Mornings With Barney (5 page)

The meeting with Paul
was definitely positive. He loved the dog and wanted him to remain part of the morning news block. More important, he wanted
me
to remain part of the morning news block. The downside was that he, like so many others, believed that when the dog did something funny, I had somehow orchestrated it. At the end of the meeting, he even said to me, “The peeing on the monitor was funny. But it won't be funny the second time.” Was he serious? The dog had a mind of his own and minding me was not part of the game plan. I couldn't say, “Okay, be funny.” I couldn't even do that with myself.

And there was another element: I was accustomed to being the center of attention. The emphasis was shifting. Was the tail wagging the hog? Was this my first tinge of Barney jealousy? Was I envious of a stray hound with absolutely no previous TV experience?

I spent several days mulling this over. Finally I decided I was looking at this the wrong way. What other TV reporter had a dog as a sidekick? This human/canine team could be a meal ticket to success for both of us.

What we needed, though, was a breakthrough moment, a segment that people would talk about around the water cooler. All the promotion you can buy, all the billboards, all the print ads pale in comparison to word of mouth. The next week a gift arrived from heaven in the form of a letter, a gift that kept on giving for the next eleven years, and it became the most repeated show, kicking off every highlight tape of Barney's many years on TV.

While most viewers were enjoying Barney's mischief, one viewer was troubled by the shenanigans—or at least thought that
I
was. On air, I continually lamented the dog's destructive behavior, playing the victim's role, and pretending that his behavior was more than I could handle, which was certainly true at home. So distressed did I appear that Dr. Gary Sampson, a former research veterinarian with Eli Lilly, wrote me a sympathetic note claiming he could be of assistance. Sampson had retired from Lilly and had started a new career dealing exclusively with dog and cat behavior. I read the letter and immediately called him.

“I can help Barney with that digging,” he told me over the phone.

“Geez, Doc, the last thing Barney needs is help. I want someone to stop him.”

Honestly, I didn't want Dr. Sampson's help. Barney's uncontrollable behavior on TV was getting lots of street talk. Hmmm ... I asked Dr. Sampson to come on the show live and discuss how to remedy the situation. He was hesitant. His practice was primarily done over the phone, and the idea of live TV was frightening and unpredictable to him.

I was good at convincing people to appear on TV (a friend used to say I could talk a dog off a meat truck) and besides, this was good PR for the doctor's new career. So, two weeks later, bright and early, Dr. Sampson and I sat on my front step at 5 in the morning while he pontificated about the animal instinct to dig and chew and some of the possible remedies for besieged dog owners like myself. Barney was unimpressed. He sat there and bayed during the early segments. Neighbors peeped out of doors and windows to see what was causing the disturbance. But as you will now see, it was a day that lived in infamy.

Never in the history of live television has a dog taken a cue better than Barney. At the first mention of digging by Dr. Sampson, Barney was on a mission. His first target was my wife's rosebush near the front stoop. The barrage of dirt was so great that both the doc and I spent most of the interview brushing off the remains of his excavation. Mud and topsoil came spewing from between Barney's legs. Mary Ellen's rosebush had been deflowered and uprooted. The front porch was a disaster area.

Looking at the pile of dirt that had accumulated at his feet and peering at Barney as he continued to burrow, the good doctor observed: “There must be something down there that he wants.”

Ya think?

Dr. Sampson was absolutely right. Actually, I was going to make a similar, albeit layman's assessment of the situation. The dirt kept coming. Barney didn't even let up during the first commercial break. This was always the thing that distinguished him from other television talent. He was no media phony. He was the same on the air and off.

During the break, I mentioned to the doctor that we should probably move from discussing the digging problem to Barney's chewing problem. The vet agreed that was a good idea.

We never did do that segment. As we chatted, Barney chewed through the audio cord from the camera, and so we were off the air. The segment ended. Dave Barras, the anchor back at the station, said we had technical difficulties. Technically, we did. His name was Barney. If YouTube had existed then, we'd have been the number-one download.

Dr. Sampson's career did not suffer from his TV interaction with Barney. In fact, he is today a leading expert on dog and cat behavior. Dr. Sampson seldom meets with the dogs in person; he simply helps the owners correct their ways, consulting over the phone. It is rare for Dr. Sampson to make a house call. Gee, I wonder if he had a bad experience at someone's house.

Dr. Sampson and I lost touch for quite a while, although he apparently followed Barney's career on TV for years. The last thing I wanted was a well-behaved dog and the last thing Dr. Sampson needed was an unmotivated owner. We each had our roles to play. That was contrary to Dr. Sampson's mission, but he understood the situation.

Barney generated a lot of talk at the station and more than a few people stopped me in the grocery store and asked if my new dog had found a full-time job. Now that Barney was appearing almost every day, he was greasing the viewers' early morning routine of getting up and going to work. But I still had no sense if the public had fully come to see us as a team.

Then one evening, the family attended an Indianapolis Indians game at Bush Stadium, the Triple A ballpark downtown. I was trying to encourage Brett to have a little interest in local sports and a night at the ballpark was fun even if you weren't a big baseball fan.

