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

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.

Beagles and Burgers

I’d like to take credit along with Barney for our rise from the bottom of the AM ratings pile to the top, all the way to the number-one morning show in the mid-nineties. I can’t, of course. Television shows live and die by the ratings, but research is expensive and there were no hard numbers that would pinpoint exactly what had happened. The rise did occur during my tenure. And, yeah, it also happened to coincide with Barney’s rising popularity. Anyone who had a nose for the local news scene would have suspected that our growing success had at least something to do with the beagle. My success certainly did.

Barney gave me a different kind of TV presence from all the other reporters. A guy on another station doing a similar show pegged himself “Treeboy,” often doing spots about gardening and home repair. That was his gig. I had mine. Fortunately, I was never pegged Dogboy. Not that I know of.

It wasn’t long before booking the morning segment had to be done with an eye and a floppy ear toward Barney. He had touched a very deep chord with Hoosiers. Part of the attraction was the unpredictability of his behavior. But it was more than that. He was the devil in all of us, the unfulfilled desire to do bad things—not hateful, harmful things—but to be the imp, the rascal, the scamp. Barney was all of us when our mothers weren’t watching.

The pressure to find something new to do during my time slot every morning, five days a week, was intense. And now I was also searching for a way to include the dog. I knew Barney’s best moments would continue to depend on his unanticipated contributions. I also knew that giving him the proper environment to showcase his talent was a good showbiz move.

I didn’t have to do much searching to find these ideas; they often found me. Many times the call came because the piece involved dogs, but the next step was always for me to find a way to involve Barney in the segment. Barney was seldom content with a cameo appearance, but he took what he could get. When I went back to the station to watch my segment on videotape, I’d see that even if Barney was not supposed to be part of the show, he managed to insinuate his nose or his tail into the camera shot. Viewers told me that watching my segment of the news was like the book Where’s Waldo? Only it was Where’s Barney? Keep your eyes open. He’s there somewhere.

That summer I received one of the first calls requesting a personal appearance by the two of us. I’m not a very good businessman, and when I started getting these requests I didn’t know how to respond to the question of compensation. What was I worth? How much did the dog raise the ante? Sometimes I’d put off the call by saying I needed to discuss this with my business partner. It sounded good, anyway. They just didn’t realize I meant my dog.

The local Hardee’s franchise owner had become a loyal fan of Barney’s and he wanted the two of us to do a series of commercials and appearances to promote the restaurants.

His enthusiasm was so overwhelming that I bought into it. I could do what I did best—perform—and Barney would have center stage. Besides, Barney was a big fan of their sausage and biscuits, even devouring an entire plate for one of the future commercials.

The big test was whether stressed-out moms and dads would drag their kids out of bed on a Saturday morning to see Dick Wolfsie and his dog. It was true that we did have a lot of kids watching in the morning, more than the other stations, but news was still a grown-up deal, so I did have some question whether this would really work.

Convinced the kids would love the pooch, Hardee’s did an extensive media blitz based on the Barney appearance. The biggest draw, they claimed,