Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  During and since World War II, the United States alone has bestowed ten million medals and ribbons of honor on its soldiers, many of them for acts calling for as little courage as living a year in Paris.

  Bravery is as rare in war as it is in peace. It isn’t just a matter of facing danger from which you would prefer to run. If a man faces danger because the alternative to doing that is worse or because he doesn’t understand the danger, this may make him a good soldier but it is something other than bravery. Stupidity faces danger easier than intelligence. The average bright young man who is drafted hates the whole business because an army always tries to eliminate the individual differences in men. The theory is that a uniformity of action is necessary to achieve a common goal. That’s good for an army but terrible for an individual who likes himself the way he is.

  Some men, of course, like the order imposed on them. They like the freedom from making hard decisions that mindless submission to authority gives them.

  There is always more precision on the drill field back home than there is on the battlefield. Uniformity of action becomes less precise as an army approaches the front. At the front it usually disappears altogether. It is not always, or even usually, the best marchers who make the best fighters.

  Everyone talks as though there was nothing good about war, but there are some good things and it’s easy to see why so many people are attracted by it. If there were no good things about war, the chances are we would find a way not to have another.

  A nation at war feels a unity it senses at no other time. Even the people not fighting are bound together. There is a sense of common cause missing in peacetime. Accomplishments are greater, change is quicker . . . and if progress is motion, there is more of it in war-time. A nation at peace is busy gratifying itself, overeating, over-dressing, lying in the sun until it’s time to eat and drink again.

  If war brings out the worst in people as it has been assumed it does, it also brings out the very best. It’s the ultimate competition. Most of us live our lives at half-speed, using only as much of our ability as is absolutely necessary to make out. But at war if a man is actually fighting it, he uses all his brain and all his muscle. He explores depths of his emotions he didn’t know were down there and might never have occasion to use again in his lifetime. He lives at full speed, finding strength he didn’t know he had accomplishing things he didn’t know he could do.

  The best thing about war is hard to describe, is never talked about. Most of us get a warm sense of fellow feeling when we act in close and successful relationship with others, and maybe that happens more in war than any other time. There is a lonesomeness about life that no one who has experienced it likes to talk about, and acting together for a common cause, men often come closest to what they ought to be at their very best.

  It is paradoxical but true that in war when man is closest to death, he is also closest to complete fulfillment and farthest from loneliness. He is dependent, dependable, loved and loving.

  And there is another thing about war. If there is love in us, there is hate, too, and it’s apparent that hate springs from the same well as love and just as quickly. No one is proud of it but hate is not an unpleasant emotion and there is no time other than wartime when we are encouraged to indulge ourselves in an orgy of hate.

  The worst of war is hell but there isn’t much of the worst of it and not many soldiers experience even that much.

  A soldier at war doesn’t feel the need to answer any questions about it. He is exhausted by the battle.

  He is busy destroying and it does not occur to him that he will have to help rebuild the world he is pulling down.

  He often mistakes the exultation of victory for a taste of what things will be like for the rest of his life.

  And they are only like that for a very short time.

  Part III

  A Few Decades with Andy Rooney

  The home of “A Few Minutes”

  In 1978 “Three Minutes With Andy Rooney,” a short segment that featured Rooney opining on all things praiseworthy, annoying, and worthy of inspection, was aired at the end of 60 Minutes. Initially a summer stand-in for “Point/Counterpoint,” a debate segment between liberal writer Shana Alexander and conservative columnist James Kilpatrick, by the end of the season “Three Minutes” had become “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” and had assumed the primetime spot. The people had spoken. Andy Rooney’s no-nonsense approach to life hit a nerve. With “A Few Minutes” Rooney firmly established himself as a beloved contrarian, a man who liked to poke holes in common wisdom, remind his viewers of values worth upholding, moments worth relishing, and the rewards of skepticism. In its past thirty-one seasons, “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney” has won millions of fans. Broadcast from Rooney’s paper-strewn, lovingly cluttered walnut desk at CBS (a desk that he built), Rooney’s on-air time is a refreshingly clear-eyed look at the perils and joys of the world we live in.

  The Man Behind the Desk

  Introducing Andy Rooney

  To begin with, here are some clues to my character. It seems only fair that if you’re going to read what I write, I ought to tell you how I stand: —I prefer sitting but when I stand, I stand in size 8½ EEE shoes. There have been periods in my life when wide feet were my most distinguishing characteristic.

  —When it comes to politics, I don’t know whether I’m a Democrat

  or a Republican. When I was young I was under the mistaken impression that all Democrats were Catholic and all Republicans were Protestant. This turns out to be untrue, of course, and I’ve never decided which I am. Those of us who don’t have a party affiliation ought to be able to register under the heading “Confused.”

  —I like cold better than hot, rice better than potatoes, football better than baseball, Coke better than Pepsi. I’ve been to Moscow three times and don’t like that at all.

  —This morning the scale balanced at 203 pounds. I’m 5'9".My mother always called me “sturdy” and said I have big bones. A little fat is what I am.

