VST & Company’s Spanky Rigor lives a simple life in US as baggage handler

Spanky Rigor, former actor and a pioneer of the band VST & Company, whose founding members include Tito and Vic Sotto, is now living a simple life in the US as a baggage handler.

His nephew Albert Samaha, an investigative journalist for Buzzfeed News, told the story of his Uncle Spanky and how he ended up in the US in a video feature for Pop-Up Magazine.

Albert said his uncle Spanky was a baggage handler at San Francisco International Airport and he’s been doing it for nearly three decades now since he first came to the country from the Philippines.

The journalist said Spanky refused to retire at almost 70 years old and despite the injuries he suffered at work because his uncle had bills to pay.

Spanky was one of the founding members of the iconic ’70s band VST & Company, where the “S” stood for his name. He wrote and produced songs and played guitar for the band.

The band’s “V” and “T,” meanwhile, were none other “Eat Bulaga” mainstay Vic Sotto and now Sen. Vicente “Tito” Sotto III, the group’s lead singers.

Spanky Rigor has worked as a baggage handler at SFO for almost 30 years. But back in the Philippines he was a rock star — a founding member of the pioneering ‘70s disco band VST & Company.@AlbertSamaha shares the story of his Uncle Spanky. https://t.co/DTm2CAq2W2

— Pop-Up Magazine (@PopUpMag) June 29, 2020

Albert said VST & Company was considered the “Bee Gees of the Philippines.”

He said the band was “part of a wave of ’70s disco bands that redefined Filipino popular culture.”

“Folks called this renaissance ‘Manila Sound,’” said Albert.

When he was 25 years old, Spanky worked as a producer at a record company where he met brothers Vic and Tito, who liked his ear for music.

In 1977, VST & Company released their first record with their debut single “Awitin Mo at Isasayaw Ko.”

Height of Spanky’s fame

According to Albert, his Uncle Spanky realized he was famous a few months later when he took a taxi cab home one morning after a long recording session.

The cab broke down and as he stood by the road smoking a cigarette, a bus full of nursing students lingered across from them.

“The whole bus started screaming and I was just looking and the cab driver got out of the hood, looked at the bus, then looked at me, then looked at the bus then looked at me,” Spanky narrated on the Pop-Up Magazine video.

“I go like ‘what are they screaming about?’ And then they were looking at me and I just waved. And when I waved the more they screamed.”

Albert said Spanky went from playing proms and college parties to touring the country and showing up on a list of the sexiest men in the Philippines.

From there, Spanky’s show biz career eventually blossomed, as he began hosting talent shows and appearing on comedy shows and films alongside his usual collaborators, the Sotto brothers and actor Joey de Leon.

Most notably, Spanky Rigor was part of the main cast of the sketch comedy and variety show TODAS (Television’s Outrageously Delightful All-Star Show), which aired from 1980-1989.

Spanky’s success came during the reign of martial law in the Philippines.

At that time, Albert said Spanky saw his duty as an entertainer as a way “to help relieve the fear so many felt. To help people forget.”

As part of the “upper crust of Philippine society,” Spanky lived a schedule full of “red carpets, A-list clubs, celebrity basketball tournaments” and “adoring mobs anytime he was in public.”

Invitations from the President “Dictator Marcos himself to Malacañang Palace to entertain dignitaries and cronies lining long banquet tables” were also common, said Albert.

From “big house, bigger beach house. Drivers, maids, nannies, bodyguards, private school for the kids and an endless string of well-paying, low-stress gigs,” Spanky’s future was laid out for him.

Living the American dream

In 1988, however, at the height of his fame, Spanky surprised his bandmates by leaving that kind of life behind.

“Sometimes they would tell me ‘What the hell were you thinking about?’ You practically had it made here,” said Spanky.

A decade before he left, Albert’s grandmother immigrated to San Francisco all by herself.

One by one, family members soon joined her, beginning with Spanky’s wife Ging in 1981. It was supposed to be temporary setup.

“Just long enough to help my grandma steady her feet on the road to the American Dream,” said Albert.

“Auntie Ging would hop on a plane and visit Manila once a year and in return, Uncle Spanky would visit my auntie and their baby boy,” he narrated.

Albert said every time his Uncle Spanky would land in San Francisco, “he found even more glamour than what he had left across the ocean.”

“It was like going to La La Land. It was going to another dimension, another world.  Everything I see ‘Wow. Beautiful.’ I couldn't see the dregs of life. I couldn’t even see garbage. I couldn’t even see homelessness. All I saw was, ‘wow, what a beautiful place,’” said Spanky.

Albert said it went on like that for 7 years until Ging became pregnant and more of her siblings had already joined her in California.

Both approaching middle age, the couple decided to stay together for good and bought a house in Vallejo, California.

“Spanky thought the place was perfect. Cherry, apple, and lemon trees to pick. Weekend barbecues in the backyard. Family and friends always passing by for long nights of beer and grilled meat,” said Albert, describing the life his uncle had.

New suburban life

This paradise, however, was soon taken away from the family after “America’s crack-cocaine epidemic” became “the backdrop for Spanky’s new suburban life.”

At the time, burglars broke into Spanky’s home, the Vallejo shipyards closed, and unemployment soared.

Through a Filipino friend, Albert said Spanky managed to get a job at the airport loading carts for airplane kitchens.

“I’m working here, I mean I’m working here? I don’t even know what a kitchen looks like. And it’s dirty, cluttered, it’s a lot of people. Wow. I said, Well I’ll give it a try,” said Spanky.

The former band member questioned what he was doing as he drove 50 miles going home with his hands still dirty.

“Several times I nearly fell asleep at the wheel. Sometimes while driving I’d think, ‘why am I doing this? I’m not supposed to be doing this but I’m doing it.’”

Spanky thought of leaving but “there was a small voice in the back of my head that said ‘oh yeah, you can do it. You lazy bum. It’s about time you work.’”

There’s always a price to pay

Despite his struggles in the US and thoughts of what would have been a luxurious life in the Philippines, Spanky told his nephew that he had no regrets leaving.

“Whatever successes you do in the Philippines there’s always a price to pay,” said Spanky.

That price, according to Albert, “was the suffocating hold of fame and comfort in a country where food and opportunity are scarce to all except those at the top.”

It was “the gilded cage of a society where sons and daughters are expected to carry on the family business,” the journalist added.

“Whereas here in the States? At least they leave you alone to do your thing to the best of your ability,” Spanky said. – RC, GMA News