Mornings With Barney

by Dick Wolfsie

  There was one beagle, Stanley, at the Hamilton County Humane Society, who did catch my attention. And he looked like Barney, but he was a girl. Yes, a girl named Stanley. And for reasons that I cannot explain but will probably get me in trouble with feminists, this was not a female role I was casting. I wanted a Jim Carrey, not a Tina Fey. I know that’s totally nuts. But that’s how I felt.

  One afternoon when I was at my computer writing a newspaper column, the phone rang ... “Mr. Wolfsie, you don’t know me, but I’m down at the shopping center about three minutes from where you live and I drove two hours to show you my six beagle puppies. It would be an honor if you would put one on TV and make him a star.”

  I jumped in the car to take a look. How could I not? The dogs were adorable. So adorable, in fact, that while I was playing with them in this huge pen, people in the parking lot recognized me and thought they were about to witness a historic event: the selection of the new Barney. I resisted taking one of the pups, but I am pleased to say that three of the dogs found a home that day.

  One of the complications of my decision was that our cat Lindsay, who was within a whisker of twenty-one years old, was in no condition to deal with a new dog. I made a promise—no new dog while Lindsay was still alive—to my wife, and that took the pressure off me to continue the search. Mary Ellen was happy being beagle-less, at least temporarily.

  Two weeks later, Lindsay retreated to the laundry room and as cats often do, passed away quietly in private. She was a classy cat who never gave a mouse’s ass about Barney. Over the dozen years, there was an occasional swat and maybe one or two hisses, but Lindsay was unimpressed with the TV star. That’s how cats are.

  Our other cat, Benson, still spry at nineteen, might have to face the prospect of a new housemate. I knew he wouldn’t like it. Well, tough.

  Then in September, just six weeks after Barney died, a call from a former guest, just one of thousands on my show who had been moved by Barney’s death. Marcia had two loves: dogs and mushrooms. She had been on Daybreak twice, each time highlighting her business, Fungus Amongus, an endeavor that made her a favorite with local chefs who prized her homegrown mold. To quote her T-shirt: SHIITAKE HAPPENS.

  “I have a dog I want you to see. A beagle. I’ve had him for a couple of weeks. A stray.”

  “Marcia, please don’t do this to me.”

  “Dick. You have to see this dog.”

  Marcia knew mushrooms, but she also knew dogs. She was harboring about six other rescues at the time and I sensed that her husband, John, was pressuring her to get rid of one. Apparently, the beagle (Toby), the newest edition, had disrupted whatever chemistry had existed within the pack.

  Marcia lived three miles away in a rustic farmhouse just off the main thoroughfare. When I pulled in, I heard the cacophony of howls, barks, and whimpers as my car rumbled to a stop on the cobblestone driveway.

  I walked in with the feeling that I was going to go home with a new beagle. Marcia greeted me, then retreated to a back room where she managed to release just Toby, although all six dogs were desperately trying to nudge their way through the door and into the main room to greet me.

  Out he came, his legs spinning along the wooden floor as he desperately tried to secure his footing. The exuberance in seeing a new face only intensified the furor of his advance and he skidded head first into the sofa. Dazed for a moment, and panting furiously, he gathered himself and then sat up on his hind legs and howled at me.

  Oh, God. That’s what Barney used to do. And he looked exactly like Barney. Well, almost. His coloring was virtually identical, although he lacked a tiny white strip on his forehead. Instead, there was a kind of crevice or dent in his head, a place my son would later say was where they were supposed to put his brains. And he was a big beagle, fifteen inches high, not eleven like many beagles. Just like Barney.

  And he had the eyes. He had Barney’s eyes. Marcia knew I was hooked. I knew I was hooked. Even the dog knew it.

  We struck a deal. I’d take Toby home for the weekend, introduce him to Mary Ellen, Brett, and Benson, and if we could get through Saturday and Sunday without structural damage to the house or major opposition from feline or family, I’d take him.

