Mornings With Barney

by Dick Wolfsie

  The racket was so intense that the station did get a few phone calls from curious—and concerned—viewers who wanted to know why, no matter where I went for my telecast, you could hear this wailing in the background. When the receptionist who screened the calls asked me how to respond to the inquiries, I told her to suggest to people it was a problem with their TV set. In my opinion that was always the best way to explain technical difficulties to the viewers.

  I tried parking the car closer to each reporting location so Barney would not feel abandoned, but this had the opposite effect and made him even more determined to get my attention. Now that he could see and hear—and probably smell—me, the volume of his yelping only increased.

  Because it was winter, some of the segments were indoors. I was reluctant to request of my guests that Barney be allowed to come into their homes or offices. I knew what had happened to my own home and office. I could leave him in the car, but I knew how unhappy he was alone. In addition, it meant leaving the car turned on so I could leave the heat running. He accidentally figured out that the electric windows lowered if he stepped on the button. And that meant he could scamper out the window, which he did twice in the first few months. Fortunately, in the early days he was reluctant to venture far from me, and I found him sniffing around the area. But he gained confidence quickly and leaving him in the car with the heat or AC on just wasn’t viable anymore.

  One morning when I sensed his bellowing would wake up the neighborhood, I asked permission to bring him into the senior citizens’ home in Mooresville, Indiana, where I was doing a segment. The residents were putting on a talent show and they had no problem with Barney being tied up inside. They did stress the words tied up. I borrowed some cord from the center and attached him to a doorknob.

  One of the first guests was a spry octogenarian whose talent was doing the hula. She wiggled out from behind the curtain and began doing the native dance. Her grass skirt was seductively flapping about. Not seductive to me, I assure you, but seductive to a year-old beagle that chased and chewed anything that moved.

  Barney, securely tied—or so I thought—beagle-eyed the hula dancer’s skirt, busted off of his lead, and raced to his intended target. In a flash, he grabbed a hunk of the skirt in his teeth and ripped it off the woman. Completely off.

  Fortunately, the woman had worn sufficient undergarments to keep the show rated PG-13, but my cameraman at the time, Marcus Collins, almost broke his neck trying to whip the camera around to feature a more family-friendly picture. He was also laughing so hard, we barely got through the rest of the show.

  The residents took it well, considering they hadn’t seen anything quite like that at the Mooresville Senior Citizens’ Home for some years.

  When we left, we were invited back (by all the men).

  That was Barney’s first appearance on TV. I’m not even sure viewers realized he was my dog. Actually, at that point I wasn’t sure, either. My wife had not granted official permission. A few colleagues at the station asked me about the pooch and why he was with me during my segment. I kept it all low-key; after all, he wasn’t a hit on the home front and if my bosses ended up feeling the same way as my family, Barney wouldn’t have anywhere to go.

  Homeland Security

  Barney was not winning any popularity contests at the Wolfsies. I dragged him to work with me every day, but he still had to be home the other twenty hours. During that time, I watched him like a hawk, knowing that if I could brag about an unblemished record for even a week, there was a chance that the majority voting bloc in our family would determine a favorable outcome about whether he would achieve squatters’ rights in our home. On some level, my wife knew we were going to keep him, but maybe she held hope that even I would soon tire of his shenanigans and find him a good home. There was no chance of that, of course.

  At one point, after Barney had successfully unraveled a complete roll of toilet paper that now snaked through the entire house, I sensed the scales were tipping against us. I delivered an ultimatum to the dog in front of my wife, knowing full well that this plea would fall on deaf (but floppy) ears, but I hoped it might sway my wife’s growing reluctance to Barney’s taking up permanent residence.

  “If you keep up this behavior,” I said, shaking my finger at him, “I will have to take you to the pound and when you get there you will have to be in a little cage all day and there will be no human food and there’s a good chance that if no one adopts you within a couple of weeks, they might have to . . . well, you know ... put you to sleep.”