At one point in the game, I retreated to the john and picked up a beer on the way back. As I edged my way through my aisle, I suddenly heard a group of guys who clearly had already downed a few Bud Lights themselves begin a chant: BAR-NEY ... BAR-NEY . . . BAR-NEY! Then they bellowed each letter in the name.

They almost spelled it correctly. These were serious fans.

My wife heard the chant and was impressed. “Wow, it's too bad no one can spell
Wolfsie,
” she said. But I knew we had arrived. It's amazing the lessons baseball can teach you.

In my first ten years of television,
prior to meeting Barney, I'm guessing that I signed maybe 100 photos of myself for fans. Most of these after a subtle suggestion: “Say, would you like a photo of me? Please?” But when Barney became my partner, I signed thousands.

Most on-air reporters have what is called an eight-by-ten glossy, usually a black-and-white head shot that they use to grant requests from viewers for pictures and autographs. Unless you're a hot female meteorologist, most of us never use up the five hundred photos we are initially given (they are cheaper by the forty dozen). The poor quality of a mass-produced likeness initially made you look ten years older. But it would ultimately make you look ten years younger because the station wouldn't replace them until you gave away the first five hundred. Which was never. I had about 475 left when I first teamed with up Barney. Then no one wanted a photo of
just
me, so I trashed them.

Barney's first photos were courtesy of Ed Bowers of Tower Studio. Ed was an icon in central Indiana and had been taking high school graduation pictures for at least three decades. There was a pretty good chance that if you went to public school in Indianapolis, Ed had taken your yearbook picture. And if you were under thirty there was a better chance he took your mother and father's pictures, as well.

He was also an early-morning TV fan and had been watching Barney emerge as a rising star. Ed wanted to do a full studio shoot with Barney—dozens of poses, different angles, sexy lighting, the works.

Ed was no dummy. Even with all the chemicals you inhaled developing photos in those days, he was clearheaded enough to know he wanted the photo shoot on TV as part of the morning news.

“But, Ed,” I pleaded, “it will be chaos. Barney won't sit still; the result will be total pandemonium.”

“I know,” he said. “And people will talk about it forever.”

Then he shot me a cheesy grin, the kind he was so adept at getting from high school seniors. Ed knew the value of good PR.

The morning of the show I was not surprised to see the thought and preparation Ed put into the photo shoot. Ed had lugged in scenery and a small crew of assistants. He brought dog food and treats and a high-pitched whistle to get Barney's attention. He even had a long ladder so he could shoot from above. Why? I had no idea. But I was impressed. At the time, quite frankly, I cared less about the quality of the photos than the fact that this was going to be a great show. I really couldn't lose. Barney would probably dart around the studio, unwilling to sit for even a second, leaving poor Ed actually missing his decades of interaction with adolescents. If that's possible.

The other possibility was that Barney would simply bask in the glow of the moment, lapping up every second of the spotlight, loving being the center of attention. He would be the perfect model. It would be one extreme or the other. There never was a middle ground. Not with Barney. And it never mattered. It was funny either way.

Barney opted for chaos. Every prop, every play toy, every wastebasket, every treat became a diversion. The few times we managed to get him settled, Ed decided it was a good time to shoot from the ladder, which required about thirty more seconds of waiting time while Ed, who was no spring chicken, managed to slowly—very slowly—hobble his way up the creaky steps. When he finally reached the top, he carefully twisted himself around and then seemed genuinely surprised—and mildly miffed—that Barney had not remained in the spot Ed had assigned to him. Much of this dance was seen on TV. The whole thing seemed choreographed like a Laurel and Hardy routine.

In the final on-air segment, Ed pulled out the heavy hardware. Not a new camera or fancy lens, but an artificial smoke-producing machine, the kind you might use in a movie to create a creepy scene or a steamy, sexy one. “This will make for some very artsy shots,” said Ed, beaming.

With Barney finally sitting in a big, comfy recliner, relaxed at last, Ed cranked up the machine and smoke spewed out of the device and into his studio. It also made an odd screeching sound. Ed wasn't real hip on how to use the contraption. Apparently, he didn't get a lot of calls for smoke when he photographed the high school football players.

Never, never had I witnessed my dog, or any dog for that matter, so terrified. His ears virtually shot straight up on the top of his head, his eyes widened like Frisbees, his hair stood on end.

It was funny television, yes, but it was a classic example of that fine line I would sometimes cross where viewers were no longer amused with Barney's antics but concerned about how he was being handled or mishandled. I knew as I watched this fiasco unfold that the station would get dozens of calls with concerns that I had allowed Barney to be harmed. Everyone was beginning to feel they had a vested interest in Barney. “No one is going to mistreat my dog” was the collective feeling.

I spent most of the afternoon later that day on the phone, allaying people's fears. The next morning I opened up the show with Barney at my side, assuring the viewers their favorite news hound was okay and that I swore I would never let something like that happen again. But throughout the years, I was amazed how carefully people scrutinized my interactions with Barney. If I picked him up, I had to be sure to lower him slowly to the ground. If it appeared I “dropped” him (which a certain camera angle might suggest) the station would get calls. If I yelled at him, people chastised me. This was all evidence he was the viewers' dog.

