I really thought this was funny, even though...it may be serious Dennis 08/29/00 By Russell Ben-Ali Newhouse News Service It was a census taker's nightmare: knocking on the door of a Bayonne apartment, only to be met by a naked man screaming obscenities and looking for a fight. "My guess was he was sleeping off a horrible hangover," said Jo Anne Wells, the Hudson County census enumerator and crew leader who was assigned to gather information about the man's household last month. "I don't think he even knew he was naked." Wells cautiously gauged his anger, scanned the hallway for emergency exits, scolded him for his vile mouth and then got down to work. For the next 20 minutes they stood in the building's first floor hallway: a census worker who asked and a nude resident who answered most of the long form's 53 questions. Then he apologized for not shaving. Nationwide, a half-million census workers knocked on 42 million doors during Census 2000. They found most respondents clothed and cordial. But this month, as the last U.S. households are being counted, checked for vacancies and verified for data, enumerators and supervisors in New Jersey and around the country recalled their personal tales of horror. A "Beware of Dog" sign on the gate of a Creole, La., home led one census taker to approach cautiously, one step at a time, particularly after he'd spotted the pooch on the porch. The dog never budged. But suddenly, a 200-pound domestic pig emerged from beneath the porch and charged the worker, said field operations supervisor Walter Trahan, the man's manager. "It just kept coming at him," Trahan said recently. The worker fled to his car, where he blew the horn until the residents appeared; he then proceeded to interview them, Trahan said. At least seven census workers have died on the job - five in car crashes and one after a stroke. In June, census taker Dorothy Stewart, 71, was mauled to death by a pack of dogs as she approached a house near Nashville, Ind. Others were shot at, chased off property by shotgun-toting inhabitants and sprayed with water hoses. A Newark census taker filed a police report after a resident poured water on him from an upper-floor window. Another in Union City filed a complaint after he was assaulted by a resident. By contrast, Annerys Villafane, a bilingual Hudson County enumerator, said she was surprised at how easily she was able to obtain census data in most cases. Even illegal immigrants and the occupants of illegal basement apartments and rooming houses volunteered information when she explained that census information is kept confidential, even from other federal agencies such as the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But after Villafane persuaded one tenant to let her inside a locked Hoboken apartment building on her first day of work, another resident screamed that she was trespassing and followed her until she left. "I felt awful," said Villafane, who was born in the Dominican Republic. "But I didn't take anything personal; there were more good experiences than bad." Wells, the Bayonne enumerator, said each respondent requires a different approach, each carefully, but quickly, devised. "There is no such thing as a refusal," said Wells, who was assigned to Bayonne and Jersey City homes where residents declined to give information to other census workers during three prior visits. "I always went under a very positive outlook, that I was going to get this done. I really think that made the difference." "It's the way you approach people, your body language and the way you are with them" that determines whether you get the interview, said Essex County enumerator Gabriela Kennedy. Census takers donned snowshoes to travel to homes in Wyoming and upstate New York. They flew in helicopters to reach the Havasupai Indian tribe at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. They brought the forms back by hiking and riding horses to the canyon's rim. One enumerator, in her fourth attempt to interview a resident in rural Texas , accidentally crashed her car into the person's home. While she was lifted from her car by a neighbor, the occupant arrived home. She apologized for the damage and conducted the interview while awaiting an ambulance. Reaching residents was only half the battle. Getting them to accurately complete the forms was often another fight. A Salt Lake City man claimed he could not say who was in his house on April 1, the official census date, because he was on another planet. He was counted anyway. In New Jersey, some Belleville and Nutley residents wanted their dogs included as household members, enumerator Nancy Delia said. And when faced with the race question, which for the first time allowed people to identify themselves using up to 63 possible combinations of racial groups, a Jersey City man opted for the box marked "other." "He said, 'I'm a member of the human race,' " said Philip Rosace, a crew leader in the Jersey City census office. "That's the way he wanted it recorded."