  Toby jumped in the car and we took off for his new home, but before we departed Marcia saddled me with one piece of additional information about the dog. He had been a stray, which I knew, but when Marcia took him to the vet they discovered a microchip in his neck. This is often a good sign of a vigilant, caring owner. Marcia had tried to contact the family, but they had not returned repeated calls.

  The last thing I wanted to do was bond with the dog, then have to return him. I had a flashback to the early days of Barney’s celebrity when people would come up to me and claim that Barney belonged to them and until they had seen him on TV, they had no idea what had happened to their precious little (fill in any name). Most folks were just pulling one of our six legs, but it did raise a frightening specter of how I would have dealt with a serious challenge to my ownership.

  Toby dragged me into the house, a good indication of my challenges ahead. It was about 2 PM, so Brett was still at school; Mary Ellen was at work. Toby sniffed about but was decidedly reserved, a touch skittish in his new surroundings. Suddenly, a cameo appearance by Benson, who simply eyeballed the dog and confirmed it was Barney—suggesting that reports of the beagle’s death had been exaggerated. Then as Benson moved on, he got the first delayed whiff of the intruder, just nanoseconds after the initial visual ID. This was enough to dissuade him of his original assessment. His head whipped around to scrutinize Toby. Wait! One more quick look. Hey, that’s not Barney. What are they trying to pull over on me? Now we had hair on end, growling, paw swatting. A cat hissy fit.

  But don’t miss the point here. Benson had done a double take, an honest-to-goodness theatrical, Hollywood double take. Even Barney had never mastered that.

  It was a tough weekend. Toby clearly possessed all the attributes that would make him a possible substitute for Barney. This meant that he was also a bit incorrigible. Could I make my family go through this again? Did I have to? Remember that I still had not been instructed by the TV station not to get another dog. I knew it in my gut, but no one had the nerve to tell me. Yet.

  We were at a precarious point. We had all cozied up to Toby over those few days—even Brett, although that zeal would wane eventually. But did we really want another beagle? Well, I did. I was hoping this was not going to a household vote.

  Within a week, that decision was made crystal clear to me by my boss. Crystal clear! Did I want the truth? Could I handle the truth? “No more dogs,” I was told. “Let’s face it,” said the news director, “there can never be another Barney.” You could read that with any inflection you wanted, but here was the bottom line: no more reporters with canine sidekicks. But what about me? Would I continue in the same gig without a dog?

  As Cochrun later explained, he felt my value as a reporter on live shots was a waste of my real talent. He was a fan of my weekly newspaper column and wanted me to devote my time to feature packages, stories that are written and edited. “No more live stuff,” he said. I panicked. I was flattered he liked my writing, but five produced stories a week meant twice the work. I didn’t have to write or edit the live segments. I just did them. It also meant the end of the spontaneous nature of the show. I told my wife I was going to quit. She wasn’t a big fan of that idea, so I agreed to try it.

  So there would not be another dog. How did I feel about that? I must admit, I have always thought it was the right decision, but for the wrong reason. The boss was correct. There would never be another Barney. Everything about Barney’s stardom, his impact on the community, was pure happenstance. He was a one-in-a-billion beagle, thrown into the ideal situation with this aging reporter who was just perceptive enough to capitalize on the pairing, highlighting the antic-prone tendencies of this special canine.

  No, there could never be another Barney. But this decree was n
ot about Barney’s irreplaceability, it was about getting a new, more “sophisticated” look for the news. That’s why they didn’t want my live daily shenanigans anymore. The new emphasis would be on news, weather, and traffic.

  The truth is that the package segments were a success. I won awards and over forty of my pieces were nationally syndicated. But even that gig bit the dust, finally. Two years later, I was told that viewers didn’t have time to watch a thoughtful two-minute segment in the morning. They needed to get the basics and head out the door. Which is where I thought I was headed. The solution from the station: Put Wolfsie on live on the weekends. His shtick will sell there. People have more time to watch.

