03/08/2025
The Last Man Standing
He was present at creation, an eyewitness to history.
He was among the 35 who converged at the bombed-out ruins of the Cancer Institute of UP at Padre Faura to form a fraternity that will embrace scholarship and nobility of service to man.
This was how a friend, Larry Henares in his Philippine DaiIy Inquirer column, described him:
โA natural born genius with a rare gift of being humble and soft spoken.โ
โHe graduated numero uno from La Salle, with honors from UP, and ended up at Harvard.โ
He is a Cum Laude Chemistry graduate of UP when such an honor was the intellectual equivalent of summitting Mount Everest. He went to Harvard on scholarship and the prestigious MIT - Massachussetts Institute of Technology.
He parlayed this first-rate mind into building a pharmaceutical company that tapped Filipino talent.
That company, Inphilco, manufactured and sold veterinary drugs, pharmaceuticals, livestock and aquaculture feeds, animal nutrition supplement, some of which it still sells today.
It also became a de facto Beta Sigma chapter as he recruited brods right out of college, not as employees, but as partners in a Filipino-owned enterprise that treats its workers as family.
Brods earned and learned from him, as a few still today. As a boss, he has been generous both with advice and compensation. He is a mentor who imparts not only the secrets of the trade but how to achieve work-life balance.
Above all, he is a deeply-religious man who preaches his faith by example.
Patrician in looks and bearing, he is a die-hard Beta Sigman who attends fraternity gatherings big and small, whether S-R-O frat balls or solemn farewell rites for brods.
Of the 35 good and noble visionaries who made a covenant to found a fraternity anchored on egalitarianism and excellence that July day 79 years ago, he is the last man standing from that famed batch.
He is Brod Gregorio โGreg/Goyitoโ Abreu,
The Last Living Founder.
