Mornings With Barney (16 page)

What made Barney so funny?
I used to have this surreal belief that he had a sense of humor. Let's get serious.

Here's the truth. Dogs are, well, dogs. They enter our human world and we expect them to act like dogs. Right? Not really. In fact, most of us have a set idea of how our canines should behave. Tail wagging is cool. So is sitting and rolling over on command. But that's a short list. We keep dogs on a short leash, so to speak.

I'm always amused when I a hear a dog owner reeling off a list of his or her pet's virtues: He doesn't mess in the house, she doesn't climb on the furniture, he doesn't chew things, she doesn't leave the food all around her bowl, he doesn't bark at other dogs, she doesn't pull me when we go for a walk, he doesn't run away, etc., etc. Notice anything about this list? It's all negatives, all things the poor dog doesn't do! Well, not having a dog achieves pretty much the same results, at considerably less cost in money and effort. The point is, these behaviors are natural. When someone says about your dog, “Oh, he's such a good boy,” what they mean is: you've managed to suck the real dog out of him.

Now, in all fairness, I have heard dog owners boast about their pets' naughtiness or how spoiled they are. But usually these are endearing behaviors . . . and tolerable. Like when your toddler smears cake all over his face at his birthday party.

The cool part about being a dog owner is that you have power. You are a control freak. I know you don't want to hear this, but it's true. There's this dog whisperer on TV who says he hates long leashes because it lets the dog think he's the boss. Barney was always on a long leash. I paid the price and reaped the rewards.

What made Barney a hoot is that I let him be a dog in a human world. He was sometimes naughty, sometimes nice, and occasionally nuts. Not just in the regular human world, but in the manufactured, often rehearsed world of TV. If your dog ate four sticks of butter (like Barney once did) you'd be ticked: at the expense, the mess, the diarrhea. Basically I let Barney be himself. I let him go where his instincts led him. Do not try this at home with a teenager. Everything I ever aspired to on TV, Barney achieved through the niche that his very nature afforded him. I wanted to be unpredictable. I wanted people to wonder, “Gee, what will Dick do today?” I had to work hard at that, but not the dog. For him it was natural. Dogs don't have day planners.

And yet, I did wonder sometimes. Did he have a sense of humor? A natural sense of timing? His unpredictability was damn predictable in the sense that you knew he was going to do something funny. Case in point: Damien Mason was a very talented Bill Clinton impersonator who came on the show during the 2000 presidential campaign.

I rarely did in-studio interviews, but the satellite truck was broken and this kind of exchange really did work better in a seated arrangement. In cases like this, Barney occupied the third seat on the set, happy to chill out and snooze during the chat.

I was seated to Mason's right, Barney to his left. But this time Barney sat straight up in his seat for the duration of the exchange. As Mason delivered one-liners lampooning the president, Barney was attentive. As the interview wrapped in the third and final segment, Mason turned to Barney and asked: “Barney, I'm not happy with Al Gore. How about being on the ticket with me as vice president?”

Barney turned, looked at the comic, shook his head abruptly, jumped off the chair, and disappeared as the cameras followed him out the studio door. Anchor Dave Barras made the oddest remark. “I swear, that was totally unrehearsed,” he said, as viewers heard the camera crew burst into laughter. Did he think that the dog had writers? Could he read a teleprompter?

Barney took one famous bit after another right out of a playbook. One spring we arranged a visit to observe the Carmel High School baseball team in practice. Five AM was not their normal start time for a workout, but the coach wanted a little publicity for the team, which was on a winning tear and had one of the best pitchers in the state.

I interviewed the coach in the first segment and then as the sun came up we decided to show the celebrated hurler in action. The first athlete struck out on three blinding fastballs. Barney was sitting on the bench enjoying the attention of the rest of the team. At the plate, the next batter swung wildly, squiggling a ball down the left infield foul line. Barney scampered off the bench, grabbed the ball while it was still rolling, and headed for the outfield.