  —I have an American Express card but often leave home without it and pay cash.

  —The following are among the famous people I have met: Richard Nixon, George McGovern, Arthur Godfrey, Frank Gifford, Barry Goldwater, Art Buchwald, Jimmy Stewart and Carol Burnett. I have never met Teddy Kennedy although I’ve seen a lot of pictures of him.

  —I have been arrested for speeding.

  —I speak French, but Frenchmen always pretend they don’t understand what I’m saying.

  —It is my opinion that prejudice saves us all a great deal of time. I have a great many well-founded prejudices, and I have no intention of giving up any of them except for very good reasons. I don’t like turnips and I don’t like liver. Call it prejudice if you wish, but I have no intention of ever trying either again just to make sure I don’t like them. I am sure.

  —I don’t like anything loud.

  —Fiction doesn’t interest me at all. I haven’t read a novel since Lorna Doone. I meant to read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea when it came out, but I didn’t. Fiction takes too long for the ideas contained in it. I’m not interested in being diverted from my own life.

  —Good ideas are overrated. It makes more difference how a writer handles an idea than what the idea was in the first place. The world is filled with people with good ideas and very short of people who can even rake a leaf. I’m tired of good ideas.

  —When I write, I use an Underwood #5 made in 1920. Someone gave me an electric typewriter, but there’s no use pretending you can use

  An Interview with Andy Rooney 95

  machinery that thinks faster than you do. An electric typewriter is ready to go before I have anything to say.

  —I know a lot about wood, ice cream, the English language and Harry

  Reasoner. In other areas I have some serious gaps.

  —Writers don’t often say anything that readers don’t already know,

  unless it’s a news story. A writer’s greate
st pleasure is revealing to people

  things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is

  the best a writer can do.

  —There’s nothing mystical or magic about being a writer. A writer is

  just a person who writes something. There are almost no people who are

  not dentists who can fix teeth, but there are a lot of people who aren’t

  professional writers who write very well. This is one of the reasons why

  being a writer is tougher than being a dentist.

  —I admire people who don’t care what anyone else thinks about

  what they do, but I’m not one of them. I care what people think and

  would not want you to know how much I hope you like what I write.

  An Interview with Andy Rooney

  “A nyone attracted to the rugged features of his handsome countenance might at first glance fail to observe the piercing intelligence of Andy Rooney’s steel-blue eyes.”

  That’s the way I’d like to have an article about me begin. In the past year I’ve been interviewed twenty times by reporters and none of them has started a piece that way. The articles have been friendly and many of them well done but no one who reads anything about himself is ever totally satisfied. Do they have to point out I’m grumpy? Must the reporter mention that my clothes are unpressed? Is it necessary to say that I’m overweight and getting gray?

  What follows are some guidelines for reporters who wish to interview me in the future. I’d like to have the report go more like this:

  A proud trio of Emmy award winners; (left) cameraman Walter Dombrow and (center) producer Bud Benjamin

  “Rooney, who wears his expensive but tasteful clothes with a casual grace that conceals his position as one of the style setters in the men’s fashion world, talked to this reporter in his hotel suite where he draped his taut, muscular frame over an easy chair.

  “Considered by critics to be the leading essayist in print and broadcasting, Andy was disarmingly diffident when this reporter compared his work with that of Mark Twain, Hemingway, Robert Benchley, E. B. White, Walter Lippmann and Art Buchwald.

  “‘Shucks,’ he said modestly as he dug his toe into the deep pile rug of the carpet in his penthouse suite, ‘I don’t know about that.’

  “Although it is not widely publicized,” this article about me would continue if I had my way, “Andy Rooney might well be known as a modern-day Chippendale, were his mastery of the cabinetmaker’s art not overshadowed by his genius with the English language.

  Sartorial Shortcomings 97

  “On the tennis court, Andy’s serve has often been compared to that of

  John McEnroe. He moves with a catlike quickness that belies his age. “‘Andy is wonderful to work with,’ says his wife, Marguerite. ‘He’s al

  ways good-natured and a joy to have around the house. I can’t recall an

  argument we’ve had in all the years of our marriage.’

  “Rooney’s four children, Ellen, Martha, Emily and Brian, are all perfect, too.

  “On the average day, Andy rises at 4:30 a.m. By 6:00 a.m., because of

  his unusual ability to read six hundred words a minute, he has finished

  two newspapers and Time magazine. His photographic memory enables

  him to store anything he has read for long periods of time and it is partly

  this ability that makes it easy for him to turn out three interesting, accurate, informative and perceptive essays each week.

  “Of his friend, Harry Reasoner says, ‘I only wish I could write as well

  as Andy does.’

  “During our interview, Rooney got several telephone calls. William

  Buckley called to ask his advice on a point of grammar. There was a call

  from someone identified only as ‘Ron’ asking for advice on the economy. A third call came from E. F. Hutton asking Andy how he thought

  the stock market would behave in the days ahead.”

