Kay, what was it like being in the breed in the sixties?
Rusty and Teru - 1st
place in Am Bred Class at the ACA 11th Annual Show. Oct.''70
There was the parent breed club and the chapter clubs. I was
living in Pasadena, California so I was a member of the parent breed
club. In those days the parent breed club held regular monthly meetings.
When we first started attending, the meetings were small and they
were held in members' homes, on a rotating basis as I recall. Then,
as the meetings got too large for that, they switched to a regular
meeting hall. Now, I don't know what it was like being a member
of the chapter clubs but there were, of course, a lot of political
wars going on in the parent club; meetings were stimulating and
exciting. You never knew what was going to happen. There was always
an undercurrent. You would show up at a meeting and suddenly the
room was packed.
Getting Involved With the Registry
What I became actively involved with was the Registry. Back in the
50s, the Fishers got the Akita breed into the Miscellaneous class.
When the club first formed, Liz Harrell started the ACA Registry,
which meant that she put together the papers for the registration
of the litters, the American-born individual dogs, and the Japanese
imports. The original papers that she submitted to the American
Kennel Club in 1962 when the ACA tried to get the breed recognized
the first go round included the records of 454 dogs (and weighed
75 pounds). Nancy Hoeltje was handling the registration papers when
I got my first dog, and people were not particularly happy with
the way things were going. She was extremely slow in processing
the papers. So, eventually, a Registration Committee was formed.
Monica Vogl headed up the committee. In March 1971, I joined the
committee; Barbara Uyeda was a member, and Eric also joined the
committee at some point. If there were other members, I don't recall
who they were. Eric and I wrote up a booklet of registration rules
with new forms because there didn't seem to be any uniformity, and
a lot of people seemed confused about what the procedures were.
We wanted to make it clear and concise and have everything be uniform.
Part of the reason for establishing a committee was to reassure
everyone that all forms would be processed equally according to
rules. In December 1971, I became the acting ACA Registrar.
Relocating the ACA Stud Book
It became clear at some point that the breed was going to be recognized.
This was shortly before Eric was finishing his degree, and we were
planning to move to the East Coast. We were under the impression
that, when the breed is recognized, all you do is turn over your
records to the American Kennel Club. So, we thought, rather than
ship all the records to New York, we would just take them with us
to Virginia and at the appropriate time we would drive them to New
York (which was agreeable with the Board)…. only that wasn't the
way it played out. What happened was we moved to Charlottesville,
Virginia [with all the stud book files] in Sept '72, and I believe
it must've been around October of that year that we learned definitively
that the breed was going to be recognized…. because the cut-off
for litters was Nov 1, 1972. All American-born Akita litters born
on or after that date would have to be registered directly with
AKC.
Beginning Foundation Stock Registration
Anyway, the way the system was explained to us was that someone
(or some committee) in the club had to process a totally new application
for every dog that would be registered with AKC as foundation stock.
AKC did not want us to deposit our voluminous records on their doorstep
(the records filled half of a 1971 3/4 ton Dodge van). Since we
were in the middle of nowhere in Virginia with all the records and
nobody but me within 3000 miles who knew anything about how to use
them, either I had to do this task or it wasn't going to get done.
There were no other Akitas in Charlottesville. We were in a remote
location and there was no one we could call for help. So, we bit
the bullet because this was important to us. Instead of getting
a job, I would simply do foundation stock registration. I don't
remember exactly when "the madness" began, but the first
thing we had to do in the foundation stock registration process
was prepare a bulk mailing to everyone who had ever registered an
Akita with the ACA to announce the limited opportunity to register
their Akita with AKC during the foundation stock registration period.
 
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