Mornings With Barney (3 page)

“See me” really did send
chills down my spine. I guess it's because I spent lots of time in the principal's office as a kid in New York. Every report card from kindergarten through sixth grade was one teacher's lament after the other, a verbal wringing of the hands. My parents were told I had no self-control, I was a wise guy, and I was caretaker of the messiest desk in the history of Roosevelt School. I could have been the poster child for ADD. But they had not invented that diagnosis yet.

For me there was quite literally no prescription for success. Every day was torture, sitting for hours listening to the teacher, desperately searching for the right time to offer a wisecrack to the class. There was the one thing I was good at: ad-libbing. I even remember my first real gem back in the third grade. Miss Davis had cautioned a student about the danger of chewing on his pencil.

“What would happen if you swallowed that pencil?” she asked Mark Fisher.

My hand shot up. “He could borrow my pen.”

The crowd went wild. But I was in trouble, as always. I sat for two hours after class and had the privilege of writing my little wisecrack 1,000 times on the blackboard. Comedy is hard work.

Then came junior high school. I don't remember a thing about junior high. My sense is that that is a good thing.

I do remember Pokie, my first dog and I guess my first real experience loving an animal. We had gotten the black and white speckled mixed breed from the Humane Society to appease my sister Linda, who was so obsessed with dogs at age six that when she got out of the bathtub, she would shake like a pooch caught in a downpour. A canine companion was a cheaper route than long-term therapy, so the Wolfsies got a dog.

Just months after Pokie arrived, she escaped from the house. I chased her to the end of our block, just in time to see a car crash into her back legs as she crossed the main thoroughfare. Pokie yelped and limped home. It was traumatizing to see this, but the injury was not as bad as we had thought, although her tail had been completely crushed and required amputation.

My mother, who I am not sure had truly bonded with the dog at the time, became her dedicated health care provider for the next ten years. The remaining stump lacked mobility, which meant my mother had to clean Pokie each day when she returned from her daily constitutional—but not before Pokie had soiled clothing and furniture. Mom loved that dog. Her dedication to that needy pup showed me what dedication to an animal meant.

In school, I was seldom a serious pupil, often a dedicated punster and the runaway favorite for class clown my senior year. I got a 35 in the state Regents Test in chemistry. That's out of 100. But on my English regents, I scored 40 out of 40 on the written exam, a surprise even to me because my 300-word essay was filled with corny plays on words and sentence fragments. Which I still like to use.

New Rochelle High School was just like a big stage for me, an audience that would laugh at almost anything if I had the nerve to blurt it out in class during a lesson on
The Scarlet Letter
. Occasionally, I'd even get a grin from a teacher, which is really the highest compliment. When I became a teacher several years later, I remembered how much that reaction had meant to me and I consciously doled out chuckles and smiles to deserving students who managed a clever ad-lib in class.

In August 1965, my parents dropped me on the corner of 21st and I Street in the nation's capital, just a few blocks from the White House. I had never been away from my parents. I didn't know a soul in this new city. I was homesick for my family and friends.

And I was going to miss my audience.

Getting laughs turned out be a lot easier than getting laid, evidenced by the fact that I graduated from college at the peak of the sexual revolution with zero experience in pleasing a woman, but rave reviews when it came to performing for a crowd.

Freshman year I began slipping anonymous essays under the door of the newspaper editor, a technique that apparently both Ben Franklin and Mark Twain had used to get their first break in publishing. By sophomore year I had fessed up to my ploy after a few of my essays were printed, and soon I began writing a weekly humor column for the school paper,
The Hatchet.

By my junior year, my chutzpah had kicked in again and I had orchestrated a way to distribute my column in one hundred college newspapers, becoming the first student syndicated humor column in history—as far as I knew. Incredibly, checks kept appearing in my mailbox at the dorm, payment for the right to use my material. It was the closest I ever got to getting high. And this was the sixties.

As it happened, the man who had inspired me to pursue a humor column of my own lived right here in Washington. And ever since I'd begun college, I had wanted to meet him, the number-one syndicated writer in the country: Art Buchwald. So I finally got up my courage and looked up his home number in the phone book—not that he would be listed. But there it was.

Incredibly, Mr. Buchwald answered his home phone. I told him I was a fan. That I wrote a humor column, just like his. Yeah, right. Silence on the other end. I also informed him that I attended the university just a few blocks from where he worked. “Call my office,” he said. “Let's see just how funny you are.” It was like an Old West gunfighter throwing down a challenge.

A week later, I entered Buchwald's office with a stack of
Hatchets
under my arm. He put both feet up on his desk. Not one at a time; instead, he propelled both of his hefty legs together onto the mahogany surface with a thud. There was a hole in one of his shoes.

Buchwald stole a glance at me and snapped, “Let me see one of those newspapers, kid.” He ripped open the current issue and began reading my column. I watched his face. Nothing. He grabbed a pen off his desk and scribbled a few words over my byline. He apologized that something had come up. With that, he left. The entire meeting with him lasted but ten minutes.

