Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  The heat of summer is as silent as snow but it’s an oppressive silence. There is no pleasurable relief from heat comparable to the great feeling of pulling up the extra blanket on a cold night. Air conditioning is a modern marvel but it is loud, heartless and mechanical, with no charm. I don’t like it but I don’t know how we ever lived without it.

  Wind is nature’s most unpredictable sound. You never know for sure what it’s doing, where it’s coming from, or where it’s going when it leaves. It’s going somewhere but while it blows, it seems to stand still. The trees in front of my house are miraculously strong standing up to the wrath of a gale. The trunks creak, the branches crack, but the big maple has stood through hundreds of storms since it was a slip of a tree whipping in the wind fifty years ago. The tree will, in all probability, survive many more years.

  My perfect day would be to awaken to a cool and sunny day with a sun that shone in the kitchen window while I ate breakfast. I’d take my own shower under circumstances that improve on nature’s showers by allowing me to control the force and temperature of the spray with the twist of a dial.

  By the time I sat down at my typewriter, which is not a typewriter at all any longer, my ideal day would be cloudy with a threat of rain that discouraged my considering even grocery store travel and encouraged this kind of overwriting.

  Where Are All the Plumbers? 153

  The Search for Quality

  Where Are All the Plumbers?

  For the past few days I’ve spent most of the time in my woodworking shop making a complicated little oak stool for Emily.

  I like the whole process of writing but when I get back there in my workshop, I notice that I’m quite contented. Yesterday I worked until 2:30 before I remembered I hadn’t eaten lunch. It even has occurred to me that I could give up writing and spend the rest of my life making pieces of furniture that amuse me. Who knows? I might get good at it.

  It’s a mystery to me why more people don’t derive their satisfactions from working with their hands. Somehow, a hundred or more years ago something strange happened in this country. Americans began to assume that all the people who did the good, hard work with their hands were not as smart as those who worked exclusively with their brains. The carpenters, the plumbers, the mechanics, the painters, the electricians and the farmers were put in a social category of their own below the one the bankers, the insurance salesmen, the doctors and the lawyers were in. The jobs that required people to work with their hands were generally lower-paying jobs and the people who took them had less education.

  Another strange thing has happened in recent years. It’s almost as though the working people who really know how to do something other than make money are striking back at the white-collar society. In all but the top executive jobs, the blue-collar workers are making as much as or more than the teachers, the accountants and the airline clerks.

  The apprentice carpenters are making more than the young people starting out as bank clerks. Master craftsmen in any line are making $60,000 a year and many are making double that. In most large cities, automobile mechanics charge $45 an hour. A mechanic in Los Angeles or New York, working in the service department of an authorized car dealer, can make $60,000 a year. A sanitation worker in Chicago can

  Hard at work in his woodworking shop in

  Rensselaerville, New York

  make $ 35,000 a year. All this has happened, in part at least, because the fathers who were plumbers made enough money to send their children to college so they wouldn’t have to be plumbers.

  In England, a child’s future is determined at an early age when he or she is assigned either to a school that features a classical education or one that emphasizes learning a trade. Even though we never have had the same kind of class system in America that they have in England, our lines are drawn, too. The people who work with their hands as well as their brains still aren’t apt to belong to the local country club. The mechanic at the car dealer’s may make more than the car salesman, but the salesman belongs to the club and the mechanic doesn’t.

  It’s hard to account for why we’re so short of people who do things well with their hands. You can only conclude that it’s because of some

  On Conservation 155

  mixed-up sense of values we have that makes us think it is more prestigious to sell houses as a real-estate person than it is to build them as a carpenter.

  To further confuse the matter, when anyone who works mostly with his brain, as I do, does something with his hands, as when I make a piece of furniture, friends are envious and effusive with praise. So, how come the people who do it professionally, and infinitely better than I, aren’t in the country club?

  If I’ve lost you in going the long way around to make my point, my point is that considering how satisfying it is to work with your hands and considering how remunerative those jobs have become, it is curious that more young people coming out of school aren’t learning a trade instead of becoming salesmen.

  On Conservation

  My grandfather was right and wrong about a lot of things, but he was never undecided. When I was twelve, he told me we were using up all the good things on earth so fast that we’d run out of them.

  I’ve worried about that. I guess we all have, and I wonder whether it’s true or not. The real question is, will we run out of the things we need to survive before we find substitutes for them? Of course, we’re going to run out of oil. Of course, we’re going to run out of coal. And it seems very likely that there will be no substantial forests left in another hundred years.

  Argue with me. Say I’m wrong. Give me statistics proving there’s more oil left in the ground than we’ve already used. Tell me there’s coal enough in the United States to last seventy-five or a hundred years. Make me read the advertisements saying they’re planting more trees than they’re cutting.

