by Andy Rooney
I can understand why people don’t always put their names on their work. The workman is seldom completely satisfied with what he’s done. The man who built the brick wall in my friends’ house was proud enough to want his name there for the life of his wall but modest enough not to want it in a prominent place.
During World War II, I stayed in the home of a British aircraft worker in Bristol, England. The British aircraft engines had a reputation for being the best. When the man came home from work one night, we talked about what he was doing.
“Me and my buddies are making an engine,” he said.
And that’s what he meant. He and two other men were actually assembling from scratch an engine for a Spitfire fighter plane. They were intensely proud of their work and you can bet the RAF fighter pilot who sat in the cockpit with a Luftwaffe F-W 109 in the sights of his guns had confidence his airplane wasn’t going to let him down.
Each Rolls-Royce, the best automobile in the world, is still made by hand by just a few men, not on an assembly line. The work on that airplane, or on a Rolls-Royce, is a long way from the work on the U.S. planes that are reported to have been made with bogus parts. Fake parts might get past an assembly line worker. They wouldn’t get past one man making an engine.
Everything should be signed by the people who make it. We live in a house that was built about one hundred years ago. We have raised four children in it. I know every nook and cranny, every strength, every defect it has. I know the beams in the basement, the rafters in the attic. I know the crack between the foundation and where the cellar steps lead down into my workshop—but I don’t know who built the house. This is wrong.
Every builder of every house should be compelled to attach his name, in some permanent but inconspicuous way, to that house . . . for better or for worse.
What we need in our country is fewer mile-long assembly lines turning out instant junk and fewer “project” builders turning out ticky-tack houses by the hundreds. We need more builders of solid brick walls willing to put “T. Morin” on their work.
Loyalty
For years I kept my money in the same bank and filled my car at the same gas station. I liked the idea that I was loyal.
Over the years there’s been a big turnover in bank personnel, and it occurred to me that when I went there, no one in the bank knew I was a loyal customer but me. It was the same with the gas station. I flattered myself into thinking they appreciated my business. When they gave me my change and said, “Thank you, have a nice day,” I thought they were thankful and wanted me to have a nice day because I was such a good customer. Several years ago I realized I was kidding myself. The gas station had changed hands three times, and they didn’t have the vaguest idea that I’d been buying my gas there for seventeen years.
Lately I’ve been banking and buying gas at my own convenience. I buy gas at the station nearest me when I need it or I drive to one I know is a penny cheaper. I’ve changed banks twice recently because they opened a branch a block closer to my office. Give me a toaster or move in next door and you have my allegiance. Loyalty got me nowhere.
I suppose both gas stations and banks would object to being linked together, but they serve the same purpose in my life. When I run out of gas or money, I have to go to a place where I can get more. Gas stations used to compete for my business by offering free air, free water and a battery and oil check. Now you’re lucky if the attendant bothers to put the gas cap back on.
Banks used to care about my business. They knew me. I didn’t have to bring my birth certificate, a copy of my listing in Who’s Who, and four other pieces of positive identification to cash a check for twenty-five dollars. If I wrote a check for more money than I had, Mr. Gaffney used to call and sound real angry. But he did call. He knew where to find me. No one at the bank knows me anymore. I went in yesterday to pick up a new Master Charge card that was supposed to be there, but they wouldn’t give it to me because I hadn’t brought the letter with me that they sent saying the card was ready.
If the bank doesn’t know me by name, the feeling’s mutual, because I don’t know my bank’s name anymore, either. It usually changes before I’ve used up all the checks they’ve sent me with the old name on it. My bank seems to keep acquiring other banks—with my money, I suppose—and they throw the other bank a bone by putting some little part of its name in with their primary name.
My bank’s name was originally the Chemical Bank, plain and simple. They changed it to Chemical National Bank, then Chemical Bank and Trust Co., then they acquired the Corn Exchange Bank and my checks said the Chemical Corn Exchange Bank. I always liked that best, but it didn’t last. They bought another bank, dropped the “Corn” and called themselves Chemical Bank New York Trust Co. This was unwieldy, and I was pleased several years ago when they renamed the bank once again. The new name? The Chemical Bank.
There is a bank in New York called the Irving Trust Company, and I’ve always sort of hoped they’d buy my bank and call it Irving’s Chemical Bank.
It’s too bad everything is as big and impersonal as it is now. I’m sorry to have lost personal touch with the people running the establishments where I do business, but if they don’t care, I can’t afford to be sentimental. When I was a little boy, we patronized Evans Grocery Store. It had oiled wood floors, and Mr. Evans always gave me a free candy bar when I brought him the check for the month’s groceries. The supermarkets were just getting started, and eventually, of course, they ran almost all the little neighborhood grocery stores out of business. My mother kept buying things from Mr. Evans, even though the same loaf of bread was two cents cheaper at the new supermarket. She wanted to help him survive, but apparently the two cents wasn’t enough, because he didn’t make it for long. He never got to be Evans New York Chemical Corn Grocery Store.
