Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  After reading Dr. Howard’s letter, I realized that I didn’t really care who married us either. It was a ceremonial formality, the religious overtones of which meant nothing to me.

  Travel was difficult and the prenuptial negotiations had been so contentious that neither my parents nor Dr. Howard came to the event conducted in a bare-bones Army chapel used for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish services. The priest, a lieutenant named Joseph Farrell, who was chaplain for the regiment, assumed that Margie was Catholic through the circumstance of birth, and inasmuch as I had told him I was not Catholic or anything else, decided it was what he called a “mixed marriage.”

  He was very friendly and casual about it, but he thought he ought to get permission from some higher authority in the church so he called the living quarters of his bishop. The bishop was on the golf course at the time but someone on the other end of the phone said he was commissioned to act in his name.

  “Mixtae religionis,” our priest said. “Okay?”

  Evidently it was okay with this anonymous and somewhat suspect stand-in and we were married on the authority of a cleric well down the hierarchical ladder from the pope. I suppose I was predetermined to dislike this likable priest, and it seemed to me that Chaplain Farrell had a condescending air about himself during the ceremony which suggested that he felt marriage was for lesser mortals than himself.

  We had dinner that night with a group of friends of Margie’s father and mother who were staying at The Pinehurst Inn, near Southern Pines, North Carolina, which was for a time one of the great resort hotels in the country. Most of them were doctors and their wives, and I was uncomfortable with what I considered the off-color stories they were telling. “Off-color” is what we used to call a dirty joke. After dinner I returned directly to the barracks at Fort Bragg and, on the very next day, before we’d had a chance to live any married life, the Seventeenth Field Artillery was ordered south from North Carolina to Camp Blanding, Florida, and we were all restricted to the base until the move, which took place ten days later.

  A Missive to Marge from England 19

  A missive to Marge from england

  Nov 30, 1942

  Dearest Marg,

  I have never put so many words on paper in one day in my life but I can’t go another day without writing you.

  Eight days ago I was transferred from the 17th to The Stars & Stripes. And except for frequent trips out of town I will be living permanently in London. The first week has been hell. I am not a good newspaper man, nor do I write particularly well at this point. But what I need is work and I’m getting it.

  In the week with the paper I have seen more of England than Desk of Cook’s Tours and have seen things Cook will never see. I have been out for four days covering the major air fields in the British Isles with a photographer. We got some good shots, and several stories—the best of which are not for publication.

  Thursday I am going up with some sort of a formation of Flying Fortresses on what they are calling a “sortie.” There are twenty other newsmen going so I hardly think we will hit the continent.

  The S&S is put out by two boys who really know what newspaper work is all about. Bob Moora and Bud Hutton. Hutton is the typical tabloid desk man—has worked on most NY papers. Moora is the stabilizer—five years with the Herald, two as night editor. (Moora says of Yank “If I ever get back there I’m going in swinging, what a bunch of glamour boys.”) And I could think of a few examples of what he meant.

  The editorial offices are in the Times building. The Times itself has shriveled into the bowels of its building and we work in three offices previously used by pages three, four and five of the Sunday Supplement.

  You should see the Times function. About twenty seventyish English gentlemen come in each day about noon, retire to their rugged offices with a roaring fire place and a boiling samovar and ponder the days news. When a decision is made about using an item they call a secretary, have fresh crumpets sent in, pour the tea and chat. Then they dictate what they have to the secretary and while I’m not sure I think it then goes before the Board of Directors for approval previous to release.

  It will be a sad Christmas for me and nothing merry for you I’m sure. I spent most of what money I had on twelve Wedgewood service plates and a Wedgewood bowl for Mother. I paid quite a bit for them, about $50 so I hope they get there intact. They are in three huge boxes and will probably be in several thousand less huge pieces when they get there.

  I sent you something not nearly as nice but then Mrs. Rooney had no choice about being my mother and I thought it was time I did something decent for her. Next month and all months thereafter I will draw an extra $150. so when your birthday roll around etc. (By the by Lovie, that means that all in all I will kill about $250 a month. It will cost something to live here but not $250.)

  If you volunteer for Red Cross work here, you will find me usually in the vicinity of Blackfriars near the Embankment but in the event that you don’t get over I will see you sometime in 1943.

  All my love forever,

  Andy

  21

  At the end of World War II Andy Rooney collaborated with fellow Stars and Stripes reporter Bud Hutton to write an informative firsthand account of the Army’s daily newspaper titled simply The Story of the Stars and Stripes. Written by and for soldiers, The Stars and Stripes was, as editor Bob Moora put it, a paper ‘for Joe.’ A morale booster and source for hard news about the American forces and the enemy’s movements, the paper was also, in Rooney’s words, a “refuge for eccentrics.” Established by a corporal, a sergeant and a private, The Stars and Stripes was produced in the height of war and published in Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, Casablanca, and Liege. In their book, Hutton and Rooney offered readers vivid accounts of the perilous, sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious life of newsmen covering the frontlines of battle.

