By Lynndee Kemmet — The Dressage Foundation’s Century Club has a new member in Anne Kulak. Kulak, 80, entered the prestigious club this fall when she competed with her 20-year-old Thoroughbred and partner of many years London Gem. The Century Club honors rider and horse pairs in which the rider and horse have a combined age of 100 years or more.

Kulak entered the club on September 23 after earning a 79.20 in a Training Level 3 test during competition at Stockade Polo and Saddle Club in Glenville, New York. It turned out to be the high score of the show. “It was a glorious fall day and some of my children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and close friends came to watch,” she said. “It was great fun and I was overwhelmed at the outpouring of congratulations afterward.”

Kulak, the mother of event rider Marcia Kulak, was born in New Haven, Conn. and raised in Hartford. She started her riding career at a military armory in West Hartford. That was prior to World War II when the military still had a cavalry. “They had a mounted unit at the armory and even an indoor ring,” Kulak said. As the military moved from horses to mechanized vehicles the armory’s indoor ring became a parking garage for military vehicles. Kulak then started taking lessons at a nearby farm.
She got in much extra riding when spending her childhood summers in Vermont where horses were her main means of transportation. “We rented a Morgan horse in the summers, complete with harness and buggy. We’d hitch him up in the morning and my mother and two sisters and I would go off to the village for mail and other errands,” Kulak recalled. She and one of her sisters would ride the Morgan bareback all over the countryside. By the end of the summer, their horses were so fit that they would ride them 22 miles to the start of the Green Mountain Horse Association’s annual 100-mile ride. When she was about 12 and her sister 16, Kulak said they convinced the Horse Association to create a junior division for its annual endurance ride. “We needed a division with no weight requirement,” Kulak explained.

It was also during her Vermont summers that Kulak met Sally Swift and began learning about her centered riding approach. It was a relationship that lasted through Swift’s lifetime. “I went to a camp where Sally was teaching when I was nine and she left an indelible impression on me,” Kulak said.

Kulak got her introduction to jumping during high school in Connecticut but it wasn’t the slow introduction most new jumping students experience today. “They’d take you out and there would be a three- foot fence and you’d jump it. I had a number of dreadful habits and never was that comfortable with jumping.” Kulak still does cavalletti work with London Gem but said she much prefers flat work now.

Kulak went to Bennett Junior College in Millbrook, New York for a degree in modern dance but what really drew her was that the college had a riding program. “They had such a good riding program. We rode all over countryside, including through land where a mall now sits.”

She left the Northeast for Indiana after marriage and then returned to the East in 1964 when she and her husband, John, moved to Glenville, New York. They started their own farm, which Kulak still runs today. “I keep busy. I drive the tractor and do the mowing. People call me the divot queen.” Her husband, now deceased, was not a country person but Kulak said he was amazingly supportive and did much to keep the farm in shape.

At about the same time that Kulak moved to New York, her long-time friend Essie Perkins moved up to Vermont from New Jersey with her husband Read. They started Huntington Farm and played an instrumental role in the growth of eventing in the U.S. Both Essie and Read were successful event competitors and their daughters Beth and Bea also both rode. Beth, like Kulak’s daughter, Marcia, has gone on to have a successful eventing career.

“Marcia would go to Green Mountain Horse Association camps for several weeks in the summers and would then go over to Strafford and work on Huntington Farm,” Kulak said. “She showed an early interest in jumping. We have this marvelous picnic table that a friend built for us. It’s very sturdy and very broad and when she was a child Marcia kept telling me that she was going to jump it with this Welsh pony that was equally broad and strong. One day, I saw the evidence that they had actually done it. There was a little dent in the wood where a hoof hit.”

Marcia Kulak is just as proud of her mother. “The success of my career is directly related to the roll my mom has played over the years. She is truly a remarkable woman. She raised six children, kept my dad in line, all the while running a farm and managing a very busy household. She’s also an amazing cook,” she said of her mother. “To this day my mom is the first one in the barn in the mornings and the last one out at night check. She has shared her home with countless students, friends, clinicians and relatives. Most of all, she set the standard for a work ethic, for kindness and for generosity with great class. She continues to touch many lives every day. I count my blessings to have such a special mom.”

Just as special, said Marcia Kulak, is her mother’s equine partner in the Century Club. London Gem came to the Kulak family as a six-year-old off the track. “He’s a super little athlete. What really sets him apart is his temperament. He’s soft, kind and generally very quiet, although his free spirit shows through every now and again.”

In the 1970s, after moving back East, Kulak also reconnected with Sally Swift who began coming to the Kulak’s farm to teach. “When we moved to New York we had two boys and four girls and Sally sort of watched all our kids grow up. We raised beef cattle and bred Thoroughbreds.”

Kulak also gave lessons at the farm and over time incorporated the centered riding that she was learning from Swift. In addition to being an instructor, Kulak also competed in dressage and eventing and was part of the group that created the Eastern New York Dressage and Combined Training Association (ENYDCTA).

The idea of joining the Century Club came to Kulak from Audrey Evans, a friend and client of Marcia Kulak. Evans is also a member of the Century Club. Having now made it into the prestigious Club, Kulak hasn’t decided yet if she’ll compete again next season. But she’s absolutely certain that she’ll continue learning and riding. More recently she has been doing much study of ground training techniques, which she feels is valuable but often overlooked by many trainers.

“I was brought up in the day when you rode through problems. But we have learned much since then and there is so much more information about training. If a horse rebels there may be reasons and you need to look for them and address them. Sometimes the work from the ground shows you the problem more clearly. Horses are such good souls that they’ll often go in spite of what we are asking them to do in our bad riding,” Kulak said. “I find it really fascinating when I try to be more like a horse in my thinking. I won’t live long enough to be anywhere near as well educated toward horses as I would like, but I’m not sorry for a minute of my life with them.”

Photo Courtesy of Stanley Horton