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

There is a distinctive odor to the Indiana State Fair, but only the uninitiated, the newcomers, are put off by it. For all others, it is a rite of nasal passage, and a reminder to Hoosiers that the long days of summer are almost over.

The fair was an easy week for me in the sense that there were always new acts and exhibits to cover. The bad news was every station in town—and many from outside central Indiana—also covered the event, so the chances of airing something exclusive were rare. One year, every station featured the pig races, where the oinkers lumbered around a track at some surprising speeds to get back to their cozy pens. Only WISH-TV added a dog in the competition. Watching Barney race four pigs was must-see TV. He lost, by the way. I don’t think he realized they were potential pork chops.

No one liked the annual Indiana State Fair more than Barney. We went to twelve of them. All those years of corn dogs and deep-fried Twinkies kinda blend together in my mind—what’s left of it. Barney loved the fair for the exact same reason that all Hoosiers did: he loved cholesterol-laden food, animal smells, and country music concerts. Okay, maybe not the third one. Although we did sit through a George Strait concert once and he only howled twice. The dog, I mean.

Each August when we drove through the gate, every parking lot attendant took the time to come over and stroke Barney, his head sticking out the window, his nose twitching at record speed. Occasionally, an employee who was not familiar with Barney questioned whether you could bring a pet to the fair, which always made me laugh because there were thousands of pigs, cows, and chickens just a sniff away.

Once Barney realized where he was, he’d go into a frenzy, fully aware that there was a cornucopia of smells awaiting him. After a segment from the fair demonstrating the proper way to make a deep-fried pickle, for example, we would walk down the main drag, greeting people. If I saw in my radar any small children with food walking toward us, I always called ahead and issued a warning: Please ask your children to guard their food. If there is food in your baby carriage, please secure it.

This never worked and on more than one occasion, as Barney and I were hustling down the main drag, Barney extricated a hot dog or a burrito right from a youngster’s grip as we sped by. Sometimes it scared the kids, but most of the victims’ parents were fans of the show and felt honored to have been an official casualty of his stealth. Yes, they would brag about this. Now they had a personal Barney story to share with their friends and neighbors.

During a typical fair, patrons saw Barney ride on the Ferris wheel, enter the pig race, cavort with rabbits (they made him nervous; so much for breeding), and get kicked by a horse. He rode in mini-race cars, sat on tractors, and took a bite out of a huge statue of a chicken carved out of butter. He did almost everything a regular fairgoer did, except pay to get in. Incredibly, he seemed to remember places he had been to the previous year, and made it clear which venues he wanted to return to.

Each year, our first appearance at the fair was the morning of the annual balloon race. Thousands of people lined the infield of the horse track waiting for thirty balloons to lift gracefully into the sky around 6 AM Barney and I reported from the balloon race for twelve years. Much of the crowd was composed of WISH-TV fans, born and bred Hoosiers who made it a tradition to attend the first day of the fair.

Most of the balloons were huge floating advertisements for everything from real estate companies to local wineries. If you were a big Jack Daniel’s fan, you could stumble out of bed and watch a 2,500-square-foot bottle of whiskey float across the sky. How about a huge Burger King Whopper? The sky was the limit.

Part of the balloon race ritual was my annual interview with various city and state dignitaries. Frank O’Bannon, then lieutenant governor, was always there because he was also the unofficial head of the Department of Agriculture, so any time he could get on TV and somehow work the word “corn” into a sentence, it made political hay—another word he got in a lot. Somehow he also managed to sneak in a few references to beef, pork, and poultry. The guy was good. Ditto regarding his wife, Judy, a class act who just loved Barney and would come over every year during the balloon race just to give him a hug. Every year, I could read the lieutenant governor’s lips prior to the interview as he asked his aide what my name was. Remembering Barney’s name was never a problem for him.

When the governor, Evan Bayh, went on to become a U.S. senator, O’Bannon was elected to the top state office, but he never abandoned his obligation to the fair and always stopped by to see Barney and me. It would be years later that both Barney and this beloved Indiana politician would make their final visit to the fair the very same summer.

There was another tradition that I upheld. I would interview a balloon pilot, he would tell me how safe ballooning was, then he would ask me to go up with him, and then I would chicken out. I was not afraid of flying; I was afraid of crashing. The truth is, the sport is quite safe, so I often used Barney as an excuse, claiming he was afraid of heights.

One Balloon Day morning just prior to leaving the house, I peeked out my window and immediately called the station. The clouds were thick, dark, and menacing, but rain had not yet fallen. Randy,