Accreditation pioneers look back.

As he left the accreditation exam in Chicago, Lowell Turner, ABC, recalls suddenly finding himself in the middle of a shootout.

"Two guys came running out of a liquor store they had robbed and the police came roaring up almost at the same time," Turner says. "It was like being back in Vietnam except I was trying to hide behind a box of mints I was carrying."

That was 20 years ago, when members were taking IABC's first accreditation examinations. Forty-one accreditation certificates were given out that year, and 19 of the recipients are still listed in this year's IABC WorldBook. Their memories of the experience are as vivid, if not quite as dramatic, as Turner's.

They were in various stages of their careers at the time, anywhere from the minimum five year's professional experience to within a dozen or so years of retirement. They also reflected the demographics of the 1974 association; three-fourths of the first accredited members were men.

Asked to think back, they generally remember taking the examination because they were either curious or they felt an obligation to the association and the profession. Either way, they looked on the exam at the time as representing a personal challenge; were they good enough to meet the professional standards being set by their peers?

A pilot group of six or seven members including Dick Charlton, ABC, Mort Leggett, ABC, and Phil Douglis, ABC, took the first exam in February at Parke-Davis headquarters in Detroit. IABC Fellows were given automatic accreditation back then, but Leggett took the examination because he was curious and interested. Other exams would follow in Philadelphia, Portland, Chicago and Dallas.

Already accredited by PRSA, Charlton recalls being wrung out and stumbling out into the dark wondering if he had just become the first person to bust the IABC examination. Instead, he became the first person accredited by both organizations.

Steve Hirschman, ABC, also gained accreditation from both about the same time and says it helped his performance by reinforcing the pride he took in his work.

Douglis says earning accreditation helped establish his reputation in the field as a professional communicator and the three letters after his name always reinforced his well-rounded background.

Bill Toderan, ABC, who later chaired the Accreditation Board, took the exam for his own personal satisfaction and passing it was a career highlight for him. "Being judged by my peers and passing was a definite milestone for me," he says.

David Jones, ABC, decided to change jobs within six months of becoming accredited and played up accreditation on his resume. Charlton had a similar experience. A few months after he passed the exam, Charlton was the only one of 400 candidates for a job who was accredited by both IABC and PRSA.

"Achieving accreditation did a lot for me as an individual, as a communicator," says Downs Matthews, ABC. "It made me think constructively of what I was doing, why I was doing it, and what could be achieved thereby."

Matthews, who had seen small value in the program, says he became a more effective and efficient member of the corporate team as a result of having met the ABC standards. To that end, he feels the program is worth the time and energies of those involved.

"The accreditation validated my status as a professional, "says Carol Wilson, ABC. "It gave me the confidence to take on any new assignment with faith that 'I could do the job.'"

Jim Beck, ABC, concurs that accreditation instilled a sense of personal and professional confidence that he could meet the standards set by his peers. Bill Hamilton, ABC, put the test in the same league with surviving the Marines and running a marathon.

"The reason to take the examination is something everybody has to discover for themselves," says Pat Walker Angevine, ABC.

Bill Herr, ABC, who took IABC's presidential reins that year, says, "Accreditation wasn't and isn't 'proof of professionalism.' Rather, it's a positive statement for professional standards and for the association we trust to establish them."

Their most memorable ABC experiences:

* When people putting the exam together asked Phil Douglis, ABC, for feedback, he made a strong case for visual literacy testing and they asked him to put together a "visual segment" for the examination.

* When Bill Hamilton, ABC, took the examination, he found himself looking at one of his own proof sheets from an article on an employee marathon runner. He had shared the proof sheet with Phil Douglis who used it in the visual section. "It was a good example," says Hamilton, "because it had all the cliches and it also had candids of the runner at the end of the race."

* PRSA-accredited Dick Charlton, ABC, had submitted some sample questions for the IABC prototype examination. Jake Wittmer, ABC, and John Bailey, ABC, who administered the exam, made sure he didn't get a single question like the ones he had suggested.

* When Steve Hirschman, ABC, transferred from Wisconsin to Connecticut, he was the only accredited member in his new chapter. He took the train to Chicago for the examination in a building that housed a business school, specifically the typing room. In the midst of the exam, a fleet of young women appeared, sat at the available typewriters and began to pound the keyboards, just practicing and making a racket. Bill Herr, ABC, remembers banging his way through the exam on a noisy old manual typewriter in a dingy Temple University classroom in Philadelphia.

* The whole idea of accreditation was new and scary, says Carol Wilson, ABC. No one was available to provide advice and there were no guidelines because accreditation had not been done before. None of the candidates knew what to expect and she says she dripped sweat during her oral exam in Portland.

* Bill Herr, ABC, says his greatest pleasure has been in watching the Phoenix chapter's recent ABC classes experience the mentoring process and seeing their joyful smiles of satisfaction when they succeeded.

Connie Eckard, ABC, is senior staff assistant for ICF Kaiser Hanford Company in Richland, Washington.