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

not to say that there wasn’t evidence wafting in the air that he had been naughty, but there was just as much proof he had remained healthy despite some very unorthodox ingestions.

The Top Ten Things He Ate1

Four sticks of butter at one time

An entire bucket of KFC I left on my backseat (remember)

Half a turkey on Thanksgiving Day

An entire platter of lasagna (Garfield, eat your heart out)

Two packages of hot dog buns

A head of lettuce

Two cherry pies

A box of chocolate cherries (I know he’s not supposed to eat chocolate. But he didn’t know that)

That $25 giant pepperoni pizza, including the box

An entire loaf of Italian bread (Well, not the whole loaf. He buried the rest under the blankets at the foot of Brett’s bed.)

A final note of pride: Emergency veterinarians tell me it is not uncommon for beagles to enjoy batteries, dental floss, and sweat socks, each of which requires invasive surgery to save the animal. Barney generally restricted his diet to human food, the ant trap being a notable exception.

Oh, and by the way, it’s hydrogen peroxide. One teaspoon of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide (make sure the strength is not any higher than 3 percent) per each ten pounds of body weight. Just in case you find a beagle. Or a beagle finds you.

Is that a Wet Nose in My Popcorn?

Barney was more than a TV hound. He was a multimedia megastar who found his way into just about every medium there was.

He appeared on the cover of the city magazine Indianapolis Monthly three times. Give me a second here while I figure out how many times I was on the cover.... Okay, never.

In one edition, the publishers wanted to highlight the major symbols of the Circle City, Indianapolis. They put only three icons on the cover: A basketball, a race car, and a photo of Barney. Talk about being in good company!

Barney was also a Hollywood movie star. Not Hollywood, California, but the Hollywood Bar and Filmworks in downtown Indy. It has since moved to Chicago, but in its day it was the yuppie place to go in town, the one theater where you could see a movie and sip Merlot at the same time.

The owner, Ted Baltuch, like any smart hotel owner, knew that seats with no people in them, like rooms with no guests, did little for the bottom line, so to speak. As a result, he gave away free tickets to Saturday and Sunday kids’ matinee movies. The hope was that burger-and-fries sales would cover his expenses and introduce the theater to the children’s parents—who might then return without kids.

For several years, I would mention the freebie on the morning show, as well as the additional incentive of meeting Barney and me before the movie. Kids could pet Barney and get autographed photos of the two of us. With the help of a good flick (Toy Story, for example), it was not uncommon to sign two hundred pictures during the hour preceding the show. Ted paid me for my appearance, and Barney was bellyrubbed for sixty minutes. I think he got the better deal.

Ted knew that the parents—the ones who watched the news—were usually more interested in the trip to meet Barney for the celebrity angle than the kids, many of whom just loved dogs in general. But I did notice as time went on that more and more children were watching our news, in part motivated by their chance to see Barney.

Success in television requires a constant influx of viewers, a curious blend of keeping the old and attracting the young, although for the past few years, keeping the older viewer has lessened in priority. Of course, TV stations now sell a lot of Viagra ad slots, suggesting not all TV fans are twenty-somethings.

The news executives at WISH-TV later felt that a dog on the news skewed toward older viewers. But ironically, many of those youngsters who had encounters with Barney are now young adults with their own families. “I grew up watching you and Barney!” a young woman will tell me with her two toddlers at her side. Sometimes I can’t believe I have spanned an entire generation on TV. At this point I have kept my face on TV in Indy for about a century. At least in dog years.

Ted had another idea: how about if Barney and I appeared in a short piece of film that would welcome guests to the theater? The clip would explain some of the required information for the movie guests: Smoking rules, NO TALKING, fire exits, NO TALKING, bathroom locations, NO TALKING.

Shooting the spot required that I recite those basic theater rules on camera. Throughout my television and radio career I have been blessed with the gift of ad-lib, but God did curse me with zero capacity to remember prewritten lines. While I struggled with the script, I sat there with a bag of buttered popcorn as a prop, which drove Barney insane. Just when I was about to do Take No. 42, Barney would bury his nose in the popcorn, scattering the kernels all over the table. I’d forget my lines and the director would yell, “Cut! Take 43.”

Well, how dense was I? Barney had found the perfect vehicle to inject humor into this otherwise rather vanilla presentation. Okay, now this was my idea. To ensure his total obsession with the popcorn, I added a chicken wing to the bottom of the box and situated the treat right under his nose.

Take 44: I still stumbled with my wording, but that was okay because I had clearly been distracted by the popcorn pooch. “Leave my popcorn alone,” I continually admonished him, but to no avail. In the video, his entire head is buried in the popcorn box. All you see are ears flopping over the box.

The more Barney tried to exhume that hidden chicken wing, the funnier it got. Take 45 completed the shoot. I liked working with a