  I’m going to clip this out of the newspaper now and carry it with me

  wherever I go. If a young reporter wishes to interview me, I’ll show it to

  him, just to give him some idea how I think his report should read.

  There’s no sense having reporters waste a lot of time getting the facts.

  Sartorial Shortcomings

  F rom time to time it is brought to my attention that I’m not the bestdressed man in the world. Someone wrote once that I looked as though I slept in Grand Central Station every night. I have four grown children who unfortunately aren’t afraid of me and they’ve never hesitated to point out my sartorial shortcomings, either. The least they could do is lie a little if they really love me.

  I’m relatively unaware of how I look in clothes. I usually look once in the mirror when I dress in the morning but that only shows me myself from the chest up.

  I don’t know where I go wrong. I buy pretty good clothes but one of us is usually the wrong shape.

  Maintaining clothes in good condition is as hard as keeping a house painted and in working order. For example, it’s inevitable that you’re going to get a spot on a necktie or the lapel of a coat once in a while. I keep all kinds of spot remover at home and in the office and I’ve never had any success with any of them. That spray can, with the powder in it, just plain doesn’t work for me. I’ve used it a dozen times on grease spots and the same thing always happens. The grease spot is gone and I’m left with a big, plainly visible splotch of white chalk imbedded in the fabric. Nothing takes that out, ever.

  Most brands of spot cleaner use carbon tetrachloride. I’ve tried to remove a thousand spots from a thousand neckties with carbon tet. All I get is a ring bigger and more obvious than the original spot.

  I’ve seen women remove spots successfully. They say you just have to keep rubbing in circles. I’ve rubbed spots in circles with carbon tet until I was blue in the face from the fumes and I still get nothing but a big ring and a smelly tie.

  In the morning I often take a pair of pants, a shirt or a coat into the back room where we have an iron set up. My intentions are good. I don’t want to burden my wife with my problems and I want to look neat. I don’t want to embarrass my friends or my family.

  I have yet to iron a pair of pants that end up with fewer than two creases down the front of each leg. I’d like to have one of those machines the dry cleaners have. They just lay a pair of pants on there any which way, they pull down that handle, there’s a big whoosh of steam and presto! the pants are perfect.

  Shirts? Who can iron a shirt? I’ve never ironed a shirt yet that didn’t look worse when I finished with it than it did when I started.

  Neckties are smaller but they’re at least as hard to iron as a shirt. You’d think they’d be easy but if you press down on a tie, you get the imprint of the lumpy lining on the front of the tie. As a result, many of my ties look like my pants.

  During the summer I often carry a tie in my pocket instead of wearing it. Many of them never recover during the winter.

  It’s a good thing socks don’t show much because if my kids think my pants and jackets look bad, they should see my socks. I’ve given up trying to put them on right side out because at least half the time I don’t even have a pair. I just look for two socks in the drawer that are somewhere near the same color. I haven’t had pairs of socks in years.

  The funny thing is that I have a clear idea in my mind what someone well dressed looks like. I know what I want to look like and sometimes I realize I’m unconsciously thinking that’s what I do look like. Obviously I’m dreaming.

  I had several friends in school who were always well dressed, and I can go around for days thinking I look more or less the way they looked. Marshall always looked just right. Then someone will casually tell me I look like an unmade bed and I’m brought back down to earth.

  The only thing for me to do is take the position that c
lothes don’t make the man.

  A World-Class Saver

  There is a pair of crutches leaning against the wall opposite the oil burner in our basement. I’m not sure who ever used them. They’ve been there as long as I can remember. I suppose one of the kids broke something once or maybe we bought them for my mother the year she broke her hip.

  No one ever used the crutches much, I know that. I was looking at the rubber tips last weekend and they’re almost new. I suppose I’ve kept them because, in the back of my mind, I know someone’s going

  At home in the country, in Lake George

  to break something again someday . . . me, maybe. They’re an unpleasant reminder of that possibility every time I see them, though, and I think I may throw them out. If anyone breaks a bone, we’ll just start fresh with a new pair. Crutches cost about twenty dollars. It would be worth coming up with that when we need them rather than having these crutches staring me in the face every time I go downstairs. On the other hand, maybe I’d better keep them just in case.

  It’s this kind of thinking that makes me realize I lack the executive’s decision-making ability. I hem and haw, never quite making up my mind whether to keep something or throw it out.

  For example, I finally got at going through about five big cardboard boxes of scripts I wrote for a radio show with Garry Moore and Durward Kirby. The show was on five days a week for ten minutes each day. I wrote it for five years, so you can imagine the stacks of paper involved. The scripts I have even include the commercials.

  For twenty years I’ve saved these scripts with the five boxes taking up valuable space.

  What am I saving them for? I thought to myself. In a hardheaded moment, I dragged a major plastic trash can down to the cellar from the garage and started dumping the scripts in it.

  I needed help carrying the can upstairs, and when I finally got it out in the driveway for the trash pickup, I started idly looking through some of them.