Ch. Kenny's Blazer Boy of Caribou CDX (completely out of coat) April 1961
“I bought a male first that had been trained for obedience, and he had his CD and he’d been trained for CDX, but never gotten a leg on it. Finally, we got all three legs on his CDX, then started training him for conformation … He was Best of Breed in the 1964 National Specialty in Denver. He was always a very happy fellow as long as I had the lead, but let anybody else handle the lead … His name was Ch. Kenny’s Blazer Boy of Caribou CDX.
Of course, I never could have done that if I hadn’t had some excellent guidance along the way. Most of my guidance came in the early days from the late Agnes Mason …
What really climaxed things for me was at the March Portland bench show in 1965, the late Cliff Collins took his time talking to me that day. He must have spent three hours. I’d finished about eight champions at that time, but I still didn’t know what I was doing and he knew it. I was breeding dog to dog, as too many people do – they breed to a winner or something, and if they don’t get what they want from the first dog they breed to they don’t know why. He was the one who taught me how to go back to grandparents and great grandparents, and if I couldn’t get movies of them to get stills of different views – front views, side views, rears – and try to get some when they were moving, watch those and see what the grandparents and great grandparents, in particular, were doing. That, too often, in a linebreeding was what would come through, and you had to know which grandparents dominated the present generation before you bred to it. It was the most valuable session I ever had and I’ve never forgotten it. It really straightened me out and showed me how to do things.”
Ch. Tsiulikagta's Sa-Kie-Ste-Wa. Sa-Kie-Ste-Wa was Hopi and meant 'little flower of the valley.'
“There were more people who tried to buy Sa-Kie-Ste-Wa. All they had to do was lay eyes on that bitch and watch her move and they were right on you … People came from Wisconsin–and everybody who came to New Mexico and saw that bitch wanted her, but I never sold her. She was part of me. She always moved clean whether she was going or coming and she had so much personality and she’d really turn it on in the ring.”
“I’m a retired registered nurse, and was on the staff at National Jewish Hospital in Denver, and had an Eskimo patient there. One day, when I was going someplace that had something to do with dogs, I brought one of them with me in the back of the car … She looked up and saw him and nothing would do but she called down to the office to try to have me come up there. I got him out of the car so she could look through the window and see him.
The next day when I came to work, she kept saying “Tsiulikagta, tsiulikagta.” I asked her what it mean and she said “Great one.” I had her print it out for me. I had a heck of a time at first learning how to pronounce it. For a long time, after I decided to use it for a kennel name, I didn’t even tell anybody what it meant … But I found out that people would forget my name, forget the dogs’ names, but they never forgot that kennel name. It they say it in a show, and the dog won, it stuck in their heads and they remembered that name.”
The Samoyed Quarterly, Winter 1993-94