On Home and Family
A Nest to Come Home to
E veryone should have a nest to come home to when the public part of the day is over. Having a little room with a comfortable chair to settle into is important. You should be surrounded by familiar things. You can talk or read or watch television or doze off but you’re in your basic place. You’re home and you don’t have to watch yourself.
I’m not sure the furniture stores and the room designers are in tune with what most Americans want. We’ve never had a designer design anything in our house. It’s all happened by accident. I like our house a lot better than I like those rooms I see in magazines that have been put together by designers. They look more like the rooms they have just outside the men’s room or the ladies’ room on the ballroom floor of an expensive hotel. There isn’t a decorator who ever lived who could surround me with the things I like to have around me in my living room.
Decorators go for fuzzy white rugs that show the dirt, glass-topped tables you can’t put your feet on and gilt-edged mirrors that only Napoleon wearing his uniform would look good in.
I like to have the windows covered so the neighbors can’t see in and I agree you shouldn’t just cover them with newspaper but it’s very easy to carry curtains too far. When strangers come into your living room and say right away how nice the curtains are, then you know you’ve gone too far with the curtains. Friends who come to your house once in a while should not be able to remember what the curtains look like.
It must be difficult to sell furniture. No one in a store would sell you a chair in which the springs were beginning to sag but most chairs aren’t very comfortable until that begins to happen. No one wants to pay a lot of money for a secondhand piece of furniture and yet furniture looks better when it has a well-worn look.
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My green leather chair is eighteen years old now and the rest of the family complains about what it looks like but I notice they take every chance they get to sit in it. I don’t take that chair when I come into the room because I’m the husband or the father. I sit in that chair because it’s my chair. It’s as much mine as my shoes. If they want one like it they ca
n have one but I like a chair I can call my own. Familiar things are a great comfort to us all.
When the Christmas catalogs begin to come in and there’s a noticeable increase in the amount of mail coming into the house, I usually make a decorating change of my own. I move another little table over by my chair so I have a table on either side of me. It’s a temporary thing for one time of year. When the Christmas cards start coming, I have a better way of separating the cards from the bills and the junk mail from the personal letters. If you keep the newspaper, the mail, a letter opener, a glass, scissors, three elastic bands, some paper clips, some loose change, the television guide, two books and a magazine next to you, one table next to your chair isn’t enough at Christmas.
When I sit down in my chair at night, it’s the one place in the world I have no complaint with. It’s just the way I like it. I’m wearing comfortable clothes, my feet are up and I’m surrounded by things that are there because I choose to have them there.
I was telling my wife how quickly and how well American soldiers make a nest for themselves, no matter what their circumstances are. They can be out in a field somewhere but first thing you know they’ve dug a foxhole and invented some conveniences for themselves out of empty coffee cans and cardboard containers. They’ve made that one little spot in the world their own. It’s true but I never should have told my wife.
“That’s what this place looks like,” she said, “a foxhole.”
RealReal Estate
When the real-estate people talk about space in houses, they put too much emphasis on the number of bedrooms and bathrooms and too little on how much stuff the kitchen counters will hold.
If we ever have to move out of our house it would be because we’ve run out of places in the kitchen to put all the pots, pans and electrical appliances we’ve bought or been given for Christmas. Things are approaching the crisis stage now on our kitchen counters. I don’t buy sliced bread, and it’s getting very difficult to clear enough space to operate with a bread knife.
In addition to running out of counter space, we’re running out of places underneath the counter to put pots, pans and a wide variety of culinary miscellany. When we had the kitchen redone five years ago, we made sure we had plenty of storage space for pots and pans under the counter, but that was five years ago. The pots have expanded to fit the space available to them and now we have more.
It’s the odd-sized, odd-shaped pots and pans that are most difficult. There are things we don’t use more than twice a year taking up valuable real estate under the kitchen counters but I don’t know what to do with them. Where do you keep the fluted cake pans, the cookie cutters, a pressure cooker, Pyrex dishes, big baking pans for the turkey, a fondue pot, the cast-iron popover pan and the muffin tins?
We need double the number of electrical outlets on the back wall of the counter.
Let me see if I can make a list of the major items on the counters without going upstairs to the kitchen to look. The kitchen counters now hold: a toaster-oven, a blender, a heavy-duty mixer, an electric can opener, one orange-juice squeezer, a Cuisinart, a radio, one small blackand-white TV.
Don’t tell me some of these items are repetitious because I know it, but if you’re given a Cuisinart you can’t throw it away even if you have a Mixmaster and a Waring blender.
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In addition to these electrical devices, there are, below the counter, a pancake grill, a waffle iron, an egg poacher that hasn’t poached an egg in twelve years, an electric fry pan, a deep fryer we never use and a small ice-cream freezer. Pushed to the back is an electric knife that I’ve only used twice although it was given to us by a relative who now has been dead for nine years.
It’s apparent we need either a great deal more counter space in the kitchen or we need someone to invent a compact combination radioTV-toaster-oven that would open cans, squeeze oranges, whip egg whites and mix cake batters.
