Mornings With Barney Dick Wolfsie (best ebook reader for ubuntu .txt) 📖

had a huge ego; I loved the attention and the notoriety, but it was also important to me that I not squander that time each morning. Few people in my business had the freedom to say and do anything they wanted for ten minutes every morning in front of tens of thousands of people. Sometimes the segment was a riot. But it was always a responsibility—to either entertain or to educate. Or the perfect form: do both at once.

Mike Hunt sent me a photo a few weeks later that he had taken during the show. And this is one of the photos I treasure most. This is what Barney was all about. Take a look at it. And then you’ll understand, as I did, Barney’s mission in life.

By the way, Mike and Emily wrote a book called Emily’s Walk, the story of how one courageous little girl faced incredible challenges early in her life. Book signings always were a success, but the day that she and Barney teamed up together broke all sales records. That was a combo that was hard to beat.

Travels with Barney

Barney was always next to me, eyes on me like a laser. During book signings at malls, he loved the attention from fans but even a short trip to the men’s room resulted in a touch of separation anxiety (for both of us).

He was visibly agitated when I was not in plain sight, straining his neck to see where I went. I usually offered a free book to a customer if he or she would watch Barney while I went to the bathroom. But this had some serious drawbacks. On several occasions he got off the leash he was tethered to and scampered down the mall, his legs in a whirl as he tried to negotiate the slippery vinyl floor at each turn.

“He went that-a-way,” my supposed dog watcher would say as I returned to my table. I would bolt down the mall, occasionally catching sight of him, but he would disappear around a corner. No problem: I just had to look for him in 200 stores. I needed an excuse to go into Victoria’s Secret anyway.

I’d walk into each shop and ask the clerk if he had seen a male, tri-colored beagle. I realized how stupid it was to offer a description. There were not a great many stray dogs in the mall on any given day. Eventually I would find him. He was never surprised to see me. Remember, that was part of the game.

Because Barney was so unhappy alone I seldom left home without him, making us potential stars for the next American Express commercial.

Mary Ellen had encouraged—no, demanded—my constant stewardship of Barney over the years because of his destructive nature. “If you go, he goes.” This had a much less ominous sound than her dictum years earlier, “If he stays, I go.” We had made some progress.

When my second book, Dick Wolfsie’s New Book: Longer, Funnier, Cheaper, was published, the concept was that people would come into the bookstore and say, “Do you have Dick Wolfsie’s New Book?” That was funny until my third book came out. Now the title made no sense at all and just confused the buyers and the sellers. Other than all that, it was a great idea.

Barney’s picture was on both covers—mine, too, but Barney had been absolutely no help with those books. That was the extent of Barney’s involvement in the whole process . . . just waiting for a walk and dinner while I sat all day at the computer trying to think of witty things. They were just Andy Rooney/Dave Barry kinds of musings about everyday life. It was easy. If something funny occurred to me, I wrote it down. But as Mark Twain said, “It’s not the writing that’s hard, it’s the occurring.”

It was time for something different. When a Connecticut publisher was looking for authors around the country to compile books of roadside oddities and unique people in each of the fifty states, she contacted me about Indiana. Sadly, she did not have the strength to give Barney a good belly rub, but her smile lit up the room, enough of a treat for both of us.

I was flattered by her interest, but I was leaning against accepting the offer for the following reason: It was a whole lot of work. It meant traveling to all ninety-two counties to search for these oddities. I did know central Indiana, but that was only 20 percent of the state. I hadn’t the slightest idea about the other seventy or so counties. It was another world. Much of it was more rural, for one, and there were over 2,000 cities on the map, many with just a few hundred people.

Where would I begin? There was no way I could do this.

But I knew I couldn’t use lack of time as an excuse because I had an incredibly flexible schedule. I was on TV for two hours each weekday morning, but booking the segments and pre-interviewing guests could be spread out over a week or done in one full marathon afternoon. No, I needed a better pretext to avoid this new challenge.

How about this: I cannot follow directions, a talent I assumed was a prerequisite to traveling the state in search of material for the book. Compass and map—I can make a very funny limerick using those two words, but I couldn’t find my way out of a Plymouth minivan. On a map, north is up, south is down. I can’t make this concept work for me in a three-dimensional world. I might have been the right person to write this travelogue but I was the worst one to go out and research it. That’s what I was going to tell the editor when she called back for my decision.

My wife had a different view. Mary Ellen felt that if I declined this offer and someone else wrote the book, it