  As a twenty-four-year-old reporter for The Stars and Stripes, Andy Rooney boarded a B-17 bomber with the Eighth Air Force to fly on America’s second bombing mission over Germany. In 1944 he landed on Utah beach, three days after the brutal invasion of Normandy. The day that Paris was liberated from Germany, Rooney entered the city with French forces. Rooney’s front-row seat to the war afforded him a unique purview into the soldier’s life and a crash course in delivering news under the most unforgivable conditions imaginable. The following selection from The Story of the Stars and Stripes offers a glimpse of that world.

  Places of Business

  T he Times of London is an institution. From the drab and motley cluster of brick and wooden buildings in the dingy shadows of Queen Victoria Street, on the edge of London’s old city and just off the Thames, the Times does grammatically as it considers right, and in so doing molds an important (the important, the Times is apt to feel and not without a lot of justification) portion of British public opinion. The

  With Bud Hutton, in a Hollywood publicity shot

  Times does not hurry. Through its intricate, winding hallways linking the buildings that have been expanded with empire and time, Times editors walk with thoughtful mien, and they do it in fresh linen, with neckties, and coats. Sometimes, they do it with morning trousers, even in rationed wartime. The editors and subeditors are served tea in their offices at four on silver and china tea sets.

  Maybe the Times is best summed up: its readers open their paper first to the editorials.

  When The Stars and Stripes became a daily on November 2, 1942, it was at the Times, the first in a long line of journalistic step-parents to the daily paper of the army.

  When The Stars and Stripes staff first clattered through their building, the sober editors of the Times looked up disapprovingly from under their green eyeshades. Times reporters, busy writing out their reports in longhand, lay down their pencils and pens as the unconscious Americans hit the floor, where only toes previously had tread, with heavy GI heels, making more noise than the building or any of its occupants had heard since the last nail (or wooden peg) was hammered in pla
ce hundreds of years before. There was a lot of walking to do to get where you were going at the Times.

  The course from the street, near Blackfriars Bridge, to the S&S office in the Times led through hundreds of feet of narrow, winding corridors, up and down flights of wooden steps and around little corners.

  Strangers groping their way to the office often felt like dropping small bits of paper, Boy Scouts of America–like, so they would be able to find their way out. The second night of the occupation of the Times, Bob Moora and Russ Jones started out to find a shortcut from the editorial offices to the pressroom, some four floors below, and eventually wound up in a black maze, literally unable to retrace their steps. They stood there and hollered for help until a small, gray Times employee came along and, completely unperturbed, led them back to the city room.

  The labyrinth, which would have driven any intelligent American laboratory guinea pig insane, was some protection, though, from the thousands of screwballs who tried to get up to the office. Some of the Belgian bicyclists who wanted to insert ads in the paper, the refugee Poles who wanted to find their cousins from Scranton and the soldier with the selfheating bedroll for tired and cold soldiers got to know their ways to the editorial rooms, but thousands more must have given up, discouraged. We never found any parched skeletons, though, on the way out.

  The Times got The Stars and Stripes daily printing job by underbidding all the other London papers for the job. It was on a reverse LendLease basis, but they were doing it cheaply. It was almost a gesture of goodwill to their American allies. “Sure we’ll print your little journal for American soldiers,” they said in effect. What they definitely did not understand was that within a year and a half The Stars and Stripes would dwarf the Times’ own circulation and would be published by a highpowered staff from whom “The Thunderer’s” own editors frequently borrowed stories.

  It probably was a merciful thing that the Times didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late to stop it. From its venerable presses was coming an American tabloid newspaper, comic strips, pin-up photos of semidressed femininity, black headlines on page one; six days a week, four pages a day except Monday when there were eight and every one of them blatant by Times standards.

  That first month of November, 1942, full of bold news for bold American headlines, such as the invasion of North Africa, gave the Times an idea of what it was going to be like. Before December, every newspaper in Fleet Street was sending a messenger boy to wait at the Times’ pressroom, not for a copy of the Thunderer, but for The Stars and Stripes. So, too, the American news agencies. The British press picked up leads on stories, and frequently stories intact, albeit injecting into them the unique style of London journalism.

  The Stars and Stripes was particularly proud of its roundup on the day’s bombing activities during that period of the war when there was no fighting in Europe except that in the air; the paper literally was an Air Force trade journal. As such it had to know its business. The air story often ran for 1,500 words and included a meticulous report of heavy and medium bomber missions, their targets, and the background down to the number of tons that target already had absorbed, fighter-bomber sorties, strafings, aerial minelaying and just about everything else. The roundup was so capably handled that most London papers and American news bureaus there waited for it before writing their final stories of the night, sometime along about 11:30 p.m.

  The Times, from the first day of war, had begun its air story with a simple introductory sentence and then had printed verbatim the RAF communique, later adding whatever the Americans might have done. Its air editor finally got around not only to the S&S treatment of the story, but one evening broke down enough over a glass of mild-andbitter to confess that he was “finding actually more enjoyment these days in treating the subject in your ah American manner. With some reservations, of course, some reservations.”

