Mornings With Barney (18 page)

Barney seemed to grow more comfortable
in his skin as the years passed.

“A major part of his success was that he was so comfortable with people,” Lee Giles recalls. “He never lost his patience, especially with the kids.”

But it wasn't just little people. Barney and I first met Sandy Allen at a charity event in the early nineties. She was the tallest woman in the world. All seven feet seven inches of her loved Barney. On several occasions we also visited her in the retirement village where she lived. Sandy had a rough life. She was born in Chicago, then left by her mother and raised by her grandmother. She once observed that she was kind of like Barney—abandoned at birth, never fully appreciated. Barney always jumped onto a chair so Sandy could pet him. Kneeling or reaching down to the floor was virtually impossible due to her size.

Sandy's height was both a liability and an advantage. To be sure, her abnormal tallness afforded her some opportunities in life, but this required calling attention to her stature, like when she was hired as a greeter at the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum in Canada. Her whole life she had to endure both the ridicule of others and the sheer complexities of getting through a day dealing with problems posed by her size—like finding a pair of size 17 shoes. She used humor, just like Barney and me. When people would ask, “What do you eat?” she'd point to her T-shirt, emblazoned with the phrase, “I love short people. I had three for lunch.”

When Sandy had a bout with some health issues, Barney would jump up on her specially made bed (no small leap) and nuzzle himself against her. Sandy would beam and remark, “Thanks for bringing Barney; he's the only reason I watch the show.” Then she'd ask if that hurt my feelings. It didn't. I was used to it.

Accepting others regardless of their looks, size, or mental ability was Sandy's mission in life. It was also Barney's. Happily, dogs don't make such distinctions, but Barney's public display of total acceptance probably served as a lesson to all who watched. The message was: we all should be more like Barney—more loving, more tolerant.

Sandy died in August 2008. She had remained upbeat until the end but had clearly tired of her battle against the restrictions placed on her by her own body. The local stations ran video of the assisted-living home in Shelbyville, Indiana, where Sandy resided. In a shot of her room, a photo of Barney was clearly evident on the bulletin board above her bed. They were together at the end. She was truly his biggest fan.

As a television reporter, I was attracted to stories like Sandy's, tales of people who dealt with prejudice and discrimination.

But remote live TV did not always lend itself to issues as heavy as this. A taped package or a longer format program give you more time and the luxury to develop the subject. But during my morning spots I had only three minutes each hour—barely enough time to ask a couple of basic questions.

That's why I was torn when a local support group of parents whose children had Down syndrome contacted me about doing a program highlighting their efforts.

How could I raise awareness of the organization, spread the word that support was available for new parents, and do it responsibly in three-minute intervals? Oh, and still make the show light and entertaining? Remember, I was supposed to provide the break from hard news.

After exchanging a number of phone calls with the executive director of the support group, I began searching for an angle. I needed more than talking heads, an insider reference to shows where nothing is happening, just people yakking at the host.

I was good at finding a hook to hang a show on. Potential guests were not. They knew that they wanted to get on TV but didn't grasp the visual nature of the medium. “Can't we just talk about our event?” they would ask. The answer was no. I needed more than that.

“Do all the youngsters ever get together?” I asked the president of the Down Syndrome Support group, still in search of a show concept. “Well, next week, we're making a calendar to raise money and we have to meet with the photographer and all the families.”

Whoa! There it was. Problem solved. We'd do a photo shoot with these adorable children. We'd observe the artistic process as it unfolded with the subjects and the photographer.

Barney and I arrived at 4:45 AM I don't think the photographer had ever been up that early in her life, but she knew what a superb opportunity this was to publicize a unique group of children, as well as her craft.

We did the first segment with the photographer, talking about the challenge she faced in creating a dozen different shots that would send a positive message about these kids. When the children arrived a little later, they were antsy. I looked at the photographer's face. She knew this was going to be a very, very long morning and she had to “perform” on live TV.

At one point, the photographer wanted all ten children in one shot, preferably sitting on the daybed in her studio. The parents put their toddlers in place, but this was kind of like herding cats, as each child tried to scramble away, often grasping and crying for Mom and Dad. The chaos added to the youngsters' anxieties and I could see some genuine fear in their precious faces. I worried about the idea of using the kids for pure entertainment purposes. I certainly didn't want anyone to think I was exploiting the children.