Dejected, I shuffled along Pennsylvania Avenue back to my apartment, but I stopped at the first corner bench and opened
The Hatchet
to the page that Buchwald had read just minutes before. I stared in delight at these words scrawled on the page: “Wolfsie, stay out of my racket.”—Art Buchwald. To this day, I assume he meant he saw me as a potential competitor, but I suppose at the time it could have been just good advice for someone with no talent who needed to pursue a more realistic line of work.

In l969 I graduated from the George Washington University, and with diploma in hand, I headed home. That May, only a war in Vietnam stood between me and the rest of my life. I did oppose the war, but the truth was that even if I had embraced the politics of the conflict, the idea of shooting a gun and killing anyone was unthinkable. Being shot
at
, I wasn't good at thinking about either. Knock 'em dead with jokes was my way of dealing with people. “Stop, you're killing me” was the refrain I looked forward to hearing someday in a comedy club in New York. Not in Vietnam.

What
do
you do with a degree in American Studies? I knew I was creative and a fairly good writer. Maybe advertising? But writing spots for Pepsodent on Madison Avenue was not going to keep me out of the draft.

Teaching had always intrigued me, although I had this unrealistic notion that to teach something, you had to know something. Despite my four years of post-high school education, I didn't think I'd feel any more confident in a classroom than in a rice paddy. When I learned that teaching positions were open at my alma mater, New Rochelle High School, I decided it was worth a try.

When I called to make an appointment at the central office, the secretary said the superintendent of schools wanted to know if I was the same Dick Wolfsie who had gone to New Rochelle High just four years earlier. Stupidly, I told the truth, and I'll never forget her retort: “Dr. Misner said to come in anyway.”

I did get the job, but the department chairwoman who hired me had a clear memory of my senior year, just five years earlier. She had also taught my mother, apparently another poor student, she kindly shared with me.” This is the worst hiring I have ever made,” she told me, wagging her finger. Fact is, she was desperate. School began in a few weeks.

Faculty members who had disciplined me for my antics, teachers who had rolled their eyes at my one-liners and admonished my parents about my lack of appropriate reserve, were now my colleagues. For nine years, I taught psychology. Then English, as well. Teaching psychology allowed for more innovation and demonstration in the class. When I blindfolded students and had them run through a maze of chairs, the chair of the department heard about my technique and informed me that I could have just as easily taught the concept through lecture, not a demo that caused a great deal of disruption in the room. She was wrong, of course. I knew how to work an audience.

The teachers and the students nicknamed me Kotter, a reference to the TV show
Welcome Back, Kotter,
where Gabe Kaplan in the title role returns to teach at his alma mater. I was also dubbed “rookie of the year” by the more experienced teachers. I instinctively knew how to inform and entertain at the same time, the one-two punch for effective teaching and hosting of a talk show. But the latter was still a decade away.

The summer of'78 looked like it would be typical, chasing girls and golf balls, but a call from a friend would soon mean the beginning of a roller-coaster series of events that took me from a high school psychology teacher to the host of the number-one local morning show in the country in only two years.

The call was from Burt Dubrow, a high school buddy, whose obsession with TV had resulted in a myriad of media jobs since college, including emceeing and producing a revival of the legendary
Howdy Doody Show
on college campuses. Burt was producing a series of shows for Warner Cable in Columbus, Ohio. Viewers had their homes hardwired so they could interact via a tiny box, not unlike a TV remote. Based on questions elicited from the game- and talk-show hosts, viewers could register opinions and provide feedback, which then appeared on the screen fully tabulated. It was so advanced for its time that Phil Donahue did a show from one of the studios, heralding the new technology.

I became a writer and associate producer for the evening talk show as well as a weekend kids' program. I moved from New York to Columbus, Ohio, to start a new life. I watched the host of the evening program each night read my questions verbatim and knew that I could do it better and more spontaneously. How did I know that? Because for a decade I had managed to keep the attention of thirty hormone-charged adolescents for forty minutes five times a day with a technique that combined just the right mixture of information and entertainment. That's exactly what a good talk-show host does. But how would I get a job like that? Not a clue.

In the early fall, Burt's wife introduced me to one of her friends, a stunning redhead who was not looking for a husband but was seeking an MBA at the University of Michigan. Mary Ellen drove from Ann Arbor to Columbus for the blind date and we had dinner at Burt's home.

Mary Ellen and I were total opposites by any observable criteria. She was measured and reserved. She actually let people finish sentences when they were speaking. This really threw me because in New York the only way you know you are done talking is when someone interrupts you. Initially, she was put off by the interaction between Burt and me, which often bordered on the juvenile as we relived our childhood together and fell into fits of laughter during the meal.

But in the three days that followed, Mary Ellen and I had more time to talk one-on-one. Despite the obvious differences in demeanor and style, we shared some common values. It was love at fourth sight.

The romance blossomed quickly, maybe too quickly for Mary Ellen, who was interviewing for jobs all over the country and was reluctant to commit to a relationship with a guy who wrote cue cards for a living. When she secured a consulting job in Chicago, we decided to move to the Windy City together, and I would look for freelance work as a writer there.

Before we left for Chicago, on several occasions I had filled in for the evening host, who eventually left the show for the business world. The bosses liked my style and for almost a year, they flew me in from Chicago on Sunday nights, then jetted me home on Wednesdays. I was hosting the show three nights a week.