Mornings With Barney (7 page)

Over the years,
I'd battled the elements, technology, and human foibles (mostly my own) in an attempt to keep the show lively. I had made many reckless attempts to get laughs and ratings, but only once was I truly injured. Ignoring the warnings of a professional calliope player (a calliope is a type of pipe organ), I sat “inside” the organ and jumped to my feet, like a showgirl popping out of a cake, to start the show. In the process, the calliope pipes whacked me in the head. Blood gushed from my noggin and it appeared as though I was bleeding to death on live TV. The emergency room doctor couldn't suppress a smirk as he knitted my head together with eleven stitches. “Gee,” he quipped, “this is my first calliope injury.”

“Mine, too,” I admitted.

Despite taking considerable risks for the good of the show, there are some things I wouldn't do—I'd just pretend I was doing them. I first learned the necessity of this ploy when I booked a segment on bungee jumping. The original plan was to bungee-jump from the top of a 700-foot platform. Great idea, except that I forgot to factor in four problems: I'm afraid of climbing, I'm afraid of heights, I'm afraid of falling, and I'm afraid of landing.

I'm also afraid of a dull show. Finally, we dressed a professional jumper in an outfit like mine and she (yes,
she
!) made the jump. At the end of the segment, anchor Dave Barras expressed skepticism, which was confirmed when my cameraman revealed that I was sitting in a lawn chair reading the newspaper during the jump. In case you think I'm a total wimp, it was the sports section.

A live TV spot coupled with on-air antics is a recipe for the unpredictable. There are no retakes on live television. Ask any reporter who has made it onto YouTube. When our remote truck failed during one show at a local dinner theater, I drove all the sisters from the play
Nunsense
back to WISH. The nuns invaded the studio and interrupted Vince, our sports anchor, by asking, “How is Holy Cross doing?”

Quick to the punch, Vince quipped, “Beat the devil out of William and Mary.”

Another nun interrupted Randy, our weatherman, who had just forecast colder temperatures. “If this keeps up,” spouted the sister, “you're going to have a bunch of blue nuns walking around.”

In one Channel 8 segment, a fledgling band known as Dog Talk was slotted to play at a local pub. But the bar owner overslept and the musical instruments were locked inside the bar. Instead of canceling, I convinced the band to make do with assorted tin cans and other discarded items from the alley trash bin. It proved a winner, and the band went on to be one of the most successful musical groups in Central Indiana.

My favorite impromptu moment happened in front of a store on the west side of Indianapolis. When my scheduled guests didn't show, we pulled up in front of a local business called Discount Vacuum's. As a former English teacher, I had always been bothered by the unnecessary apostrophe in the sign.

And that became our show. I stopped people in cars and asked them what was wrong with the sign. “Are there two ‘u's' in ‘vacuum'?” several asked.

“Is one ‘c' enough?” asked others. Finally, the store's owner saw his shop on TV and raced to the scene to ask what the problem was.

“It's your sign,” I explained. “It's wrong.”

The owner, visibly shaken, replied, “Oh, yeah? Show me a place in town you can buy them cheaper!”

Segments like these prove something I've said a thousand times: if you plan certain things, they will fail miserably. I was quick to deal with the unexpected. And I think that's why people watched me on the morning news. Then I added a dog to the mix. This was a train wreck waiting to happen. On the highway this is called rubbernecking. But people weren't viewing a crash, they were watching the news and, at least in those days, it worked.

Barney, of course, was my sidekick in so many of these moments. Like the one that involved the search and rescue arm of the Indiana State Police. The folks there were justly proud of their trained German shepherds, who could seek out a victim buried under rock, debris, or dirt in an explosion or building collapse.

The officers suggested on the phone that I be buried in the rocks at a nearby limestone quarry and that their dogs would be released to find me before I died of starvation or exposure. There wasn't much chance of this happening since the segments were only three minutes long. The idea of the dogs sniffing me out and then finding me sounded like good TV.

But what would Barney do on a mission like this? Could he compete with highly trained canines that did this for “a living”? Didn't matter. And that was the beauty of these segments. Either he'd be totally distracted and wander off to a local trash can (hey, that would be funny!) or he'd take his assignment seriously while the home viewer rooted for him. It was a no-brainer. An all-noser. It couldn't fail—unless it did. And how funny would that be? Are you with me?

That morning—cold and damp, as I remember—I opened the show with a serious look at the service these dogs performed and what a crucial role they played in public safety. This was always important to me. No matter how silly my interview ended up, I always felt a responsibility to pay attention to the guests' agenda and treat them with respect. That obligation met, let the fun begin.

