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

Then came junior high school. I don’t remember a thing about junior high. My sense is that that is a good thing.

I do remember Pokie, my first dog and I guess my first real experience loving an animal. We had gotten the black and white speckled mixed breed from the Humane Society to appease my sister Linda, who was so obsessed with dogs at age six that when she got out of the bathtub, she would shake like a pooch caught in a downpour. A canine companion was a cheaper route than long-term therapy, so the Wolfsies got a dog.

Just months after Pokie arrived, she escaped from the house. I chased her to the end of our block, just in time to see a car crash into her back legs as she crossed the main thoroughfare. Pokie yelped and limped home. It was traumatizing to see this, but the injury was not as bad as we had thought, although her tail had been completely crushed and required amputation.

My mother, who I am not sure had truly bonded with the dog at the time, became her dedicated health care provider for the next ten years. The remaining stump lacked mobility, which meant my mother had to clean Pokie each day when she returned from her daily constitutional—but not before Pokie had soiled clothing and furniture. Mom loved that dog. Her dedication to that needy pup showed me what dedication to an animal meant.

In school, I was seldom a serious pupil, often a dedicated punster and the runaway favorite for class clown my senior year. I got a 35 in the state Regents Test in chemistry. That’s out of 100. But on my English regents, I scored 40 out of 40 on the written exam, a surprise even to me because my 300-word essay was filled with corny plays on words and sentence fragments. Which I still like to use.

New Rochelle High School was just like a big stage for me, an audience that would laugh at almost anything if I had the nerve to blurt it out in class during a lesson on The Scarlet Letter. Occasionally, I’d even get a grin from a teacher, which is really the highest compliment. When I became a teacher several years later, I remembered how much that reaction had meant to me and I consciously doled out chuckles and smiles to deserving students who managed a clever ad-lib in class.

In August 1965, my parents dropped me on the corner of 21st and I Street in the nation’s capital, just a few blocks from the White House. I had never been away from my parents. I didn’t know a soul in this new city. I was homesick for my family and friends.

And I was going to miss my audience.

Getting laughs turned out be a lot easier than getting laid, evidenced by the fact that I graduated from college at the peak of the sexual revolution with zero experience in pleasing a woman, but rave reviews when it came to performing for a crowd.

Freshman year I began slipping anonymous essays under the door of the newspaper editor, a technique that apparently both Ben Franklin and Mark Twain had used to get their first break in publishing. By sophomore year I had fessed up to my ploy after a few of my essays were printed, and soon I began writing a weekly humor column for the school paper, The Hatchet.

By my junior year, my chutzpah had kicked in again and I had orchestrated a way to distribute my column in one hundred college newspapers, becoming the first student syndicated humor column in history—as far as I knew. Incredibly, checks kept appearing in my mailbox at the dorm, payment for the right to use my material. It was the closest I ever got to getting high. And this was the sixties.

As it happened, the man who had inspired me to pursue a humor column of my own lived right here in Washington. And ever since I’d begun college, I had wanted to meet him, the number-one syndicated writer in the country: Art Buchwald. So I finally got up my courage and looked up his home number in the phone book—not that he would be listed. But there it was.

Incredibly, Mr. Buchwald answered his home phone. I told him I was a fan. That I wrote a humor column, just like his. Yeah, right. Silence on the other end. I also informed him that I attended the university just a few blocks from where he worked. “Call my office,” he said. “Let’s see just how funny you are.” It was like an Old West gunfighter throwing down a challenge.

A week later, I entered Buchwald’s office with a stack of Hatchets under my arm. He put both feet up on his desk. Not one at a time; instead, he propelled both of his hefty legs together onto the mahogany surface with a thud. There was a hole in one of his shoes.

Buchwald stole a glance at me and snapped, “Let me see one of those newspapers, kid.” He ripped open the current issue and began reading my column. I watched his face. Nothing. He grabbed a pen off his desk and scribbled a few words over my byline. He apologized that something had come up. With that, he left. The entire meeting with him lasted but ten minutes.

Dejected, I shuffled along Pennsylvania Avenue back to my apartment, but I stopped at the first corner bench and opened The Hatchet to the page that Buchwald had read just minutes before. I stared in delight at these words scrawled on the page: “Wolfsie, stay out of my racket.”—Art Buchwald. To this day, I assume he meant he saw me as a potential competitor, but I suppose at the time it could have been just good advice for someone with no talent who needed to pursue a more realistic line of work.

In l969 I graduated from the George Washington