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

would haunt me that I had turned it down. “You’ll do nothing but whine about what a poor job this person did. You’ll complain he can’t write, that he wasn’t funny and how he missed all the good stuff.” Boy, she nailed it. That’s exactly the kind of annoying thing I was apt to do.

As for my concern about directions, Mary Ellen made a good point. “Dick, so what if you get lost? You don’t know where you’re going anyway, so get in the car and drive. That’s how you’ll find neat stuff. Oh, and take the dog with you.”

That part appealed to me. It reminded me of the book Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s chronicle of his crosscountry journey with his French poodle, Charley.

There was clearly an effort here to get us out of the house on weekends, but Mary Ellen’s logic was impeccable. Before I made my final decision, I looked at the copy of Texas Curiosities that the editor had originally sent me. I decided to thumb through the book and stop at a random page. If what I read on that page reflected the kind of wacky stuff I wanted to write about, that would seal the deal. Whenever I was on the fence about something I always looked for some kind of sign for the right thing to do. I even did it for this book, as you’ll see later.

I flipped to page 78 and there it was: A story about a Jernigan’s Taxidermy shop in Waco, Texas. Jeremy Jernigan specializes in stuffing the rear ends of the animals. His store window apparently is filled with animal butts. Even Barney could have found this curiosity. With his nose in the air. Enough read. I decided to do it.

Sadly, there was no taxidermist of that sort in Indiana, so while I never found someone who did that kind of stuffing, I did find some neat stuff. For over a year, Barney and I traveled Indiana—six thousand miles, more than three hundred cities (visiting two thousand was just not possible). Virtually every weekend we’d head out either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning and spend the entire day (and often overnight) nosing our way around small towns, pumping locals for information about their area to find an anomaly that would lend itself to a chapter in the book.

I talked with local news editors and county historians hoping they would point me in the right direction. I always hoped they literally pointed, because north, south, east, and west were a mystery to me.

The historians were fixated on what had happened hundreds of years ago, but no one wants to pack the three kids in the Ford pickup to visit a historical marker in the middle of nowhere or in the middle of downtown, for that matter. I think it’s cool that James Buchanan once fell off his horse on this street in downtown New Palestine, but it’s not something you’d want to visit. Or maybe it was Millard Fillmore. See, who cares?

The visitor and convention bureaus were of little help because their inclination was to push places that they were promoting on their own Web sites and through brochures. Repeating what was already in the PR pipeline was a big waste of time and not what the publisher was looking for.

Newspaper editors were sometimes grumpy and often too busy, which meant they were damn good editors, just no help to me. Incredibly, even men and women who had lived and worked in these tiny towns their whole lives were at a loss to come up with something offbeat in the area. When I ventured to these towns, I’d inquire about local oddities at a gas station, a café, or a barbershop. I often got this kind of response: “Nothing special here, young man. Lived here all my life. Can’t think of a thing.”

I kept asking the question, mostly because I liked being called “young man.” Truth was that all these folks were aware of the local oddball stuff, but they couldn’t think of it. Why? Because they saw these things every day. The oddities were part of the daily wallpaper. In a coffee shop in Bryant, Indiana, the server told me that there wasn’t much to see in town. But twenty minutes later, just a quarter mile from the shop, I drove past a barn adorned with hundreds of monkey wrenches that had been nailed to the side of the building. I returned to the café on the way out of town. “Oh, I forgot about that,” said the embarrassed waitress, who had drawn a blank when I’d posed the original question an hour earlier.

Writing the book required a lot of poking around. On many occasions my search required engaging a total stranger in an interview. Outside central Indiana, no one knew my face or had heard of my dog. But Barney played a role similar to the one he played in Indy. He greased relationships and helped me to gain the trust of perfect strangers, whom I was asking to share their story. In the rural Midwest most people have gun racks, not ski racks, so I was glad have a beagle next to me. Not for protection, for a connection.

In Knox, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis, the first six people I spoke with at a gas station, all from the immediate neighborhood, failed to remember that one of their neighbors had giant rosary beads encircling her house. They were multicolored bowling balls, connected by a rope. In fact, everyone in Knox knew about this oddity, but again, unless I specifically mentioned it, the locals were at a loss to think of anything in town that would make it into my book.

When I found the address, I whipped out my camera and starting snapping photos. I would normally have asked permission, but it appeared no one was home. Suddenly, an elderly woman emerged from the house. At first she appeared distressed at my picture taking, although you would think