avenue of the then-capital city Manila. That marked the birth of Republic Broadcasting System (RBS). Formerly connected with the Mutual Broadcasting Company in the U.S., Bob Stewart was assigned in Manila in 1943 during World War II as a United Press (UP) war correspondent. Uncle Bob fell in love with the country and its people, resigned from UP in 1945 and opted to call the Philippines his home. A Filipina caught Uncle Bob’s heart. He met in 1948 Loreto Feliciano, a Pampagueña widow with three kids and they got married the year after. It was for Loreto that he put up the DZBB radio station, as a legacy. That was followed by the establishment of DQCC, the first music station in the country and later, in 1957, its sister stations DYSS Cebu and DYOO Iloilo. A consummate entrepreneur, Uncle Bob started RBS TV operations with a cheap, used transmitter and two old cameras. With a motley group of employees, RBS competed against networks that employed over 200 personnel. Thousands of children who grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s are all-too familiar with Uncle Bob’s Lucky 7 Club and would watch the show every Saturday morning. And on his late night show, Maestro and Uncle Bob, it was the parents and grandparents who he entertained. When Diosdado Macapagal became president in 1961, he attempted to persecute Bob Stewart for the alleged support that RBS gave Macapagal’s rival, former president Carlos P. Garcia, in the 1960 presidential election. Threatened with deportation, the thousands of kids who followed Uncle Bob’s Lucky 7 Club and their parents rallied behind Stewart and that forced Macapagal to back down. We can thus account for the pettiness and vindictiveness of the present Malacañang occupant. I met Bob Stewart when I was helping promote the shell handicraft products of a man who would eventually become my brother-in-law, Mike Moreno. Bob Stewart had expanded to retail store operations with the opening of Panacraft in 1968 and we approached him in his Channel 7 office to sell him our shell craft products. The experience was like that of two rank, wet-behind-the-ears amateurs taking on the grizzled, eagle-eyed businessman. We could see that Bob was impressed by our craftsmanship but getting him to buy our products at the prices that we wanted was something else. He used every allowable trick in the book to get his price -- from tantalizing us with the lure of a big order to checking on the phone with an associate what the market price was for what we were selling, all the while making us hear the price that he was willing to pay and not what the associate on the other end of the line was quoting. During the haggling, Bob said something that I kept in my memory bank. This is the business reality that it is no longer the creation of a fantastic product (as was the case during the Industrial Revolution) that accounts for successful business ventures but the creation of something that will sell. This was the main point that Bob used to try to get us to come c