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

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