“Hey!” screamed the coach. “That's our only ball!” With that, all the players ditched their gloves and pursued Barney. The bench emptied as well, reminiscent of the onset of a brawl in professional sports.

I stood there with the same thought I always had. If I had arranged this, planned it, rehearsed it, it would have never happened. If this were a movie scene with a “professional” dog, who knows how many takes it would have required.

Here's another Barney moment I didn't rehearse. And couldn't have. During an early morning segment to promote the opening of a new restaurant, the musicians hired to play some authentic Mexican music lacked a certain something: talent. The first two segments bordered on something you wouldn't want to hear on the border. In segment three, their electric banjos mercilessly ceased to function. This was not an act of selflessness; it was the result of Barney's removing the extension cord from the wall with his teeth and then enjoying his high-fiber (wire?) snack. Everyone's a critic.

Even the harshest entertainment critic would have given Barney an A for perfect comedic timing in this one. At the opening of the new Westin Hotel in downtown Indy, I did the show from their lobby—in my pajamas, pretending I was a guest of the hotel. The Westin was promoting one of its highly touted new, state of the art mattresses. The manager suggested I order breakfast and have it delivered to my “room.” I ordered two pieces of bacon, not good for anything coronary, but great for the comedy. I figured Barney would jump on the bed and devour both pieces in one huge bite while I pretended to be too engaged with my guest to notice. That's not how Barney saw it. He hopped up and took one piece. Then he leaped off the bed, waited a few comic beats while he gobbled his treat, then returned again, each trip stealing a single slice. But he didn't snatch it; he slowly and meticulously slid it off the plate by placing the end in his mouth and backing away. Why get just one big laugh when you can milk the premise for a few minutes?

The bottom line was that there existed this palpable anticipation by every viewer that at some point between 5 AM and 7 AM every weekday there was an awfully good chance that Barney was going to be a dog. Not a well-behaved canine from a nice family with good breeding, but a real dog. And real trouble. And real funny.

Viewers were charmed by his natural dogginess. They didn't worry about his discipline or feel responsibility for his unsocial behavior. Everyone was like Barney's grandparent, especially me.

At the same time, I had to be a real parent, and I remained aware that Brett's perception of my relationship with the dog posed potential problems. Calling it jealousy might be an oversimplification, but when I was out with Brett and Barney, people would come up to me and say, “Wow, that's the dog from TV.” It was rare in the beginning for anyone to address Brett. I learned to minimize the effect of this by always first saying to fans, “Hi folks, say hello to my son, Brett.” That gave Brett the chance to play his role as the beleaguered brother and say, “And that's Barney. Be sure you don't have anything edible in your pockets. He's real trouble around food.” Even with this, Brett avoided opportunities for the three of us to go out together. He felt invisible. And it broke my heart. It did motivate me to do even more things with him without the dog. In an odd way, it might have even brought Brett and me closer.

Both Barney and Brett loved
the Indiana State Fair. There were always so many WISH-TV fans in the crowd that it was hard to get from one end of the grounds to the other without stopping dozens of times to talk to people and let them meet the real star. In all the years Barney and I appeared on TV, I never brought my son to the fair with Barney, and vice versa. I was smart enough to know that father-and-son time didn't require a mascot.

Before I came to the Midwest, I had never been to a State Fair. I'm from New York City. I didn't even know that New York had a fair. People tell me it's upstate, wherever that is. I didn't know what I was missing.

The Indiana State Fairgrounds occupies 250 sprawling acres at the major intersection of 38th Street and Fall Creek Parkway, just a few minutes northeast of the statehouse and WISH-TV. The event is over 150 years old and has been at this location since 1892.

While the fairgrounds hosts hundreds of events throughout the year, people venture from every corner of Indiana in August for the State Fair. These folks parade their livestock, enter their pies in contests, take part in sheep-shearing competitions, and sell their arts and crafts. And, yes, stuff their faces.

