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

a new host for that spot. Their list of syndicated talkers included Rush Limbaugh from 1 to 4, and while Rush was not quite the 800-pound gorilla he is now, his girth had started spreading through the talk show world by the mid-nineties.

Indiana is a conservative state. Despite having a Democratic governor at the time, Hoosiers had seldom voted for a Democrat for president. The last time was in 1966, when LBJ got the nod, ironic in this story because Johnson had been in the news that year, accused of improperly handling his beagle pups by holding them by their ears and dangling them in front of the camera. Had he done that during the election of 2004, even Indiana wouldn’t have voted for him.

I doubt the general manager at WIBC saw me as a potential permanent replacement for the present host. Stan Solomon had been in that slot and was going to move to afternoon drive time. Solomon was a right-winger, always railing about Bill Clinton, convinced he murdered Vince Foster and that Hillary was femi-Nazi-lesbo. Okay, this is an exaggeration, but Solomon did attract a definite audience, just not the kind I aspired to achieve or had any chance of pleasing.

I filled in for three mornings, a total of nine hours on air—timewise the equivalent of an entire month on TV during my morning segments. It was a heady experience, but I kept the volume of the discourse turned down low. I talked about mundane issues, but I got a clear smattering of what the job would mean when one morning I expressed my opposition to corporal punishment. Listeners called, demanded I be fired, even spanked, convinced WIBC had hired a bleeding-heart liberal. Fire me? I hadn’t even been hired.

Yes, I was a liberal, one of the few in Indiana, who had been given access to the airwaves. The responsibility scared the hell out of me. But it also turned me on. Oh, please, I thought, don’t ask me to do this full time. I won’t be able to say no.

Other hosts filled in the next two weeks and when I didn’t hear anything for more than a month, I resigned myself to the fact that I was not right (far-right enough) for the job. I felt then, as I do now, that it is tough to offer a nuanced view of the world on the radio, which, in my opinion, is what happens when you espouse a more liberal approach to issues. But it just doesn’t work. Most people need black and white, good and evil. They need something to get in a sweat about. As Garrison Keillor once noted, “Unitarian ministers don’t do much preaching in the subway.”

I later learned that that management had liked the reaction I had initially garnered. No one had ever disagreed with Rush. The phones had lit up. Most people didn’t like what I had to say, although many did think my manner and approach were evenhanded. I was offered the job after all, with the understanding that I would present an alternative view to the right-leaning hosts presently on the air, which now included two other talkers whose shows aired in the later afternoon and evening. I was flattered by the opportunity; I didn’t weigh the downside.

Mary Ellen was good at weighing. She was afraid that my decision had the potential to endanger my growing popularity at the TV station. She knew I had a penchant for looking for good issue-oriented scraps at cocktail parties, but this would take my argumentative nature to a new level. And she said it would change my brand, no doubt a concept from one of her advertising textbooks ...

“What does that mean, ‘change my brand,’ Mary Ellen?”

“It means that people think they’re about to take a swig of orange juice and you surprise them with grapefruit. It’s jarring.”

Damn, Mark Twain was right. There is nothing more annoying than a good example.

True, the idea of broadcasting my radical (in New York, we say enlightened) views on a 50,000-watt station throughout central Indiana did pose a risk. Maybe it did jeopardize my brand, but I was feeling my Wheaties.

My boss at WISH, Lee Giles, the news director, had heard me on the radio during the tryouts and was impressed, but his enthusiasm was tempered by concern. I was a funny guy, the reporter doing the light, fluffy stuff. And everybody enjoyed watching me (and, let’s be honest, Barney), so why would I go and ruin this by actually showing people I had opinions on controversial issues? To me, it seemed as if they were afraid I’d reveal that I had a brain. Giles didn’t word it that way, but that was the feeling I got.

Nevertheless, I convinced myself I had an obligation to do this: to literally broadcast a more progressive viewpoint over a radio station that was decidedly conservative. I was consumed with this feeling of self-importance. Not a flattering quality.

I took the job.

The new routine was grueling. Up at 3:30 in the morning to do my segments for Channel 8, then on to the WIBC studios by 9 AM on the north side of town to host three hours of political discourse, peppered by angry viewers who now had a good reason not to like me—despite the dog. In fact, it was not uncommon for viewers to observe that “Barney has more brains than you do.”

My wife’s mother, who I swear had the hots for Bill O’Reilly, considered my liberal views shameful and often denied I was her son-in-law at the retirement home bridge parties. That hurt. I wondered whether she had rewritten her will.

The classic Barney photo by Ed Bowers. We printed 5,000 of them and signed each one to fans: Your pals, Dick and Barney.

Executives substitute Barney’s photo for the morning anchor’s on WISH-TV’s wall of fame.

At a local hotel. Barney gave it four stars—mostly for the room service.

The sign