Sunday, September 26, 2021
Only yesterday did I hear of the passing of Dely Reyes while I was at a Filipino gathering in Okinawa City. I did not know her personally but through her correspondence with Prof. Bienvenido Panganiban of UST and then as director his own music academy in Okinawa, incoming letters only dating from c.1960 to the mid-60s and after. Dely and he exchanged many letters and hers have survived in Bien's archive which is held at the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts. In those days she usually signed her envelopes by the name Katigbak. I was the archivist who catalogued Bien's papers. Her letters show her to have been all that everyone else says about her, energetic, resourceful, and determined with an enormously powerful and original intellect. Bien Panganiban was also born in 1930, five days before she was. He died on February 15 this year. My dearest hope is that she used to keep her papers, especially her correspondence, and that those letters, if surviving, will be preserved in an academic archive in NJ or New York (perhaps Columbia). Prof. Tony (A.P.) Jenkins