  At first his tail started wagging, which probably meant he thought I was saying, “give you a treat,” not “put you to sleep.” But then I swear that Barney’s eyes shifted to Mary Ellen. “Is he serious?” he wanted to know. I wasn’t, of course, but my point did not go unnoticed by my wife. I felt bad about using this threatening approach, but I was hoping to appeal to Mary Ellen’s basic love for animals. Not this animal, of course. But animals in general.

  Except for that inadvertent emergence on the screen, Barney made only one other television appearance that first week. Part of my routine each morning, other than the three-minute live shots every half hour, were a series of teases—short bits with me promoting my upcoming segment on the news. “Next on Daybreak, a munchkin from The Wizard of Oz.” You wanted to hook the viewers, keep them watching.

  In one interview at a bakery, I walked viewers through the process of making fresh bagels with the manager of the new store. For one of the tease shots for the upcoming segment, I took Barney from the car and stood with him outside the store. When we went live for the tease, I allowed him to lap up the remaining contents of a container of cream cheese. As he happily inhaled the treat, I shamefully said: “Coming up on Daybreak, beagles and cream cheese.”

  Dreadful, I know, and it was just the beginning. We had 6,000 more teases left in our career together.

  By the end of February, Mary Ellen and I were sleeping in separate rooms on weeknights—not because the romance was cooling, but because my Daybreak gig required a 3:30 AM departure from our house. Barney and I had become roommates in the guest room. He would nudge his butt up next to me in anticipation of what he hoped would be a normal night’s sleep for a furry carnivore: sixteen straight hours, no problem. I’ll urinate 200 times when I get up tomorrow, he must have figured.

  And so the first few months of this sleeping arrangement created a tricky human-canine conflict: I didn’t always want to get up and go to work, but I had to. Barney didn’t want to get up and go to work with me because nature had granted him the ability of endless slumber, but he had to. And I had to make him.

  It was tough staggering into the downstairs bathroom at 3:30 AM that first winter. I never wore makeup on camera, so that sped up the morning process, but my departure was ultimately slowed because our older home had a detached garage filled with debris left by the previous owner. My car was left out each night, so I had to scrape my windshield on most cold mornings. Barney, knowing he was part of my scheduled exodus, would either retreat under the covers or head upstairs for the master bedroom in expectation of sharing a bed with my wife . . . a hope even I had pretty much relinquished Monday through Thursday. One of my favorite lines from Happy Days is when Mr. C. makes a romantic gesture to his wife while watching TV one evening. “Oh, Howard,” she coos at his touch. “It’s only Thursday.”

  So, morning after morning of that particularly brutal Indiana winter, I dragged two asses out of bed every day—mine and Barney’s. I wanted to maintain marital harmony. The weekend was always just around the corner. I might get lucky.

  By March, I was sensing that Mary Ellen had softened a little in her antipathy toward Barney and that a conciliatory final gesture might cement the deal. I enrolled Barney in obedience school. As it turned out, Barney was smarter than I was. If I had known how being “bad” would be part of his charm and would add to his success on camera, I might have given this more thought, but at that point I was just eager to win p
oints with my bride.

  The woman who took the call at the school was a legend in Indianapolis, running the oldest existing dog training facility in the state. I was impressed with the sales pitch, including the money-back guarantee. She had gone through about half of her spiel when she asked the breed of my pet. When I said beagle, there was dead silence on her end of the phone . . . then a good-natured laugh. “I was just kidding about the guarantee.”

  She explained that beagles were tough to train but that with dedication and perseverance and $40 an hour, it might be possible to overcome 2,000 years of evolutionary instinct in six hourlong sessions. Darwin must have been rolling over in his grave.

  “Oh, and there is homework,” she told me. “You are the one responsible for your dog’s behavior. We just give you the tools.” The tools I needed were an Oreck vacuum cleaner and a backhoe, but I was going to try to make this work.

  Those six weeks were the most humiliating of my life. Barney just saw this as a chance to sniff a few . . . well, you get my point.

