![]() Even in petty things in my life, I tend to strike back. “One of my major shortcomings - I’m vindictive. “Your piece made me mad,” Rooney told Moore two years later. The AP switchboard was flooded by some 7,000 phone calls and countless postcards were sent to the AP mail room. On Rooney’s next “60 Minutes” appearance, he invited those who disagreed to make their opinions known. In 1996, AP television writer Frazier Moore wrote a column suggesting it was time for Rooney to retire. The Associated Press learned the danger of getting on Rooney’s cranky side. Gay rights groups were mad, during the AIDS epidemic, when Rooney mentioned homosexual unions in saying “many of the ills which kill us are self-induced.” Indians protested when Rooney suggested Native Americans who made money from casinos weren’t doing enough to help their own people. CBS suspended him for three months in 1990 for making racist remarks in an interview, which he denied. His words sometimes landed Rooney in hot water. Rooney Goes to Washington,” whose lighthearted but serious look at government won him a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. He returned to CBS three years later as a writer and producer of specials. He went on TV for the first time, reading the essay on PBS and winning a Writers Guild of America award for it. Rooney left CBS in 1970 when it refused to air his angry essay about the Vietnam War. He became such a part of the culture that comic Joe Piscopo satirized Rooney’s squeaky voice with the refrain, “Did you ever wonder …” For many years, “60 Minutes” improbably was the most popular program on television and a dose of Rooney was what people came to expect for a knowing smile on the night before they had to go back to work. Nobody knows that I’m a writer and producer. ![]() “But nobody knows I can do it or ever did it. He wrote “An Essay on Doors” in 1964, and continued with contemplations on bridges, chairs and women. With Rooney as the writer, they collaborated on several news specials, including an Emmy-winning report on misrepresentations of black people in movies and history books. Rooney wrote for CBS stars such as Arthur Godfrey and Garry Moore during the 1950s and early 1960s, before settling into a partnership with newsman Harry Reasoner. His last wish from fans: If you see him in a restaurant, just let him eat his dinner. True to his occasional crotchety nature, though, he complained about being famous or bothered by fans. ![]() He said he probably hadn’t said anything on “60 Minutes” that most of his viewers didn’t already know or hadn’t thought. He told viewers that Calvin Coolidge’s 1925 swearing-in was the first to be broadcast on radio, adding, “That may have been the most interesting thing Coolidge ever did.”įor his final essay, Rooney said that he’d live a life luckier than most. In early 2009, as he was about to turn 90, Rooney looked ahead to President Barack Obama’s upcoming inauguration with a look at past inaugurations. ![]() “We’ll pick a week next year, and we’ll all agree not to go anywhere for seven days.” “Let’s make a statement to the airlines just to get their attention,” he said. More than three decades later, he was railing about how unpleasant air travel had become. In fact, he said, the Fourth of July is “one of the safest weekends of the year to be going someplace.” He complained about people who keep track of how many people die in car accidents on holiday weekends. Looking for something new to punctuate its weekly broadcast, “60 Minutes” aired its first Rooney commentary on July 2, 1978. “And they say, `Hey, yeah!’ And they like that.” “I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn’t realize they thought,” Rooney once said. He won one of his three Emmy Awards for a piece on whether there was a real Mrs. But he was just as likely to discuss the old clothes in his closet, why air travel had become unpleasant and why banks needed to have important sounding names. Rooney talked on “60 Minutes” about what was in the news, and his opinions occasionally got him in trouble. Rooney had gone to the hospital for an undisclosed surgery, but major complications developed and he never recovered. But his life after the end of “A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney” was short: He died Friday night, according to CBS, only a month after delivering his 1,097th and final televised commentary.
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