  I’ve read all those arguments and I’ll concede I may be wrong in suggesting impending doom, but if doom is not exactly impending, it’s somewhere down the line of years if we don’t find replacements for the basic materials we’re taking from the earth. What about five hundred years from now if one hundred doesn’t worry you? What about a thousand years from now? Will there be an oak tree left two feet in diameter? How much will it cost in a hundred years to buy an oak plank eight feet long, two inches thick and a foot wide? My guess is it will cost the equivalent in today’s money of a thousand dollars. A piece of oak like that will be treasured as diamonds are treasured today because of its rarity.

  I don’t think there is a more difficult question we’re faced with than that of preservation. A large number of Americans feel we should use everything we have because things will work out. They are not necessarily selfish. They just don’t believe you can worry about the future much past your own grandchildren’s foreseeable life expectancy. They feel someone will find the answer. Pump the oil, mine the coal, cut the trees and take from the earth anything you can find there. There may not be more where that came from, but we’ll find something else, somewhere else, that will be a good substitute.

  The preservationists, on the other hand, would set aside a lot of everything. They’d save the forests and reduce our dependency on coal and oil in order to conserve them as though no satisfactory substitutes would ever be found.

  It’s too bad the argument between these groups is as bitter as it is, because neither wants to do, intentionally, what is wrong. The preservationists think business interests who want to use what they can find are greedy and short-sighted. Businessmen think the preservationists are, in their own way, short-sighted. (One of the strange things that has happened to our language is that people like the ones who run the oil companies are called “conservatives,” although they do not approve of conserving at all.)

  All this comes to me now because I have just returned from Hawaii and seen what havoc unrestricted use can bring to an area. To my grandfather, Honolulu would probably look like the end of the world if he could see it now.

 
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  We have just about used up the island of Oahu. Now we’re starting on Maui. Is it right or wrong? Do the hotels crowded along the beach not give great pleasure to large numbers of us? Would it be better to preserve the beauty of Hawaii by limiting the number of people allowed to be there? Would it be better if we saved the forests, the oil and the coal in the world and did without the things they provide? If there is middle ground, where is it?

  The answer will have to come from someone smarter than I am. I want to save oil and drive a big car fast, I want to cut smoke pollution but burn coal to save oil, and I want to pursue my woodworking hobby without cutting down any trees.

  Design

  Last summer I made a chair. The wood was maple and cherry, and I invented what kind of a chair it was as I went along. When I finished, the chair looked great, but it has one shortcoming. It tips over backwards when anyone sits in it.

  My design was better than my engineering.

  Most of us are so engrossed in whatever it is we do with our days that we fail to consider what anyone else is doing with theirs. I attended a meeting in Washington, D.C., a short time ago and everyone there but me was a designer of things. I never knew there were so many. I came away realizing that designing what a product will look like is a substantial part of any business. There are thousands of people who spend their lives doing it.

  Everything we use has been designed, well or poorly . . . your car, your toaster, your watch. When Alexander Graham Bell finished inventing the telephone, all he had was wires. Someone had to decide on the shape of the instrument it would be housed in, and they came up with that great old standup telephone. That was industrial design. There is usually trouble between engineers and designers. Most designers are creative artists who tend to ignore the practical aspects of a product. Most engineers, on the other hand, don’t usually care much what a product looks like as long as it works.

  The only time the consumer wins is when design and function blend together in one harmonious unit that looks great and works perfectly. We know it doesn’t happen often.

  A lot of artists who can’t make a living selling their paintings or anything else that is commonly called art often turn to commerce. Sometimes they are apologetic about having to make a living, but they ought not be. If they are bad artists that’s one thing, but if they are competent or even talented artists they ought to take a lot of satisfaction from being able to provide the rest of us, who don’t have their talent, with some visual niceties. Making the practical, everyday world good-looking is not a job to be embarrassed about.

  It may even be that industrial design and commercial art are more important than art for art’s sake. Art always appeals to me most when it has had some restrictions placed on it. I like art that solves a problem or says something a new way. Uninhibited, free-form, far-out art never seems very artistic to me. Artists who can do anything in the whole world they want to do don’t usually do anything. Even Michelangelo was at his best when he had a ceiling to paint.

  The danger industrial designers face is that they’ll be turned into salesmen. The first rule of industrial design should be that the product must look like what it is, not like something else. If something looks like what it is and works, it’s beautiful and no amount of dolling it up will help it. This accounts for why bridges are so attractive to us. The best bridges are built from plans that come from some basic engineering principle that hasn’t been altered by a salesman who thinks he could get more people to cross it by making it a different shape. I always liked the Shredded Wheat box for the same reason.

  The best-designed packages are those whose first priority is to contain the product. The ones we are all suspicious of are the packages that are too big and too fancy for what they were built to contain. We are

  Quality? 159

  tired of false cardboard bottoms and boxes twice as big as they need to be to hold something.