For many, a day at the fair is just an excuse to graze the main drag, sipping on icy Lemon Shake-Ups and gnawing on huge turkey legs or pork chops the size of a small laptop. Sugar-dusted elephant ears, crispy onion rings, roasted ears of corn, and the time-honored grilled cheese sandwiches are all favorites. Even health-conscious Hoosiers anticipate their annual trek to indulge in an Italian sausage on a bun with sautéed onions and green peppers, along with an overflowing plate of greasy curly fries. How about a deep-fried Oreo cookie for dessert? Hey, it's just once a year.

There's so much to see: Brett loved the state marching band championships and the pageant that selects the Fair Queen. Mary Ellen has a thing for the baby rabbits and exotic chickens. I look forward to the demolition derby and—I hate to admit this—baton twirling. There is clogging. I hate clogging. Then I see it at the fair. And I still hate it.

For the almost 800,000 people each year who spend a day at the fair, this is more than a trip, it is a tradition. Grandparents love to share memories with their grandkids. But they won't share their deep-fried sauerkraut balls. Get your own.

There is a distinctive odor to the Indiana State Fair, but only the uninitiated, the newcomers, are put off by it. For all others, it is a rite of nasal passage, and a reminder to Hoosiers that the long days of summer are almost over.

The fair was an easy week for me in the sense that there were always new acts and exhibits to cover. The bad news was every station in town—and many from outside central Indiana—also covered the event, so the chances of airing something exclusive were rare. One year, every station featured the pig races, where the oinkers lumbered around a track at some surprising speeds to get back to their cozy pens. Only WISH-TV added a dog in the competition. Watching Barney race four pigs was must-see TV. He lost, by the way. I don't think he realized they were potential pork chops.

No one liked the annual Indiana State Fair more than Barney. We went to twelve of them. All those years of corn dogs and deep-fried Twinkies kinda blend together in my mind—what's left of it. Barney loved the fair for the exact same reason that all Hoosiers did: he loved cholesterol-laden food, animal smells, and country music concerts. Okay, maybe not the third one. Although we did sit through a George Strait concert once and he only howled twice. The dog, I mean.

Each August when we drove through the gate, every parking lot attendant took the time to come over and stroke Barney, his head sticking out the window, his nose twitching at record speed. Occasionally, an employee who was not familiar with Barney questioned whether you could bring a pet to the fair, which always made me laugh because there were thousands of pigs, cows, and chickens just a sniff away.

Once Barney realized where he was, he'd go into a frenzy, fully aware that there was a cornucopia of smells awaiting him. After a segment from the fair demonstrating the proper way to make a deep-fried pickle, for example, we would walk down the main drag, greeting people. If I saw in my radar any small children with food walking toward us, I always called ahead and issued a warning:
Please ask your children to guard their food. If there is food in your baby carriage, please secure it.

This never worked and on more than one occasion, as Barney and I were hustling down the main drag, Barney extricated a hot dog or a burrito right from a youngster's grip as we sped by. Sometimes it scared the kids, but most of the victims' parents were fans of the show and felt honored to have been an official casualty of his stealth. Yes, they would brag about this. Now they had a personal Barney story to share with their friends and neighbors.

During a typical fair, patrons saw Barney ride on the Ferris wheel, enter the pig race, cavort with rabbits (they made him nervous; so much for breeding), and get kicked by a horse. He rode in mini-race cars, sat on tractors, and took a bite out of a huge statue of a chicken carved out of butter. He did almost everything a regular fairgoer did, except pay to get in. Incredibly, he seemed to remember places he had been to the previous year, and made it clear which venues he wanted to return to.

Each year, our first appearance at the fair was the morning of the annual balloon race. Thousands of people lined the infield of the horse track waiting for thirty balloons to lift gracefully into the sky around 6 AM Barney and I reported from the balloon race for twelve years. Much of the crowd was composed of WISH-TV fans, born and bred Hoosiers who made it a tradition to attend the first day of the fair.

Most of the balloons were huge floating advertisements for everything from real estate companies to local wineries. If you were a big Jack Daniel's fan, you could stumble out of bed and watch a 2,500-square-foot bottle of whiskey float across the sky. How about a huge Burger King Whopper? The sky was the limit.

