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My profile of Socorro Cancio Ramos, founder and chair of National Book Store, in the Star today.

I ask her if she’d ever imagined that the five-square-meter stall she opened in Escolta in 1939 would become this retail giant. She shakes her head. “Mapaaral ko lang ang mga anak ko, at kumain kami ng tatlong beses isang araw, tama na. Noong Japanese time, mabuhay ka lang, okay na.” (It was enough that I could send my children to school and we could have three meals a day. During the war, it was enough to just survive.)

Two years after she opened her little bookshop, World War II broke out in the Pacific and the Japanese invaded the Philippines. All books had to be submitted to Japanese censors, who cut out any mention of America. All their stocks were mutilated. “What will we sell?” Socorro asked her husband, Jose.

The answer: Anything and everything the customers needed. They sold candy, school supplies, cigarettes. She found a maker of tsinelas (rubber slippers), bought six pairs, discovered that the Japanese wanted tsinelas, and was soon selling hundreds of pairs. National Book Store might very well have been National Tsinelas.