  The original green six-ounce Coca-Cola bottle was one of the great designs of all time. It was perfect in almost every way and has, naturally, been all but abandoned. The salesmen took over the bottle from the designers, and now it’s too big or not a bottle at all.

  I hope our industrial designers can maintain their artistic integrity, even though they have turned to commerce, because what worries me about all this is the same thing that worries me about that chair I made. Too often we’re making things that look better than they are.

  Quality?

  I t is unceasingly sickening to see someone make a bad product and run a good one out of business. It happens all the time, and we look around to see whose fault it is. I have a sneaking feeling we aren’t looking hard enough. It’s our fault, all of us.

  If it isn’t our fault—the fault of the American people—whose fault is it? Who is it that makes so many bad television shows so popular? Why were Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post driven out of business in their original forms while our magazine stands are filled with the worst kind of junk? Why are so many good newspapers having a tough time, when the trash “newspapers” in the supermarkets are prospering? No one is forcing any of us to buy them.

  Around the office I work in, they changed the paper towels in the men’s room several months ago. The new ones are nowhere near as good as the brand they had for years, and it takes three to do what one of the old ones would do. Somebody in the company decided it would look good if they bought cheaper paper towels. It is just incredible that smart people decide to save money in such petty ways.

  I had a friend whose father owned a drugstore in a small town in South Carolina. It was beautifully kept and well run. My friend’s father was an experienced druggist who knew the whole town’s medical history. During the 1950s, one of those big chain drugstores moved in selling umbrellas, plastic beach balls, tote bags and dirty books, and that was the end of the good, honest, little drugstore.

  We are fond of repeating familiar old sayings like “It’s quality not quantity that matters,” but we don’t buy as though we believe that very often. We take the jumbo size advertised at 20 percent off—no matter what the quality is. I’m glad I’m not in the business of making anything, because it must be heartbreaking for the individual making something the best way he knows how to see a competitor come in and get rich making the same thing with cheap materials and shoddy workmanship.

  America’s great contribution to mankind has been the invention of mass production. We showed the world how to make things quickly, inexpensively and in such great numbers that even people who didn’t have a lot of money could afford them. Automobiles were our outstanding example for a long time. We made cars that weren’t Rolls-Royces but they were good cars, and just about everyone could scrape together the money to buy one.

  Somewhere, somehow, we went wrong. One by one, the good carmakers were driven out of business by another company making a cheaper one. I could have cried when Packard went out of business, but there were thirty other automobile makers that went the same way, until all that was left was General Motors, American Motors, Chrysler and Ford. And in a few years we may not have all of them.

  We found a way to mass-assemble homes after World War II. We started slapping them up with cinder block and plywood, and it seemed good because a lot of people who never could afford a home before were able to buy them.

  They didn’t need carpenters who were master craftsmen to build those homes, and young people working on them never really got to know how to do anything but hammer a nail.

  We have a lot to be proud of, but there is such a proliferation of inferior products on the market now that it seems as though we have to find a way to go in another direction. The term “Made by hand” is still the

  Signed by Hand 161

  classiest stamp you can put on a product and we need more of them. We need things made by people who care more about the quality of what they’re making than the money they’re going to get selling it.

  It’s our own fault and no amount of good govern
ment, bad government, more government or less government is going to turn us around. The only way we’re going to get started in the right direction again is to stop buying junk.

  Signed by Hand

  The other night I was sitting looking at a brick wall in the living room of some friends. It has become popular to tear the plaster off old brick walls of houses in downtown areas of big cities, and leave the mellow, irregular shape of old red brick exposed. It adds warmth and charm to a room.

  The house was something like 125 years old and the wall must have gone up with the house. Many of the bricks weren’t perfectly oblong, being handmade, and you could see that the bricklayer had a problem getting the whole thing plumb and square.

  It was a great brick wall though, and the people who owned the house had derived a great deal of pleasure from it over the years. There were pictures hung on it, a mirror, pieces of brass and some cherished old family china plates. They loved it.

  Who built the wall? I wondered. Who spent months of his life putting up that wall, trying to make a perfect wall out of bricks that were not perfect? Who did this laborer’s work of art? I asked my friends if they knew.

  They beckoned me to come to a remote corner of the wall over by the door and near the baseboard. There, scratched in the ancient mortar that still held the bricks together, was the name “T. Morin.”

  Maybe signed work is the answer to getting better workmanship again. Everything that anyone makes should have his or her name on it

  A contemplative Mr. Rooney, armed with a pen, ready to strike

  for praise or blame and reference. Work is frequently so anonymously done that the workman has no reason to identify with it and be proud of it. If everyone is going to know who made it, the person making it will be more careful.