Enter Barney. He had been sitting next to me, watching the chaotic activity. Suddenly he sprang onto the bed and situated himself between this mass of humanity that was spread out across the mattress. The kids squealed and began, well, pawing at Barney. The wrapped their arms around him and lavished him with kisses. In their exuberance, several children literally fell on top of him as they jockeyed for position to pet him. He never batted an adorable brown eye. Instead, he just basked in their attention, attention that almost bordered on abuse. It mattered not. This was classic Barney. Somehow, some way, he knew these kids required a different posture on his part. And later when I saw the photos that were snapped at that instant, it confirmed what an extraordinary moment it was.

Just as extraordinary was the morning Barney and I spent with Emily Hunt, one of the bravest little girls I have ever met. She had been thrown from a ride at an amusement park in northern Indiana and was paralyzed from the waist down. In addition, the accident had killed Emily's fifty-seven-year-old grandmother. A fun family outing had turned tragic for the Hunt family. The case had a devastating effect on the family but resulted in her dad's commitment to not only Emily's future but the plight of all those suffering from spinal cord injuries.

Emily attends school on a regular basis. She still holds on to her dream of one day becoming a professional dancer. Her courageous spirit and determination have been an inspiration to many in Indianapolis, the state, and the nation.

I wanted to help publicize the foundation that her father, Mike, had set up to fund research in this kind of paralysis. Doing the show required that Mike, like all guests, rise bright and early to appear on camera. He was pessimistic about Emily's participation because at that time (she was only six) bathing and dressing, as well as connecting the necessary breathing apparatus, was time consuming and would have meant getting her up literally in the middle of the night.

Emily was not a morning person, I was warned, but I knew that her presence on the show would impact the viewers emotionally and that this would lead to increased attendance at the annual fund-raising walk around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

To make it easier on Emily, Mike allowed us to bring the camera into her room and talk to her while she was still in bed. The bed was very high off the ground, a necessary adjustment so that caregivers could more easily dress her and pick her up to move her to the wheelchair.

I walked into the room, Barney trailing behind me. Emily produced the expected scowl. I felt horribly guilty about the intrusion, although my motives were pure, as Mike knew. What could I do to cheer her up? What, indeed? Barney took a flying leap onto the bed, possibly a record for a vertical jump by a beagle, beating the record set with Sandy Allen's bed by a hair. He rolled over on his back, incredibly positioning himself right alongside Emily. Sadly, she could not scratch him, but her smile lit up the room.

Any dog could boost a little girl's spirit, but this was different. Barney was not his usual hyperactive self. He had responded to her situation by kicking it down a notch. It seemed they just looked into each other's eyes for the longest time. How much of this was in my imagination, I don't know, but I can't recall another situation that touched me more.

Maybe your dog would have done that very same thing. But Barney did it in front of 100,000 people, no doubt pumping up the fund-raising for Mike Hunt's foundation for people with spinal cord injuries.

I felt very good about my job that day. Any time I had the opportunity to use my unique role to help others was a plus. Sure, I had a huge ego; I loved the attention and the notoriety, but it was also important to me that I not squander that time each morning. Few people in my business had the freedom to say and do anything they wanted for ten minutes every morning in front of tens of thousands of people. Sometimes the segment was a riot. But it was always a responsibility—to either entertain or to educate. Or the perfect form: do both at once.

Mike Hunt sent me a photo a few weeks later that he had taken during the show. And this is one of the photos I treasure most. This is what Barney was all about. Take a look at it. And then you'll understand, as I did, Barney's mission in life.

By the way, Mike and Emily wrote a book called
Emily's Walk,
the story of how one courageous little girl faced incredible challenges early in her life. Book signings always were a success, but the day that she and Barney teamed up together broke all sales records. That was a combo that was hard to beat.

Barney was always next to me,
eyes on me like a laser. During book signings at malls, he loved the attention from fans but even a short trip to the men's room resulted in a touch of separation anxiety (for both of us).

He was visibly agitated when I was not in plain sight, straining his neck to see where I went. I usually offered a free book to a customer if he or she would watch Barney while I went to the bathroom. But this had some serious drawbacks. On several occasions he got off the leash he was tethered to and scampered down the mall, his legs in a whirl as he tried to negotiate the slippery vinyl floor at each turn.

“He went that-a-way,” my supposed dog watcher would say as I returned to my table. I would bolt down the mall, occasionally catching sight of him, but he would disappear around a corner. No problem: I just had to look for him in 200 stores. I needed an excuse to go into Victoria's Secret anyway.