I have my house, but my advice to anyone about to buy a new one is to ask some questions beyond how many bedrooms there are. Don’t think you’re smart because you’ve asked about the type of heating and the amount of insulation. Ask the real-estate salesperson some really hard questions. Ask, for instance, how much room is left on either side after you’ve put two cars in the two-car garage.
Have the real-estate salesman demonstrate how to put the vacuum cleaner away in a closet that’s already full of heavy winter coats and leaves for the dining-room table.
Ask the person selling you the house where you’re going to put the wheelbarrow and the snow tires and try to figure out where you’d hang the leaf rakes and the shovel.
Look at the new house carefully and estimate how far you’re going to have to carry the garbage can to get it to a place near the road where the garbagemen will take it . . . then figure out where the garbage can is going to go when it isn’t by the edge of the road. Measure the distance between the big outside garbage can and the little inside garbage can that you have to empty into it.
Measure everything and make sure you know where you’re going to be able to store the screens and the screen door when you replace them with the storm doors and the storm windows.
Home
O ne Saturday night we were sitting around our somewhat shopworn living room with some old friends when one of them started trying to remember how long we’d lived there.
“Since 1952,” I said. “We paid off the mortgage eight years ago.”
“If you don’t have a mortgage,” he said, “the house isn’t worth as much as if you did have one.”
Being in no way clever with money except when it comes to spending it, this irritated me.
“To whom is it not worth as much,” I asked him in a voice that was louder than necessary for him to hear what I was saying. “Not to me, and I’m the one who lives here. As a matter of fact, I like it about fifty percent more than I did when the bank owned part of it.”
“What did you pay for it?” he asked.
“We paid $29,500 in 1952.”
My friend nodded knowingly and thought a minute.
“I’ll bet you,” he said, “that you could get $85,000 for it today . . . you ought to ask $95,000.”
I don’t know why this is such a popular topic of conversation these days, but if any real-estate dealers are reading this, I’ll give them some money-saving advice. Don’t waste any stamps on me with your offers to buy. You can take me off your mailing list.
Our house is not an investment. It is not a hastily erected shelter in which to spend the night before we rise in the morning to forge on farther west to locate in another campsite at dusk. Our house is our home. We live there. It is an anchor. It is the place we go to when we don’t feel like going anyplace.
We do not plan to move.
The last census indicated that forty million Americans move every year. One out of every five packs up his things and goes to live somewhere else.
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Where is everyone moving to? Why are they moving there? Is it really better someplace else?
If people want a better house, why don’t they fix the one they have?
If the boss says they’re being transferred and have to move, why don’t they get another job? Jobs are easier to come by than a home. I can’t imagine giving up my home because my job was moving.
I have put up twenty-nine Christmas trees in the bay window of the living room, each a little too tall. There are scars on the ceiling to prove it.
Behind the curtain of the window nearest my wife’s desk, there is a vertical strip of wall four inches wide that has missed the last four coats of paint so that the little pencil marks with dates opposite them would not be obliterated. If we moved, someone would certainly paint that patch and how would we ever know again how tall the twins were when they were four?
My son Brian has finished college and is working and no longer lives at home, but his marbles are in the bottom drawer of his dresser if he ever wants them.
&n
bsp; There’s always been talk of moving. As many as ten times a year we talk about it. The talk was usually brought on by a leaky faucet, some peeling paint or a neighbor we didn’t like.
When you own a house you learn to live with its imperfections. You accommodate yourself to them and, like your own shortcomings, you find ways to ignore them.
Our house provides me with a simple pleasure every time I come home to it. I am welcomed by familiar things when I enter, and I’m warmed by some ambience that may merely be dust, but it is our dust and I like it. There are reverberations of the past everywhere, but it is not a sad place, because all the things left undone hold great hope for its future.
The talk of moving came up at dinner one night ten years ago. Brian was only half-listening, but at one point he looked up from his plate, gazed around the room and asked idly, “Why would we want to move away from home?”
When anyone asks me how much I think our house is worth, I just smile. They couldn’t buy what that house means to me for all the money in both local banks.
The house is not for sale.
Struck by the Christmas Lull
A strange lull sets in sometime during the afternoon of Christmas Day in our house.
The early-morning excitement is over, the tension is gone and dinner isn’t ready yet. One of our problems may be that we don’t have Christmas dinner until about six. We plan it for four but we have it at six.
The first evidence of any non-Christmas spirit usually comes about one o’clock. We’ve had a big, late breakfast that didn’t end until 9:30 or 10:00 and the dishes for that aren’t done until after we open our presents.
Washing the breakfast dishes runs into getting Christmas dinner. The first little flare-up comes when someone wanders into the kitchen and starts poking around looking for lunch. With dinner planned for four o’clock, there’s no lunch on the schedule. Margie’s busy trying to get the cranberry jelly out of the molds and she isn’t interested in serving lunch or having anyone get their own.To her, at this point, food means dirty dishes.
