Felicitas Aguilos Arintok

Felicitas Aguilos-Arintok was born on July 26, 1935 in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines and was the fourth of six children of Briccio Riel Aguilos, Sr and Maria Irlandez Tafalla, both natives of Carigara, Leyte. Her parents were both educators – her father a school principal, later a supervisor, and her mother a classroom teacher. She was married to Antonio Arintok, also of Carigara.

When the Second World War broke out in 1941, her father served in the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) as head of the Intelligence Unit and had the rank of a Captain. Given his delicate position in the military formation, his father brought the whole family from Tacloban, the provincial capital, and hid them in the boondocks of Carigara where they remained until the war ended. There, amid an idyllic and pastoral setting, the young Felicitas –Itas or Fely to her friends and relatives—learned the ABCs from her teacher-mother.

When the skies were cleared of the war clouds in 1944, her family stayed in the town of Carigara even as her parents returned to government service. She attended grade school at the Jugaban Elementary School. In 1950 she enrolled at the Holy Cross Academy, a catholic school which her father helped establish with the primary goal of stemming the tide of Protestant educators and missionaries dotting the countryside. After two years the whole family returned to Tacloban. She earned her high school diploma in 1954 at the Teacher’s College, then a fledgling private institution that offered teacher education courses and which her educator-father again helped organize and set up.

In her desire to take up medicine, Fely (or Itas) enrolled in a Pre-med course at the then St. Paul’s College in Tacloban. For health reasons, however, she had to drop from school, thus ending her dream to become a medical doctor. After a year of respite, she headed to Manila and took up Bachelor of Science in Nutrition at the Philippine Women’s College (now a university). At that time, nutrition as a college degree course was still in its incipient stage in the Philippines. That made her among its earliest students. When she graduated in 1959, she took the licensure examinations and figured among the ten topnotchers.

Being one of the first graduates in Nutrition and Dietetics in the Philippines, she was among the pioneers of the Nutrition Foundation of the Philippines, a private non-stock and non-profit organization engaged in improving the nutritional status of the Filipino community. True to the organization’s commitment, she helped carry out public health nutrition activities all over the country for the benefit of the Filipino families.

It was in 1973 that she migrated to the US where she married her long-time fiancé Antonio Arintok. Having earned their US citizenship, the couple resided in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and finally, in 1988, settled in Pasadena, California where she got employed as a school dietician until her retirement.

Fely was widowed in 2014.

She is survived by three siblings: Briccio Jr, a retired trial court judge, Maria, a retired registered nurse and Uldarico, a visual artist and a retired government employee.

In California, Fely’s nearest kin consisted of her nephew Robert Francis Briccio, known to all as Bobby, his wife Cecile, their three daughters and a son.