Mornings With Barney (23 page)

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.

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.

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.

In a way, people needed the diversion we provided, maybe more than ever. But all of us in the media had a hard time deciding what was a respectful way to grieve, relieve the stress, and cover the news. There was no recent precedent in any newsroom.

The first day back on the air, I explained our absence. Then, somehow, it was business as usual for the next two years, up until Barney's death. I really believe that the beagle helped all of us in some small way handle the difficult months that followed the tragedy.

Barney was always my rock. While his behavior was unpredictable, his role in my life and others' lives never varied. He woke up next to me every morning, then he trotted off to work with me. His role was simple: Be himself. Ignore the rules. Have fun. See you again tomorrow.

At the beginning of this man-and-his-dog story, I sometimes I wondered if I really wanted to be identified, not as talk-show host, or a reporter, or a writer, but instead, as Barney's dad. That insecurity evaporated quickly as I saw the impact Barney made on the community. I will never know if a different dog could have gotten the job down. Maybe Barney wondered if he had picked a different TV personality if things would have worked out quite so well.

I will be linked forever with Barney. When people bring up Barney's antics, I take pride in what we did together. My license plate for the last seventeen years, BARNEY 8, is in more ways than one moving proof of that. I am now less recognizable without the dog. There was a time it bothered me a little if people remembered Barney's name and not mine.

No longer . . .

“Hey, weren't you the guy with Barney on TV?”

“Yes, I was. Thanks for watching.”

Here's the bottom line: Without Barney, I would have still gotten plenty of laughs, acquired a few loyal fans, and maybe even racked up a few awards. But I wouldn't have captured a single heart.

There's a little beagle in all of us—yearning to try something new, searching for an adventure with hope that along the way we can touch a few lives.

Thanks, Barney, thanks from all of us.

This book was written
entirely from my head . . . and heart. I never had to go to the library, never surfed the Internet or Googled anything. So unlike some authors who wax on about their research assistants and experts who collaborated on their manuscript, I don't have to.

My good friend and fellow writer Mark Olshaker encouraged me, actually coerced me, into writing this book, and provided his professional guidance every step along the way. Mark had more confidence in my ability than I did. That's the best kind of friend to have.

Then there is my wife, Mary Ellen, who said that if I didn't write the book, I'd probably end up hating myself. She was right. That's also what she said about my first ten books. Heidi Newman, my personal editor, never caved until I rewrote every sentence she hated. There were lots of them.

Thanks to Shawn Coyne, my agent, for recognizing a good story and believing in it. My gratitude goes to Ann Treistman, my editor at Skyhorse publishing, for her insightful suggestions and patience in helping to make this book a reality.

And, of course, I extend my most profound appreciation to the tens of thousands of Barney fans who still tell me how much they miss him. They are not only the reason I wrote the book, but they are the reason there was a story to share in the first place.