Andy Rooney said he was lucky.
You should watch 60 Minutes. It is the premiere news magazine on television. Wait for Andy at the end of the broadcast. Whether he was talking about politics, or crime, or, as famously lampooned on Murphy Brown, ‘babbling about the air in potato chip bags,’ he humanized the news of the day, and made the news of the day a little less distant, a little less far away, a little less like something that was happening to someone else.
He took on big issues. While Ground Zero was still burning in the fall of 2011, he brought us some perspective of who we would find ourselves fighting even now, ten years later — while using a very precise scalpel to gently eviscerate George W. Bush. “He’s not Winston Churchill,” said Andy Rooney, of President Bush:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA6olYa-FBA
And Iraq:
Rooney was mostly a CBS guy; he left CBS briefly when they refused to air an essay he wrote about Vietnam in 1970. Rooney went on camera for the first time at PBS with the essay, andwon a Writers’ Guild award for the essay. Rooney returned to CBS three years later.
There were plenty of controversies, of course. At the height of the AIDS crisis, Rooney said Americans should not pay for ‘self-induced’ health problems, including lung cancer and AIDS; he was also accused of making racist remarks. CBS suspended him. Rooney talks about that here. I’m not sure he got it. I sure a lot of other people did, though.
Then there are the issues of broads in the workplace, a piece that is, fabulously, introduced by Leslie Stahl.
Andy didn’t get the Gaga, either.
My favorite Andy Rooney moment happened off-air. When CBS decided to rewarded people for years of service, the company figured they start counting ‘years of service’ from the time people were full-time, not freelancers, even though freelancers often worked full-time hours, just without benefits. This outraged Andy, as it robbed him of several crucial years of work at CBS, shaving years off his achieving a landmark anniversary.
Because of Andy’s nonstop bellowing, freelancers were recognized as actual…workers.
He also refused to write any essays during the Writers’ Guild strike a few years ago.
Andy couldn’t stand up straight in his last years. He walked almost completely bent over. That’s why he was always crouched over his desk. He shuffled. Don’t offer to help. He would have ripped your head off. He carried all his own papers, too. One never saw him without a jacket and tie. You’d felt ashamed to stand next him to in jeans when showing up for an evening shift.
The body may have been crumbling, but the devilish glint was still in his eyes. A few years ago, he and his wife were bitching about how long it would take to get a cab from the West Side of Manhattan so they could get to the US Open at Flushing Meadows Corona Park (home of BaQuack!) in Queens.
“Wait until that poor bastard realizes how far we’re going to make him go,” Andy said. He giggled manically, waggling those famous eyebrows.”
Then he said, “I’ll tip him nice. I’m not that much of a son of a bitch.”
Photo: Wikimedia