  By the time I had been told that Barney was not going to be replaced, Toby had already become a member of the Wolfsie family. It was too late to turn back. We were stuck with him. Crass, I know, but the family choice of a dog—if we were voting—would not have been for a beagle. Mary Ellen had grown up with a collie. That was supposed to be our next dog.

  I did have one call to make. I had to make sure that Toby’s previous owners—the ones Marcia had traced through Toby’s microchip—weren’t still looking for him. I called again and this time, damn it, someone answered. I did not reveal my name, which might have been an invitation to sell the dog, rather than relinquish it.

  “I found your dog, Ma’am. A beagle, about three, a tri-color, male.”

  There was silence for several seconds. I asked again if it was her dog.

  “He’s a pain in the ass. He’s trouble,” she finally uttered. Little did she know that this was the kind of dog that had made me famous. But wait. Trouble can mean a lot of things. I pushed for details. “Look, there’s a lot of tension in my house,” she continued. “My husband and I are getting a divorce. And he keeps running away.”

  “The dog or your husband?”

  Forgive me. A straight line of such immense potential could not be ignored. But it worked. She hung up the phone. Toby was mine. I was thrilled. Or was I?

  Those first few weeks were like reliving the nightmare of the previous twelve years. He was as bad as Barney in every way. In one way, he was worse. Barney had been housebroken. How and when he acquired that skill, we never knew. But Toby had a whiz-anywhere attitude.

  Halloween night, Brett, Mary Ellen, Toby, and I sat at the front of our driveway passing out candy to skeletons, ballerinas, and devils. Toby sat calmly next to us, wagging his tail at every ghost that floated by. Suddenly, as if he had been frightened, he turned and bolted for the front door.

  “What’s the matter with Toby?” asked a neighbor who had joined our little group. “Why does he want to go back inside?”

  “He probably has to go to the bathroom,” said Mary Ellen. It was her funniest line of our marriage.

  Could Toby have become another Barney? He certainly had all the required bad habits and mischievous inclinations. But as I tell people almost daily, Barney was not something I had planned. True, once he came into my life, I nurtured and enabled the very behavior that made him a household word. But as Lee Giles put it, “You could never have that kind of magic again,” which is another way of saying what the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus declared, “You never step in the same river twice.” I suppose this is a bad analogy when you are talking about dogs, but when it came to Barney, I could only step in it once.

  End of the Tail

  Beginning in 2006, I was back on live TV doing remotes on Saturday and Sunday mornings as I had for twelve years with Barney on weekdays. It was still a hoot, but the howl was missing and I still sometimes got the eerie feeling Barney was looking over me, just making sure I was doing something silly.

  Every day, viewers came up to me to tell me how much they missed the two of us on the morning news. They still do. And when people saw me with Toby in public they assumed he was a star-in-training, a dog who would jump-start their weekend mornings. “No, he’s just my dog. He’s not a TV dog,” I explained. Most folks just nodded their heads. “You’re right, you could never replace Barney.” But the notion of having a partner again was hard to let go of. Should there have been a new Barney? Could Toby have filled that role? Would the management at the station have considered a dog on the weekend segments if I had pushed it? What a guy like me doesn’t need is something like this to obsess about.

  Instead, I found something new to obsess about. I felt the need to capture all my memories of Barney while they were still fresh. But how? Should I write a book? I had already put together a paperback scrapbook that included many of the weekly humor columns I had written about him over the years. But an entire book? Like in some kind of order, with chapters and a theme? This is not what people with ADD do in their spare time.

  I wrestled with this dilemma for weeks, while a patient publisher waited for my decision. My good friend and college buddy Mark Olshaker, a writer himself, pushed me to do this. He said my hesitation was just fear of success. My wife said I was afraid of failure. Then my agent called and said he was afraid the deadline for my decision was the next morning at 9.