  In the London office of The Stars and Stripes; Rooney, standing in back, looks over Bud Hutton’s shoulder

  The air war, then, accounted for the reproductions of diving fighters, burning bombers and formations that covered part of the walls of the Stars and Stripes office. The rest of the walls were covered with a miscellany of items stuck up haphazardly with paste. The pictures were predominantly “cheesecake,” the trade term of Sergeant Ben Price, the Des Moines picture editor, for choice items from his stack of Hollywood girls more or less out of bathing suits.

  From the walls the Times could have—and probably did—draw its own image of things to come after that first month. The Times people were very obliging, but they first began to realize they were in for real trouble the day the switchboard operator heard a voice from S&S make a request.

  “Would you please tell the department in charge of knocking down walls that we would like to have the wall knocked down between our two offices?” the voice asked.

  The operator, not realizing how surprised she was for a minute, said she would. Fifteen minutes or so later, two grayed men in overalls came into the city room, crowbars, sledges, hammers and saws over their shoulders. The Desk was a little taken aback, but pointed, and they dutifully knocked down the wall that time, the blitz and generations of Times men had left standing. That made the S&S offices in the building into one large room.

  It was about thirty feet wide and twice as long. As you came in at one of two doors—the other was bolted shut and carried a nostalgically huge poster of a dish of American ice cream—there was a small rectangular niche about five feet deep and six feet wide at your left. There, for some reason, the light switch had been placed conveniently behind a desk and a heavy wooden cabinet. On the far side of the room was the Desk.

  The city editor, through whom came all stories other than those from the newswires, sat on one side of the double desk. With the aid of the five telephones in front of him he sent reporters out to cover this largest local news beat in the world—the whole British Isles, the seas around them and the flak-filled sky all the way to Berlin.

  The news editor, who handled all the wire copy, the news from home and the stories from other war fronts, sat across from him. Six other desks of varying sizes and states of disrepair were scattered around the room.

  On a small shelf, nailed to the wall between the two windows, was the complete office library. There were eight books: a Jane’s Fighting Ships; a Webster’s dictionary; a Tacoma, Washington, telephone book; a 1939 World Almanac; Jane’s Aircraft of the World; a French-EnglishGerman dictionary; an Official Officers’ Guide Book; and a volume entitled The Fox of Peapack. Over the library, for handy reference, someone had scribbled in foot-high black crayon letters “IT’S ADOLF—NOT ADOLPH.”

  Running up the middle of the city room was a pipelike affair about six inches in diameter. It served as the office bulletin board although structurally its function was to hold the wooden ceiling off the wooden floor. Toward the top of the pipe, near the ceiling, there was a wicker wastebasket, wired fast. Ben Price tied it to the top of the pole one day when an order came down for all Stars and Stripes men to get an hour’s exercise every day.

  Price and a couple of staffers used to drag out a new case of pastepots every few days and get their exercise by tossing a few of the glass “balls” through the (waste) basket.

  The boys got the greater part of their exercise in climbing up to retrieve the glass pastepot-balls until one day Charlie White staggered into the shop and through the thick lenses of his glasses turned red eyes on the basket. Charles was no athlete, but somehow the pastepot he grabbed from Ham Whitman’s desk sailed truly through the air and into the basket. Charles was pleased, but irritated.

  “Hell of a basket,” he grumbled. “It’s got a bottom.” He climbed on a chair, jerked the basket down and kicked vigorously at its bottom. The kick carried too far. As a matter of fact, it carried Charlie’s foot, ankle and knee on up into the basket, and carried Charlie completely off his feet so that he wound up threshing on the floor, the basket jammed up around his waist. In
the confusion he lost his glasses, and his myopic eyes spun wildly as he kicked and wrestled with the basket.

  At the height of Charles’s battle with the wicker wastebasket, Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn walked into the office, and where never in a sober moment would he have thought of saluting, Charles suddenly was seized with a self-martyring urge to stand up and salute. He did, and as he stood there, the basket still around his leg, glasses lost, thin hair mussed, coat up around the back of his neck, eyes glaring wildly and his balance a precarious thing, the character of Hubert, Dick Wingert’s cartoon hero, was born.

  The thing had an aftermath. Because Charles had destroyed the bottom of the basket, when it was replaced on the pipe, the pastepots went right through, and, nonbouncing, splattered glue and glass across the room each time the mob exercised.

  This, presumably, was the army.

  On the walls, finally, in addition to the cheesecake, there were dozens of clippings, memos, pictures, and odds and ends of printed material. There were weekly notices of inspections and various formations, which eventually, as they were disregarded, came to have, you felt, a sort of pleading note in them. Sort of please, fellows, come on up to inspection this week.

  One of the staffers’ favorite headlines pasted to the wall was: YANKS GET ABBEY FOR GI CHAPEL

  It came from the first Thanksgiving in England. For the traditional

  American services, the friendly Britons gave up their most precious religious symbol, Westminster Abbey. It was a good story; it was worth a top head on page one. That meant thirty-point type, a size that simply doesn’t permit the word “Westminster” to be squeezed into one line. The resourceful Desk solved it with their headline describing the venerable abbey as about to become a GI chapel. It shocked a few chaplains, but most of them understood there was no disrespect involved, and there had been a neat job of head writing.