In Memoriam: Dominador I. Ilio

In Memoriam

by Melchor F. Cichon

 

Dominador I. Ilio was born November 15, 1913 to a farmer couple, in Malinao, Capiz (now Aklan).

 

He was, until his retirement in 1978, a professor of hydraulics at the University of the Philippines College of Engineering and head of its Engineering Science Department and College Secretary for many years. He was the Secretary of the UP Alumni Engineers since 1954 and was selected the Most Distinguished Engineering Alumnus in 1977.

 

With writing as an avocation, Prof. Ilio has been published as early as 1934 while still a student at the University of the Philippines where he was the literary editor of the Philippine Collegian (1938-39). He finished with civil and geodetic engineering degrees from UP. While working for his MS in Hydraulics at the Univeristy of Iowa, he attended the renowned poetry workshop of Paul Engle.

 

He was in the first wave of Martial Law detainees back in 1972/73. (This period of our lives is so foggy I don't even remember what year it was he was imprisoned by the Marcos regime.) His recent works include The Collected Poems of Dominador Ilio, Guerilla Memoirs (a novel), Madia-as (tales and legends in verse), The Katipunan of Aklan, and Vagaries of a Wild River. He is also included in Gemino Abad and Edna Manlapaz's Man of Earth (Ateneo, 1989) and its sequel, A Native Clearing (UP Press, 1993) and in Nick Carbo's anthology Returning a Borrowed Tongue, a collection of Filipino poetry in English, published by Coffee House Press, 1995. He died on February 7, 2006 at age 93.

 

*His year and date of birth is always in question. It's either 1913, 1914 or 1915. I am sticking to 1913 in this biography.