Part of the balloon race ritual was my annual interview with various city and state dignitaries. Frank O'Bannon, then lieutenant governor, was always there because he was also the unofficial head of the Department of Agriculture, so any time he could get on TV and somehow work the word “corn” into a sentence, it made political hay—another word he got in a lot. Somehow he also managed to sneak in a few references to beef, pork, and poultry. The guy was good. Ditto regarding his wife, Judy, a class act who just loved Barney and would come over every year during the balloon race just to give him a hug. Every year, I could read the lieutenant governor's lips prior to the interview as he asked his aide what my name was. Remembering Barney's name was never a problem for him.

When the governor, Evan Bayh, went on to become a U.S. senator, O'Bannon was elected to the top state office, but he never abandoned his obligation to the fair and always stopped by to see Barney and me. It would be years later that both Barney and this beloved Indiana politician would make their final visit to the fair the very same summer.

There was another tradition that I upheld. I would interview a balloon pilot, he would tell me how safe ballooning was, then he would ask me to go up with him, and then I would chicken out. I was not afraid of flying; I was afraid of crashing. The truth is, the sport is quite safe, so I often used Barney as an excuse, claiming he was afraid of heights.

One Balloon Day morning just prior to leaving the house, I peeked out my window and immediately called the station. The clouds were thick, dark, and menacing, but rain had not yet fallen. Randy, our weatherman, told me that there was a chance of heavy precipitation and possibly lightning, both of which would effectively cancel the annual festivities. As far as I knew, this had never happened before, but Barney and I headed out the door as usual for our first segment, scheduled for 5:15 AM Even if the race was going to be called off, I still needed to fill my three spots in the morning news.

These kinds of last-minute changes were a challenge, so they really got the adrenaline going. How do you do a segment about a balloon race when there are no balloons, there are no balloonists, and there are no bystanders? That was the prospect I faced if the prediction for heavy rain became a reality.

Once we arrived at the fairgrounds, we headed under the tunnel to the infield, an area surrounded by a horse track where every morning the trotters and pacers would get their early morning workout. As I drove onto the field behind the station van, you could see that people had already gathered for the balloon event. For many families this was the beginning of a tradition because the balloon race was only a few years old. But the idea of starting a ritual that could last generations had great appeal to Hoosiers. The fair always has been about custom and history.

The chants for Barney started as soon he stuck his head out of the car window. Once I parked, a line formed. I began signing pictures of Barney, sketching in his paw print with a black Magic Marker.

The downpour began about 5:30. Barney and I rushed back to seek shelter with my photographer, who had opted not to put up the mast atop the satellite truck, the device that sends the live signal back to the station. Putting an antenna up in a thunderstorm was just asking for trouble—like holding up your two-iron on the golf course—so we decided to sit tight and see if the skies would clear.

I took a call from the producer back at the station and was temporarily distracted. When I turned around, Barney was gone. Most dogs do not like rain. Barney included. But this was the State Fair and already the meaty aroma from the vendors had wafted toward the infield. He was off. And I couldn't search for him. I was scheduled to be on in ten minutes.

I looked out on the infield and saw a rotund man standing in a huge puddle of water. Did I say rotund? Let me revise. His potbelly protruded out almost a foot from his belt. He must have weighed 500 pounds. Water cascaded down around his mammoth physique. Apparently, he was in charge of the final decision as to the running of the balloon race. It looked like he had a tri-corder from the old
Star Trek
series. It was some kind of device that gave him immediate contact with the National Weather Service.

And Barney? His wanderlust had become a touch waterlogged, so he had situated himself between this man's legs, under his belly, using the man's girth as protection from the elements.

Every time the man moved, Barney repositioned himself. It was like a well choreographed dance. If the man moved forward, Barney moved with him. If he stepped back, Barney retreated. Even this guy was getting a kick out of Barney's well-timed avoidance of the rain.

Unfortunately, this was never seen on TV. Remember, we hadn't been on the air, but hundreds of rabid balloon fans who had not left the fairgrounds did see this classic moment.