  That afternoon, I picked up USA Today and there it was on the front page: Uno, an adorable little beagle, had just won the Westminster Dog Show, the Academy Awards for canines. The accompanying article praised the little pooch, making it clear that a beagle had never won this coveted honor.

  I watched Uno on TV all day, interacting with his fans—so full of personality, so full of life. So what was I waiting for? This was a sign, pure and simple. I decided to write this book.

  I continued to follow Uno’s coronation the next week, watching the coverage over and over again as he captured everyone’s heart, just like Barney. Yes, he was best in show, but he also could have won noisiest in show (not to mention nosiest) and the hungriest. No beagle had been in contention before, although back in 2003, there had been a rumor that one was being considered but the owner let him outside for a minute to exercise and he didn’t come back for three months.

  One of Uno’s biggest rivals was a poodle named Vicki, who apparently had her own video on YouTube. I wish that such Internet opportunities had been available when I had Barney. I would have started a Web site called MyMess.com, a place where beagle owners could post photos of the destruction their hounds wreaked that day, as well as where they were last seen before wandering off.

  From the TV exposure he received after the victory, we learned a great deal about Uno. He loved having his picture taken, for example. “He just eats that up,” said his owner. Barney felt the same way about publicity. But he devoured the pictures. And two lens caps and a leather carrying case.

  Prior to this event, Uno had already won several ribbons, all of which I am sure he buried in the backyard. Beagles really aren’t impressed with awards. In 2002, the winning dog was a German shorthair pointer. I could imagine her spending all day indicating to people with her paw that her ribbon was above the mantel.

  At the announcement that Uno had won, poodles stuck up their noses, Shar-Peis rolled their eyes (we assume), and Afghans, who were already suffering from some bad international press, were unimpressed. Beagles, you see, are kind of a lunch-bucket dog. When they came to America, they came to work, not to sit on someone’s lap or lounge on a Persian rug. I’m more liberal on immigration than most politicians but seeing some of these exotic dogs at Westminster made me think maybe we should have a fence around the U.S. border. Not that this would stop a beagle, but it might deter Irish setters, who would simply crash head-first into the barrier.

  Uno made me realize there was more to tell about Barney and I was sure that after his victory, a whole new decade of beagles would be around every corner and in every garbage can. Uno’s demeanor on TV in the following days was a giant billboard for hounds looking for homes. Just like 1001 Dalmatians catapulted that breed to new popularity, beagle adoptions rose in 2007-08. For those of you who went out and got a beagle after Uno won, this book is a confirmation of the love and loyalty you have no doubt enjoyed. And some
of the hassles you have endured.

  If you are still deciding what kind of dog you want, let this be a loving word of warning.

  A Final Word

  In August 1991, I was outside the recently closed state mental hospital just west of downtown Indy, waiting to do an interview with the state health commissioner. Barney was on a long leash attached to the telephone pole when a Volkswagen bus rounded the corner. Barney darted into the street in pursuit of a squirrel. Marcus Collins, the first photographer assigned to Barney and me, yanked on his leash, pulling the beagle back from the intersection. The VW whizzed by, missing the beagle by a hair.

  No yank in history (other than Mickey Mantle) would so affect my life. I just didn’t realize it then. It was too early in the career of this rising canine star.

  Barney and I would spend the next twelve years together. The number may not sound that impressive but consider this: During a similar length of time I somehow skated past junior high, wisecracked my way through high school, and negotiated four years of college. Let’s throw in two years of grad school. At the time of Barney’s death, he had been with me half the length of my twenty-four-year marriage and most of my son’s life.

  It was twelve years filled with ups and downs: in relationships with family, friends and coworkers, as well as in the stock market. My son went from toddler to teenager.

  And there was 9/11.

  Wall-to-wall media coverage followed that horrific event and thus a moratorium was imposed by management on my daily segment with Barney. In light of the tragedy, airing our antics might have struck viewers as frivolous and inappropriate. We both sat it out. The two weeks following the attack were the longest time that Barney and I did not do our thing on TV. Both of us sat on the bench.