In our system the manual is called The Accumulative Journal. It's more commonly called "The manual". Funny too, that I find more and more people who don't have one, never seen one, never even heard of it. Mr. Parker wrote the manual around 1969, with the help of Tom Kelly and Huk Planas. It became the standard for the system. It was in an orange binder, embossed with the IKKA crest. Later it was a red binder, without the raised crest. I have both. Huk liked to say people said they had the manual but they kept it locked in a drawer and never looked at it. I should have locked mine up. I had a guy I trusted at my studio in Palos Hills, IL who would run classes for me when I went to California. He copied my manual, thinking I didn't know he did, when I had been told by Ed Parker not to distribute it. (He'd later sell them.)The guy betrayed my trust and really showed his colors later when I told him he wasn't ready to test for black and he walked out the door without a word and promoted himself. Last time I saw him he was wearing a fifth.
I got my first copy in 1979 from Frank Argelander, when I met him at the Pasadena studio. I had more than one version as the years went by, too. I was the guy who actually made the first copies of the updated Journal in 1981. I did them in Ed Parker's business office in Glendale and he let me keep the very first set that came off the copy machine.
The day I did them we had gone to his office and he left for a while to do something else. I got a call in his office and it was him telling me to lock the office door because there was a guy loose in the building with a gun. He was chuckling, I didn't believe him but I locked the door anyway. Turns out it was true.
Now to clarify something else related to that version of the Journal. It was the first update of the original one and it was done by Jim Mitchell. There is some stuff on the web that kind of misinterprets a statement I made in an interview about that version. It says that I was contacted by Ed Parker to do that re-write but I refused. I think that makes it sound like Ed Parker came to me out of the blue to ask me to do the writing. That's not what happened.
I had been training with him privately for a very short time when one day he handed me the manual and said "I'd like you to re-write this." I gave it back to him saying that I was not qualified to do that, since I really didn't understand the system well enough to do the job right. Apparently he then asked Mitchell, who took the job. That was when the system changed to 24 techniques,new techniques were added to Yellow and some thrown out, new sets and extensions were added, too. Every re-write afterward is based on that Mitchell re-write.
Anyway, that's a brief history of the Accumulative Journal. Go to www.pacifickenpo.com, Rich Hale's site for more information. He's got the manual on a disc. You can't have mine, it's locked in a drawer.