During the second segment, just as the sun began to rise at about 6, my cameraman, Carl Finchum, perched himself on the giant limestone rocks while I burrowed into a crevice created by two adjacent limestone boulders. From the top of the pile, Carl pointed his camera back toward the parking area where Barney sat alongside several restless German shepherds who sensed they were about to go into action. One difference: we blindfolded Barney with a bandanna, hoping to handicap the competition and build the suspense. The idea of blindfolding a dog is just downright stupid. I knew that. In fact, that's why I did it.

All the shepherds stood by, drooling in anticipation as they awaited their command. Barney, agitated over my disappearance, was howling. Finally, all four dogs were released. They made a wide sweep of the area, spending several minutes snooping under every rock. Barney, whose departure we delayed to give him an additional disadvantage, hesitated for a moment, then made a direct line to me. Total time: forty seconds.

There are many possibilities for Barney's surprising success, none of which the dog trainers could explain. They were, I think, just a little miffed at Barney's natural ability. Amber, one of the officers, was good-natured about it as the show ended. “I think he peeked,” she said.

A few weeks after Barney's search and rescue debut, I received a call from a local coonhound breeder interested in showing how his pride pack of four hounds could sniff and follow a fox scent to a tree. I remember smiling (an evil smile, at that) as the breeder explained the procedure. Once again, I was damn sure that this segment had Barney written all over it. It turned out to be the second most popular segment on the highlight tapes.

I met my guests at a southside Indianapolis park, where the dog coonhound owners dragged a raccoon scent along the ground, leading to a tree. “The dogs will follow the scent wherever it leads,” bragged the owners. “They are very smart.”

They are? It wasn't even a raccoon. It was just the scent . . . and you can't eat the scent. You just bark at it. I wasn't going to argue. Guys with coonhounds carry guns.

I bet Barney can go them one better,
I thought. Barney could smell an unopened package of barbecue potato chips in my glove compartment.

Here was the plan: I brought this greasy summer sausage with me to the park and dragged it along the ground, right next to the raccoon scent. About fifty yards out, I had the two scents part. The raccoon smell led to the tree, and the beefy odor led to a picnic area where I placed the entire snack on top of a table.

Lights, camera, action!
Live
TV. The dogs were off. The four coonhounds rumbled ahead while Barney, who was beginning to sport a few extra pounds, managed to waddle up a sweat from behind. The coonhounds were dashing. Barney was lumbering.

The hounds realized that the raccoon scent was veering to the right. They followed in hot pursuit, panting in anticipation of the kill. The kill? There was nothing in the tree. But they kept yapping at the empty limbs.

And Barney? Nose to the ground, he also veered, but to the left, and within seconds launched himself onto the picnic table, where he inhaled his greasy reward. He was Everyman ... er . . . Everydog: the hero of the common canine, outdoing, outnosing, outsmarting the highly trained and expensive purebreds.

In my mind's ear, I could hear the viewers laughing and applauding for his good old midwestern common sense, cheering him on. “This is not just
your
dog, Dick Wolfsie,” Hoosiers were saying. “Barney is our dog. And we are so proud of him.”

Of course, first Barney was my dog.
And despite what they may have wished, he was Brett and Mary Ellen's dog, as well. Sort of. I think as Mary Ellen observed my growing obsession with Barney, she realized I had become Frankenstein. I didn't set out to create a monster—it just came naturally. Okay, that's not true, either.

Yes, Barney was the monster because I had molded and shaped him. I accept the credit. My wife gives me the blame. With all the love that Barney enjoyed from the community, he created havoc at home. It wasn't so much the destruction he caused, but the distraction he became.

By the fall of 1994, Mary Ellen had gone back to Community Hospital full time as vice president of marketing. She had cut back at work after our son, Brett, was born, but now it was becoming more difficult for her to maintain her executive position as a part-timer. There was always more to do at the office, so what should have been four hours at work turned into an entire day. She was putting in forty hours and getting paid for twenty. She didn't need her MBA from the University of Michigan to know this was just silly.

Now back at the hospital every day, she realized that the hours she spent with seven-year-old Brett had to be quality time—at least that was what she aspired to. It reminded me of a favorite
New Yorker
cartoon: A father has approached his son, who is playing a video game. The dad is clutching two baseball mitts and has, we assume, asked his son to play catch. His son replies: “Quality time? Do we have to, Dad?” Barney had made quality time almost impossible in our house. I saw trouble ahead.