  As mortifying as the experience was, I have always wished that I would have videotaped the final day—graduation, if you will. In the “stay-and-come” test, all the dogs were lined up. It was quite an assortment of talent, too: big, little, purebreds, mutts, howlers, whiners. Each owner told his or her dog to stay, then turned and walked fifty feet to the back of the training room. Every single one of the dogs stayed right in line—with one notable exception. He certainly never did this when we went for a walk, but for the first time ever, Barney followed me. He actually followed me. Hey, maybe the training was working. Sort of.

  Barney was placed back in line. Part two of the final exam was to see if the dogs would go to their owners. Barney had just proven he could do that. Everyone called their dogs. Each dog scampered to his owner. You guessed it, there was one exception . . . again. Barney headed for the kitchen area and launched himself into a trash can containing the remains of someone’s beef burrito.

  Later that night, all the dogs got a diploma. Including Barney. Like my cousin’s online PhD, it meant nothing. Even the Irish setter outperformed Barney.

  Some of the owners were bragging about their pets’ new behaviors. “Selma wants to be a rescue dog.” “Chotsie is going to herd sheep.” “Arnold will be a watchdog.”

  I looked into Barney’s big brown eyes. He bowed his head and his ears cascaded over his eyes. Was it shame? “You’re going to do just fine,” I told him. I was dead-on about that, but at the time, I had some serious doubts.

  “How’d it go?” asked Mary Ellen when we walked in the door later that evening.

  “I think it was a huge waste of time,” I admitted. Mary Ellen gave us both a hug. We needed it.

  Obedience school lasted six weeks, but during that time, Barney was making more and more appearances on-screen, including one that was a major factor in his career development, defining what made Barney a TV celebrity.

  By late March, the morning anchors half expected that I would somehow work Barney into one of the segments or teases—a cameo appearance, if you will. I tried to balance his play on the air because I had never asked or received permission from either of my bosses to include a dog in my segment. This was either a very gutsy move on my part or monumentally stupid. I knew eventually I’d find out.

  Before you read the following story, I’m going to admit something: I’m not sure it’s 100 percent true. I’ve told it for so long that I can’t remember anymore. Vince Welsh, then our sports anchor, can’t remember either. But we think it’s true. Most of it, anyway. That’s the way of legends.

  When I brought Barney on the show and my segment was outside, I would usually keep him tethered to a stake. (To a dog that doesn’t know what a homonym is, this would sound like fun!) To keep him in my view, I often placed him near the portable TV set I used to monitor what was going on back at the station.

  After one of Vince’s sports updates, he was to toss it to me in the field (a nice sports metaphor). Then Vince, who got a kick out of my bringing the dog on TV, asked about Barney while we were live on the air. I wasn’t happy about the inquiry. True, the dog was now appearing on the air more regularly, but anchor recognition of this ongoing event assigned it a new credibility, like it was really part of the show. I wasn’t sure how this would play with the bosses.

  “Where’s Barney?” asked Vince.

  “Oh, he’s tied up over there by the TV.”

  Vince couldn’t resist: “Well, he must be watching me. I guess he’s a big fan.”

  At that point, Marcus, my photographer, panned to Barney, who had been sniffing around the perimeter of the TV monitor. Just as the camera zeroed in on him, he lifted his leg and peed right on the twelve-inch Magnavox screen.

  “Yeah, Vince, he’s a big fan.”

  In television, one way you know you have connected with that invisible audience of viewers is the crew’s reaction. In the background, through the anchors’ microphones, I could hear the laughter of the cameraman, directors, and producers. Barney had a way of putting a person in his place. Sometimes it was a better place. Vince was an eager and talented new face on our station in those days. Not cocky, really, but self-assured. We can all use a touch of humility.

  That moment on TV was graphic enough that it led to a note in my mailbox from general manager, Paul Karpowicz. My worst fears were confirmed. It brought back memories of every note I had ever gotten from a teacher or principal: SEE ME.

