Meet Your Bemisu Breeder
Blake Gipson
My name is Blake Gipson. I started my "Sphynx Adventure" back in 1988 when I lived in Boston. One rainy Sunday I was going through the Boston Globe when I came across an advertisement for a Cat Show. A friend and I decided to check it out. When we arrived, we began traversing the rows upon rows of cats and came upon the most unusual living creatures I had ever seen. They didn't really look like a cat because their ears were too big, they had no hair and no whiskers. I met Carol Richards that day, a pioneer of the breed in the U.S. who told me about the Sphynx. We agreed that I would visit her home in San Antonio and see her cats. At the time she was still outcrossing them to another breed called Devon Rex. When I arrived at her home in San Antonio a few weeks later we agreed that I would adopt a little male by the name of Romulus. I decided to take him to shows to see how he would do.
Several shows later, I met another of the Sphynx pioneers who came from France. Her name was Aline Noel. Aline and I struck up a conversation, she critiqued Romulus and offered to provide me with a female from her Amenophis lines in Europe. She arrived two months later with "Bigoudi".
Bigoudi means woman's hair roller in French. This is how my small program started. I soon began taking both Romulus and Bigoudi to shows, met new breeders and established some very close friendships. A year later, I was asked to run for the TICA Sphynx Breed committee. I later became Sphynx Breed Chair and have been on the committee ever since. I have a very strong passion for this breed for many reasons. But the most important reason for my passion is that I now get to share these babies with new people that have discovered them. I will never forget waiting for Romulus to arrive. I have met some wonderful people through the years that love them as much as I do. I continue my journey with the sphynx learning new things all the time.