I'd walk into each shop and ask the clerk if he had seen a male, tri-colored beagle. I realized how stupid it was to offer a description. There were not a great many stray dogs in the mall on any given day. Eventually I would find him. He was never surprised to see me. Remember, that was part of the game.

Because Barney was so unhappy alone I seldom left home without him, making us potential stars for the next American Express commercial.

Mary Ellen had encouraged—no, demanded—my constant stewardship of Barney over the years because of his destructive nature. “If you go, he goes.” This had a much less ominous sound than her dictum years earlier, “If he stays, I go.” We had made some progress.

When my second book,
Dick Wolfsie's New Book: Longer, Funnier, Cheaper,
was published, the concept was that people would come into the bookstore and say, “Do you have Dick Wolfsie's
New Book
?” That was funny until my third book came out. Now the title made no sense at all and just confused the buyers and the sellers. Other than all that, it was a great idea.

Barney's picture was on both covers—mine, too, but Barney had been absolutely no help with those books. That was the extent of Barney's involvement in the whole process . . . just waiting for a walk and dinner while I sat all day at the computer trying to think of witty things. They were just Andy Rooney/Dave Barry kinds of musings about everyday life. It was easy. If something funny occurred to me, I wrote it down. But as Mark Twain said, “It's not the writing that's hard, it's the occurring.”

It was time for something different. When a Connecticut publisher was looking for authors around the country to compile books of roadside oddities and unique people in each of the fifty states, she contacted me about Indiana. Sadly, she did not have the strength to give Barney a good belly rub, but her smile lit up the room, enough of a treat for both of us.

I was flattered by her interest, but I was leaning against accepting the offer for the following reason: It was a whole lot of work. It meant traveling to all ninety-two counties to search for these oddities. I did know central Indiana, but that was only 20 percent of the state. I hadn't the slightest idea about the other seventy or so counties. It was another world. Much of it was more rural, for one, and there were over 2,000 cities on the map, many with just a few hundred people.

Where would I begin? There was no way I could do this.

But I knew I couldn't use lack of time as an excuse because I had an incredibly flexible schedule. I was on TV for two hours each weekday morning, but booking the segments and pre-interviewing guests could be spread out over a week or done in one full marathon afternoon. No, I needed a better pretext to avoid this new challenge.

How about this: I cannot follow directions, a talent I assumed was a prerequisite to traveling the state in search of material for the book. Compass and map—I can make a very funny limerick using those two words, but I couldn't find my way out of a Plymouth minivan. On a map, north is up, south is down. I can't make this concept work for me in a three-dimensional world. I might have been the right person to write this travelogue but I was the worst one to go out and research it. That's what I was going to tell the editor when she called back for my decision.

My wife had a different view. Mary Ellen felt that if I declined this offer and someone else wrote the book, it would haunt me that I had turned it down. “You'll do nothing but whine about what a poor job this person did. You'll complain he can't write, that he wasn't funny and how he missed all the good stuff.” Boy, she nailed it. That's exactly the kind of annoying thing I was apt to do.

As for my concern about directions, Mary Ellen made a good point. “Dick, so what if you get lost? You don't know where you're going anyway, so get in the car and drive. That's how you'll find neat stuff. Oh, and take the dog with you.”

That part appealed to me. It reminded me of the book
Travels with Charley,
John Steinbeck's chronicle of his crosscountry journey with his French poodle, Charley.

There was clearly an effort here to get us out of the house on weekends, but Mary Ellen's logic was impeccable. Before I made my final decision, I looked at the copy of
Texas Curiosities
that the editor had originally sent me. I decided to thumb through the book and stop at a random page. If what I read on that page reflected the kind of wacky stuff I wanted to write about, that would seal the deal. Whenever I was on the fence about something I always looked for some kind of sign for the right thing to do. I even did it for this book, as you'll see later.

I flipped to page 78 and there it was: A story about a Jernigan's Taxidermy shop in Waco, Texas. Jeremy Jernigan specializes in stuffing the rear ends of the animals. His store window apparently is filled with animal butts. Even Barney could have found this curiosity. With his nose in the air. Enough read. I decided to do it.

Sadly, there was no taxidermist of that sort in Indiana, so while I never found someone who did that kind of stuffing, I did find some neat stuff. For over a year, Barney and I traveled Indiana—six thousand miles, more than three hundred cities (visiting two thousand was just not possible). Virtually every weekend we'd head out either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning and spend the entire day (and often overnight) nosing our way around small towns, pumping locals for information about their area to find an anomaly that would lend itself to a chapter in the book.

