Mornings With Barney by Dick Wolfsie (e book reader .TXT) 📕

there were two people I met who I will never forget. They, along with Art Buchwald, shaped my developing sense of how to connect with people. And how to make them laugh.

I had watched Steve Allen on TV in the ’50s. When my parents were glued to CBS at 8 PM on Sunday nights watching Ed Sullivan, I took the hipper option and retreated to the basement to watch Steve Allen on ABC. Steve was The Tonight Show’s first host and the inventor of late-night TV talk shows. Many of the routines we are so familiar with today, from Johnny Carson’s Carnac to Jay Leno’s man-on-the-street interviews, were Steve Allen’s creations.

Steve would smear his body with dog food and unleash a pack of assorted dogs. He strapped a kite to his back and ran into a huge fan. Mr. Allen put a live camera on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and commented on the people who walked by. Sound familiar? Carson, Letterman, and Leno have all copied it in one form or another.

I first met Mr. Allen during an interview on Good Morning, New York. We were talking about the great comic actor Stan Laurel. “Where can you find people of that ilk anymore?” asked Mr. Allen. “You could join the Ilks Club,” I said. It was a Steve Allen kind of joke. And we both knew it. He laughed. Yes, I had made Steve Allen laugh.

If there was anyone sillier than Steve Allen, it was Soupy Sales. As a twelve-year-old, I was glued to the TV while Soupy sparred with his off-camera puppet friends: White Fang, “the meanest dog in the U.S.A.,” and Black Tooth, “the sweetest dog in the world.” Only the paws of these puppets were shown, and White Fang did little more than grunt. Soupy would then translate the incomprehensible sounds. I had the opportunity to work with Soupy Sales for a week while at WABC. It almost made the gig worthwhile. Almost.

Six months after I started in New York, I was done. My cohost didn’t like me. The producer didn’t like my style. The general manager, I discovered, didn’t know who the hell I was. He had been in Europe when his station manager hired me. I knew things had been too easy. I was toast. The meeting with the station manager was short and ugly. “I’m afraid you’re not quite what we are looking for, but we wish you the best of luck.”

All of a sudden that $1,100-a-month apartment on Third Avenue didn’t seem like such a good deal. I spent Tuesdays in the unemployment line, often signing autographs for people who thought I was doing some kind of news story. I tried to find freelance work doing commercials, but I was so bad at it that I auditioned to play a talk-show host in a beer ad, and I wasn’t even good enough for a second audition.

Mary Ellen had a good job as a marketing director at one of the local hospitals. The first six weeks, we lived in the Essex House near Central Park until we found an apartment. Everything was courtesy of WABC, including meals. A dream come true. My wife compared herself to Eloise, the little girl in Kay Thompson’s 1950s children’s book, who lived at the Plaza Hotel and endlessly roamed the hotel in search of adventure. Why not take it easy for a while and enjoy the Big Apple? We had not anticipated how rotten things would get.

Mary Ellen and I moved back home to my mother and father’s house in New Rochelle, just a mile from New Rochelle High School, where I once held the world’s most secure job. I bartended for a few months and Mary Ellen, America’s best-looking MBA, took part-time work as a Kelly Girl temp at six bucks an hour. Two months earlier I had been picked up in a limo to get to work. Now I had no idea what we were going to do. I was thirty-five years old, newly married, and living at home with Mom and Dad.

After I left WABC, another entourage of hapless hosts tried to make the cut, rarely lasting more than a few weeks. Within a year, WABC finally hired my permanent replacement, a guy named Regis Philbin, who was then in L.A. doing a similar show. People tell me he’s done okay.

In August of ’81, I responded to an ad in Broadcasting Magazine. The local CBS affiliate in Indianapolis needed male and female hosts for a new show. At the time, Indy was more the butt of jokes than a mecca for media, but I was in no position to be choosy.

For the audition, I had been paired by pure chance with a midwestern gal who had been on the radio in Dayton, Ohio. Patty Spitler was a feisty, quick-witted blonde. The chemistry between us was evident to everyone. The next day the general manager called the two of us into his office and offered us the job. Then this:

“Dick, this may be the dumbest decision I have ever made.”

I had heard this before. That was the kind of insightful thinking that had gotten me my high school teaching job.

“Our viewers will not like you at first. You’re too New York. This is Indiana. But the show needs an edge. I think you will grow on people.” Nice—he made me sound like some kind of fungus. But at least I had a job. Like most mushrooms, I lasted little more than a season.

In a cost-cutting move, Indianapolis Afternoon was dumped. Now I had been canned twice in two years. When most TV personalities lose a job they split to another TV market. You look like damaged goods. But Mary Ellen had a good job. As for me? Writing, teaching, bartending? Something would come up . . . wouldn’t it?

WPDS was a new independent station. Maybe there was something there. I marched myself over there after managing to wrangle a meeting with the GM, whom