  A Boy’s Life—or, Raised by Wolfsies

  “See me” really did send chills down my spine. I guess it’s because I spent lots of time in the principal’s office as a kid in New York. Every report card from kindergarten through sixth grade was one teacher’s lament after the other, a verbal wringing of the hands. My parents were told I had no self-control, I was a wise guy, and I was caretaker of the messiest desk in the history of Roosevelt School. I could have been the poster child for ADD. But they had not invented that diagnosis yet.

  For me there was quite literally no prescription for success. Every day was torture, sitting for hours listening to the teacher, desperately searching for the right time to offer a wisecrack to the class. There was the one thing I was good at: ad-libbing. I even remember my first real gem back in the third grade. Miss Davis had cautioned a student about the danger of chewing on his pencil.

  “What would happen if you swallowed that pencil?” she asked Mark Fisher.

  My hand shot up. “He could borrow my pen.”

  The crowd went wild. But I was in trouble, as always. I sat for two hours after class and had the privilege of writing my little wisecrack 1,000 times on the blackboard. Comedy is hard work.

  Then came junior high school. I don’t remember a thing about junior high. My sense is that that is a good thing.

  I do remember Pokie, my first dog and I guess my first real experience loving an animal. We had gotten the black and white speckled mixed breed from the Humane Society to appease my sister Linda, who was so obsessed with dogs at age six that when she got out of the bathtub, she would shake like a pooch caught in a downpour. A canine companion was a cheaper route than long-term therapy, so the Wolfsies got a dog.

  Just months after Pokie arrived, she escaped from the house. I chased her to the end of our block, just in time to see a car crash into her back legs as she crossed the main thoroughfare. Pokie yelped and limped home. It was traumatizing to see this, but the injury was not as bad as we had thought, although her tail had been completely crushed and required amputation.

  My mother, who I am not sure had truly bonded with the dog at the time, became her dedicated health care provider for the next ten years. The remaining stump lacked mobility, which meant my mother had to clean Pokie each day when she returned from her daily constitutional—but not before Pokie had soiled clothing and furniture. Mom loved that dog. Her dedication to that needy pup showed me what dedication to an animal meant.

  In school, I was seldom a serious pupil, often a dedicated p
unster and the runaway favorite for class clown my senior year. I got a 35 in the state Regents Test in chemistry. That’s out of 100. But on my English regents, I scored 40 out of 40 on the written exam, a surprise even to me because my 300-word essay was filled with corny plays on words and sentence fragments. Which I still like to use.

  New Rochelle High School was just like a big stage for me, an audience that would laugh at almost anything if I had the nerve to blurt it out in class during a lesson on The Scarlet Letter. Occasionally, I’d even get a grin from a teacher, which is really the highest compliment. When I became a teacher several years later, I remembered how much that reaction had meant to me and I consciously doled out chuckles and smiles to deserving students who managed a clever ad-lib in class.

  In August 1965, my parents dropped me on the corner of 21st and I Street in the nation’s capital, just a few blocks from the White House. I had never been away from my parents. I didn’t know a soul in this new city. I was homesick for my family and friends.

  And I was going to miss my audience.

  Getting laughs turned out be a lot easier than getting laid, evidenced by the fact that I graduated from college at the peak of the sexual revolution with zero experience in pleasing a woman, but rave reviews when it came to performing for a crowd.

  Freshman year I began slipping anonymous essays under the door of the newspaper editor, a technique that apparently both Ben Franklin and Mark Twain had used to get their first break in publishing. By sophomore year I had fessed up to my ploy after a few of my essays were printed, and soon I began writing a weekly humor column for the school paper, The Hatchet.

  By my junior year, my chutzpah had kicked in again and I had orchestrated a way to distribute my column in one hundred college newspapers, becoming the first student syndicated humor column in history—as far as I knew. Incredibly, checks kept appearing in my mailbox at the dorm, payment for the right to use my material. It was the closest I ever got to getting high. And this was the sixties.