I talked with local news editors and county historians hoping they would point me in the right direction. I always hoped they literally pointed, because north, south, east, and west were a mystery to me.

The historians were fixated on what had happened hundreds of years ago, but no one wants to pack the three kids in the Ford pickup to visit a historical marker in the middle of nowhere or in the middle of downtown, for that matter. I think it's cool that James Buchanan once fell off his horse on this street in downtown New Palestine, but it's not something you'd want to visit. Or maybe it was Millard Fillmore. See, who cares?

The visitor and convention bureaus were of little help because their inclination was to push places that they were promoting on their own Web sites and through brochures. Repeating what was already in the PR pipeline was a big waste of time and not what the publisher was looking for.

Newspaper editors were sometimes grumpy and often too busy, which meant they were damn good editors, just no help to me. Incredibly, even men and women who had lived and worked in these tiny towns their whole lives were at a loss to come up with something offbeat in the area. When I ventured to these towns, I'd inquire about local oddities at a gas station, a café, or a barbershop. I often got this kind of response: “Nothing special here, young man. Lived here all my life. Can't think of a thing.”

I kept asking the question, mostly because I liked being called “young man.” Truth was that all these folks were aware of the local oddball stuff, but they couldn't think of it. Why? Because they saw these things every day. The oddities were part of the daily wallpaper. In a coffee shop in Bryant, Indiana, the server told me that there wasn't much to see in town. But twenty minutes later, just a quarter mile from the shop, I drove past a barn adorned with hundreds of monkey wrenches that had been nailed to the side of the building. I returned to the café on the way out of town. “Oh, I forgot about that,” said the embarrassed waitress, who had drawn a blank when I'd posed the original question an hour earlier.

Writing the book required a lot of poking around. On many occasions my search required engaging a total stranger in an interview. Outside central Indiana, no one knew my face or had heard of my dog. But Barney played a role similar to the one he played in Indy. He greased relationships and helped me to gain the trust of perfect strangers, whom I was asking to share their story. In the rural Midwest most people have gun racks, not ski racks, so I was glad have a beagle next to me. Not for protection, for a connection.

In Knox, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis, the first six people I spoke with at a gas station, all from the immediate neighborhood, failed to remember that one of their neighbors had giant rosary beads encircling her house. They were multicolored
bowling balls
, connected by a rope. In fact, everyone in Knox knew about this oddity, but again, unless I specifically mentioned it, the locals were at a loss to think of anything in town that would make it into my book.

When I found the address, I whipped out my camera and starting snapping photos. I would normally have asked permission, but it appeared no one was home. Suddenly, an elderly woman emerged from the house. At first she appeared distressed at my picture taking, although you would think I wasn't the first person to see this as a Kodak moment. “Can I help you?” she asked cautiously. I explained I was writing a book about unique things in Indiana. “Oh, do you think I'll get in the book?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She was genuinely flattered but reluctant to grant permission, concerned I might mock her house. Barney had stuck his head out the window and was howling for some attention. “Is that your dog?”

“Yes, his name is Barney.”

“I had beagles when I was growing up. Why don't you two come in the house and I'll tell you the whole story of my rosary.”

Barney and I had a lovely visit, sharing beagle stories with the owner of the house, Linda Stage. She also provided a fascinating history of her unique rosary beads, leaving little to spare, so to speak. Like most Hoosiers, the inclination was to be open and friendly, but it sometimes required a little evidence on my part that I was to be trusted.

We left an hour later with story in hand. That chapter of the book always created the most interest. Barney helped make that happen.

When the book came out, one reviewer noted, “Dick has fun with people, but he doesn't make fun of them.” I appreciated the distinction, but sometimes I did have to gnaw on my lip. I did seem to meet some unique personalities.

By the way, Barney always enjoyed the ride through rural Indiana, his head out the window, nose twitching. He was a real trouper. And sometimes there were state troopers following our car, but I never got a speeding ticket in all the years I drove through Indiana if Barney was with me. And I was stopped more than a few times. Without Barney, I'd have had a few citations. Yeah, the dog even melted the hearts of Indiana's finest.

Barney often looked back over his shoulder as we passed fields of cows and sheep. I'm sure Barney would have liked to have made a few unscheduled stops, but there were just too many curiosities to sniff out. We were on a deadline.