With all the mayhem, we did get a photo that became a classic. The one prop I had brought with me to Tower Studio was Barney's obedience school diploma. The fact that Ed had done so many high school graduations prompted the idea, and I figured that Barney was just as undeserving of a diploma as some eighteen-year-olds, so ...why not?

Ed put Barney in a chair behind his desk and I propped his paws up on the flat surface, inserting the folded diploma under his paws. Barney seemed content to remain in that position. Ed inched toward the ladder. “I'll break your arm if you climb that ladder,” I said. “Just shoot the damn picture.”

That photo of Barney was such a favorite that over the years I printed 5,000 of them. I must have signed 4,999 because I have only one left. The only reason I updated the photo was that when Barney began to mature, I thought he deserved a picture that reflected his years of experience. In addition, I decided finally to be in the picture with him. I was, after all, part of the team.

Over the years, I signed each photo the identical way. The person's name came first, then:
Your pals, Dick and Barney
. I tried two different approaches with Barney's signature. One disaster was pressing Barney's paw down on an inkpad. The fans loved it. My wife? Not so much. There were Barney tracks all over the house: another brilliant move on my part to endear my wife to Barney. But at least we knew where he was. Or had been.

I also bought a rubber stamp with a paw print on it. People complained it was too impersonal. The most successful operation involved me drawing his paw, essentially four amoeba shapes half surrounding a small circle. Then I blackened in the outlines with a black magic marker. People did seem genuinely satisfied when I signed for Barney, so that's the way it was for most of the dozen years. I signed for both of us. Barney never lifted a paw to help. No problem.

To this day, when people come up to me to talk about Barney, they inevitably say, “I still have Barney's photo and autograph on my refrigerator.”

If they look carefully, they may have mine, too.

The incident at Bush Stadium when the fans howled for Barney was substantial proof that he was catching on. It was clear that the anchors and reporters were getting a kick out of the idea of a nonhuman colleague, but I had to be careful. Egos are big. And fragile. None more fragile than mine. From that initial conversation with Paul Karpowicz, I was pleased that he had signed on to the idea, and so had Lee Giles, the news director. From the beginning, they both knew the dog was good for ratings.

“I thought it was great,” Paul recalled. “At the time, we were not number one, and we were trying to establish a local identity. Not that we were this smart, but it turned out we were groundbreaking.”

“Little by little, it just kind of grew,” said Lee. “Barney the dog turned out, over time, to be a very interesting personality. A real dickens around the studio, but viewers just fell in love with him.”

I thought it was important for the morning news team to know that the big tunas were onboard. How could I engineer some public display of the GM's acceptance of a dog on the news?

How could I lobby for their open support? Ah, the lobby!

The lobby of WISH-TV was nothing fancy—a kind of'50s retro look with a TV monitor and a coffee table stacked with magazines so guests and clients could bide time while waiting to be summoned by the producers downstairs or the sales reps upstairs. Guests often peered at the framed photos that hung on the south wall. Each color picture was a bigger-than-life-size portrait of our news anchors, representing all of our several daily newscasts, about a dozen or so photos in all.

Now that Barney had his own photos, I wondered whether, just hypothetically, the big shots would consider placing Barney's likeness on that wall. That would mean that someone else's mug would have to be removed to make room.

And so an idea was born. I'd report live from the lobby one morning and take down our star news anchor Dave Barras's photo, then replace it with Barney's. I used one of the photos that Ed Bowers had taken months earlier and had it blown up to the appropriate size.

This is what I call a 6-Up idea.
Almost
perfect, but something was missing. To make it work, I had to legitimize the switch. I needed the transfer made live on TV—by the execs.

This was a charade, of course, but one that would be good for a few laughs and serve my purpose, as well. It also meant getting Paul Karpowicz and Lee Giles up at 4 in the morning to be part of the first segment at 5 AM I wasn't really going to ask them to do this ... was I?

What the hell. First I asked Giles, who just shook his head and rolled his eyes, but he finally agreed to do it. Then I told him I wanted Karpowicz to do it with him.

“Are you crazy? He's not going to do that.”

“Are you sure, Lee? I didn't think you were going to do it, either.”

I met with Paul the next day, laid out the plan, and waited for his reaction. “That's damn funny,” he said. “Sure. Why not?”

And so it was. We did four segments live, the first in the GM's office at 5:20 AM where I pretended to have a hidden camera listening in on this big executive decision to move Dave Barras's photo off the lobby wall and substitute Barney's. On the set, Dave Barras could be heard laughing as the drama ensued. He thought the whole idea was very funny. It was just realistic enough that I thought I caught Dave squirming a bit in his seat.

In the final segment, Barras's photo came off the wall and the beagle's went up. Karpowicz adjusted the frame and turned to the camera. “Nothing personal, Dave. The news is changing. We have to adapt to our viewers' needs.”

How prophetic. I would experience that transition myself, but it would be fifteen years later.