Barney bonded with everybody he met, but he and Brett never connected. I don't think Brett was jealous. It was more a question of alternative lifestyles. Brett was a focused, play-by-the-rules young man who was ill at ease with unpredictability and chaos—Barney's two middle names. For example, Brett often squirreled away his favorite snacks in his bedroom so we wouldn't discover his craving for Chef Boyardee. He'd hide the easy-open cans under his bed. On more than one occasion, Barney also easily ate through the container, proving they were also easily gnawed through.

Barney seemed to have an obsession with Brett's room, sneaking in at night, knocking over the trash, and chewing his toys. One evening after a particularly tasty Italian dinner that Mary Ellen had prepared, we were puzzled by the disappearance of a huge loaf of Italian garlic bread we had left on the counter. We assumed the culprit was Barney because his breath was to die from. When Brett climbed into bed that night, be suddenly began to kick wildly at his sheets.

“Oh, yuck. This is, like, the grossest thing I have ever seen. I'm going to hurl!”

We were wrong, Barney had not devoured the entire crusty loaf; he'd decided to bury it, instead, under Brett's covers at the foot of his bed. The bread was wet, slimy, and half chewed. Crustiness was just a memory. On another occasion, Barney snooped into Brett's book bag and ate every No. 2 pencil he could dig out. My son, bless him, did find some humor in this. “Hey, Dad, when Barney does number two tonight, it's really going to be No. 2.”

Brett finally installed a chain on his bedroom door because he thought, correctly so, that when Barney put his mind to it, he enjoyed full access to any place in the house. It was hard to criticize Brett's defensive behavior, considering that I had to duct tape the refrigerator door shut at night to prevent Barney from literally nosing his way into the meat bin.

Brett was unimpressed with the idea of Barney's celebrity. He was also unimpressed with mine. He once said to me, “Hey, Dad, you're on TV, radio, in the newspaper, and you write books. If you get your own Web site you can annoy people five different ways.” I think he must have felt something akin to the way actress Candice Bergen recalls her own childhood as the daughter of famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, continually being asked how it felt to have a wooden dummy as a “brother.” But Barney was flesh and blood and couldn't be hidden away in a closet, though Brett might have welcomed that option.

When people heard Brett's last name, they would ask if Barney was his dog. “No, he's my dad's dog,” he would always say. A smirk would then follow, Brett's way of boasting that he, unlike the millions of other residents of Central Indiana, had not been hoodwinked by the mutt, as he called him. To Brett, Barney was a dog and nothing more. Except a pain in the ass.

It was ironic in a way. Here was a beagle that had become Central Indiana's dog, but my own son was distancing himself from him like a political candidate from his crazy uncle in the attic.

By contrast, Mary Ellen got a kick out of the fact that for the previous fifteen years, the mention of her last name had always resulted in the inevitable query, “Are you Dick's wife?” This was no longer the case. Now Mary Ellen was asked, “Are you Barney's mom?” Every time this happened in the grocery or department store, she took great delight in dashing home and dishing it out to me. For some reason, Mary Ellen liked being known as Barney's mother. Being known as Dick's wife? Not so much.

But the label “Barney's mom” was a bit awkward at times because fans of the show wanted my wife to sing the praises of Indiana's mascot, and that required a little lip-biting on her part. It was hard to break into song when the night before, the entire family had been scouring the neighborhood looking for Barney or cleaning up trash he had strewn all over the front yard after tipping over the garbage. Overall, Mary Ellen played the role effectively. Bad-mouthing the dog was not going to help my career.

Eventually, Mary Ellen would warm to the dog, though it was never the hot and heavy relationship it could have been. But she recognized Barney's value to me on TV.

Once when I caught her lavishing attention on Barney, actually on the floor hugging him, she put the whole thing in perspective. “I think he has finally made us more money than he has cost us.” My wife, the business major.

I really am to blame for stunting Barney's potential as a family dog (meaning that the
entire
family loved him). My first big mistake was laughing when he was bad. Second, and this goes in hand with the first, I taught him that stealing food and destroying things was okay. In fact, I taught him tricks—tricks you don't want your family dog to do—by using food. I could manipulate the devil in the dog by simply providing the desired culinary treat at the proper time or in the appropriate place during a TV broadcast: a cookie on the edge of a table, a pepperoni stick in a boxing glove, or a biscuit in my pocket where the aroma of food would be evident. Or I'd give him something to tear apart on TV because people loved to see the terminator in action. Then, of course, he did the same thing at home.

Most dogs, for example, would not instinctively jump on the chair to procure the food from the table. That's more like chimpanzee behavior. But with a little help from his friendly coconspirator, Barney learned the technique. I encouraged his bad behavior. I rewarded it. Think of us as Barney and Clyde.

