Sacramento Kennel Club – 100 Years in the Making

Click here to read the complete article
104 – The Annual, 2019-20

By Amy Fernandez

Shows are dying left and right, and some say the whole game’s on a deathwatch. Tell me something I don’t know. That might be how Sacramento Kennel Club seems to be beating the odds. Next April marks their 100th year in business and there are not too many clubs that can boast an endurance record like that one.

Actually, there’s a long tradition of that out on the left Coast. AKC can be thanked for a lot of that, but not in the ways you’d expect. From the get-go, they treated that entire West Coast purebred scene like an unwanted stepchild. Granted, there wasn’t much of a scene in the beginning, but we all know “build it and they will come.” and California commenced to stake its claim in this deal way back in 1890. Even so, AKC’s “club of clubs” constitutional structure made it pretty easy to pretend otherwise. Since membership required delegate attendance at meetings–regardless of feasibility–it’s fair to say that any stake in the democratic process diminished according to distance from NYC.

For clubs located thousands of miles from New York the realities of AKC membership translated into paying annual dues for the privilege of conceding their voting rights to the self-absorbed insider clique manning the boardroom.

After more than a decade of bitching and whining about the terms of this deal, AKC finally threw a bone to those unhappy West Coast clubs which, despite their crummy situation, had somehow still managed to survive and multiply. AKC’s solution, the Pacific Advisory Committee, theoretically would champion their cause within the AKC hierarchy. Since PAC was comprised of exactly the same boardroom clique nothing really changed except five more years of mounting frustration. No, actually the other big change was the growing financial and political clout of the West Coast purebred scene. Gold, oil, railroads, banking, agribiz… dollar for dollar it matched anything happening on Wall Street. And those big players poured considerable resources into clubs and shows up and down the Coast promoting their stake in the sport. AKC was too busy alienating and antagonizing them to notice any of this situation until it reached critical mass. In 1914, it culminated in the long-threatened resignation of all West Coast clubs under the banner of a breakaway organization, the National Dog Breeders Association. The abrupt loss of almost a third of its constituents–and a lot of financing–finally woke the boardroom.

It’s amazing that it took so long. It’s fair to say that West Coast clubs grew in spite of, not because of, AKC. Anyway, that was just round one. For decades thereafter shows west of the Mississippi remained pretty scarce due to a lot of boring reasons we will skip. The important thing is that when AKC’s big bull market started up in the ‘50s those California clubs were poised to draw some the biggest entries this sport had ever seen. They had also forged a long tradition of resourcefulness and self-reliance.

But as we know too well, record breaking numbers haven’t been typical for a few years now. Many former strongholds of the sport are now drawing triple digit entries and more than a few old favorites have closed shop for good. So, maybe Rich Vida has a few insights about keeping the ship afloat. He’s been running the Sacramento show since 1981. Of course, like most of us, that unenviable job was not his initial plan. “It was more my wife’s hobby. When we got married, I didn’t even own a dog.” He sort of entered the dog game accidentally in 1961. He recalls, “My wife, Carolyn, bought a Great Dane from Helen and Jim Blood and that friendship led to my connection with the Sacramento Kennel Club.”

Click here to read the complete article
104 – The Annual, 2019-20

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Posted by AnthonyA on Dec 31 2019. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.