Why? It was funny. Damn funny. Whenever he stole a morsel, nosed into a cupboard, or had his way with a loaf of bread, the viewers loved it. “What a great dog.” Everyone would say it. Everyone except Mary Ellen Wolfsie.

At first, my wife didn't understand why Barney could be bad on TV but not mend his evil ways back at our house. “When William Shatner gets home from shooting
Star Trek,
he knows he is no longer Captain Kirk, doesn't he?” This was not the best example she could have picked, but I understood her point.

In his beagle brain, every infraction of normal canine decorum not only went unpunished, but it was rewarded with laughter and permission to keep the bounty. I was a textbook enabler.

The result was that there was no way to discipline Barney at home. After all, the dog was only human. He didn't know he was just playing a bad dog on TV. When he was scolded for tipping over the trash in the garage, he appeared honestly puzzled. Hours earlier everyone had been laughing; now we were scolding him. “What gives?” he must have been saying. “Don't you people know how to raise a dog?”

And so Mary Ellen, who would have counted herself as a dog lover, initially counted herself out as a Barney fan. In the little time she had to devote to Brett—reading stories, helping with school projects, watching TV together—she was constantly being interrupted by the attention she had to pay to a dog who couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to be more incorrigible in the house or in the yard, or wanted to make trouble four blocks away.

My wife would walk in the door at 5:30 PM and he'd be waiting for her arrival. To run away. He'd bolt out the door if she wasn't careful and scamper across the road to places unknown. Now what Mary Ellen had thought would be a quiet evening with Brett was instead another episode from the current series
Lost,
or
Without a Trace.

Barney's escapes came in two forms: your common garden variety that resulted in a neighborhood adventure for him and us, and those that occurred during the TV show, a departure that I had to deal with live, on the air. Those were scary. And they happened often.

I sometimes wonder how my life, my career, would have been different if any of Barney's escapes had been successful. I never thought Barney was running away from me, but his wanderlust motivated him to look for every opportunity to enjoy a new adventure. I guess he just liked meeting new people, which is pretty much a beagle trait. But Barney clearly kicked it up a notch. On more than one occasion, he'd jump into a FedEx truck or the UPS van and enjoy the ride until the driver found him hiding in the back behind the parcels.

I do think that was part of the reason people embraced him. He was the free sprit in all of us, even if we couldn't express it or we lacked the opportunity to so indulge. Many of us would like to symbolically dig under that fence in our backyard to see if there's something out there we've been missing. Most of us never do it. Maybe some of you would like to run away with the UPS driver. That's none of my business.

Barney would bust loose from the leash during a walk, or sneak out through an unsecured door during a TV shoot. Twice at traffic lights he leapt through the open backseat window and bolted down the street. I'd chase him in the car, but then he'd veer off behind some houses and I would have to park the car and chase him on foot. Eventually, he'd be so taken by a scent that I could creep up behind him while his nose was buried in a hole or a bush. This was a game for Barney. He was good at it. I always hoped it was true that dogs aged seven times faster than humans, because it seemed like he was getting harder and harder to catch.

Barney never came back on his own. Usually someone would find him and call. Those conversations reminded me of the great O. Henry short story, “The Ransom of Red Chief,” in which a couple of miscreants kidnapped an eight-year-old human bundle of aggravation, only to find that he was more trouble than any ransom was worth.

I always used a very scientific approach when looking for Barney. I would drive my car to each street corner, open up my window, and shout his name as loud as I could. To call this form of search useless would be giving the plan too much credit. In all his years, he never came when I called him. Never. I always found him. He always knew I would.
That
was the problem.

I'd scour the neighborhood with an eye toward open garbage pails or garages stocked with food supplies. Sometimes Barney would run off into the woods, but when he realized that most food in the woods is still alive and required some form of pursuit, his interest in the forest waned. But Barney knew every Weber grill in the neighborhood.

As I had done so many times, I'd retreat to the house without my sidekick—frustrated, empty-leashed, playing out in my mind what I would do if Barney was truly lost. Or worse, hit by a car. What would I tell the viewers? What would I tell my boss? I knew Brett would be able to deal with Barney's demise. Sure, he would have felt badly for me—he knew how much I loved Barney—but there was no question that a five-old-year old only child was going to find some satisfaction being top dog once again.

Sometimes when I would get home after an early evening meeting, Mary Ellen would meet me at the door. “He's at 34
^th
and Fall Creek; someone just called. They were having a cookout and he showed up in their backyard. He's already had three bratwursts.”