Photos: Andy Rooney - For millions of Americans, Rooney was a welcome visitor into their homes on Sunday evenings, an old familiar face appearing for a few minutes at the tail end of one of the most highly rated programs in television history. Viewers of the award-winning TV newsmagazine who saw him as a friend, neighbor or relative knew what to expect from the man who offered his opinions on a broad array of topics.
An articulate Everyman. Unruffled yet quizzical. A crank. A complainer. The man of a thousand questions. Seated behind his desk in his small, cluttered office at CBS in New York, Rooney spoke into the camera as though the viewer at home had just dropped in for a brief visit to see what was on his mind that week. In , for example, he turned his attention to the French for failing to support the war in Iraq. Smith did not exist.
But it never stops there. Pretty soon he wants to be my best friend. I tend to be rude to people like that. As for autograph seekers, Rooney refused to scrawl his name when a fan stopped him. Rooney was the personification of the crusty newsroom veteran. He wore a suit and tie on camera, but you had the feeling that as soon as the camera lights were turned off he shed the coat, loosened the tie and rolled up his shirt sleeves. With his bulldog face, bushy eyebrows and somewhat whiny delivery, the stocky Rooney was irresistible fodder for parody.
In , CBS News suspended him without pay for three months in the wake of his remarks about blacks and gays attributed to him in the Advocate, a magazine that covers the gay community. The Feb. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times after his suspension, Rooney categorically denied making the statement attributed to him about blacks during his phone interview with the Advocate. But he did confirm that he wrote the letter to the magazine commenting on gays in response to criticisms of his views on homosexuality.
I am just infuriated by the notion that I am being called a racist. Anyone who knows me knows that is not true. In the end, CBS, faced with an overwhelmingly negative public response to his suspension, reinstated Rooney after only three weeks. He loved his life and he lived it on his own terms. We will miss him very much.
Rooney had announced on Oct. Rooney wrote for television since its birth, spending more than 60 years at CBS, 30 of them behind the camera as a writer and producer, first for entertainment and then news programming, before becoming a television personality - a role he said he was never comfortable in.
He preferred to be known as a writer and was the author of best-selling books and a national newspaper column, in addition to his "60 Minutes" essays. Veteran correspondent works into his 90s as a "60 Minutes" commentator. But it is his television role as the inquisitive and cranky commentator on "60 Minutes" that made him a cultural icon. For over 30 years, Rooney had the last word on the most watched television program in history.
Ratings for the broadcast rose steadily over its time period, peaking at a few minutes before the end of the hour, precisely when he delivered his essays - which could generate thousands of response letters. Each Sunday, Rooney delivered one of his "60 Minutes" essays from behind a desk that he, an expert woodworker, hewed himself. The topics ranged from the contents of that desk's drawer to whether God existed. He often weighed in on major news topics.
In an early "60 Minutes" essay that won him the third of his four Emmy Awards, his compromise to the grain embargo against the Soviet Union was to sell them cereal. Mainly, his essays struck a chord in viewers by pointing out life's unspoken truths or more often complaining about its subtle lies, earning him the "curmudgeon" status he wore like a uniform.
In typical themes, Rooney questioned labels on packages, products that didn't seem to work and why people didn't talk in elevators. Rooney asked thousands of questions in his essays over the years, none, however, began with "Did you ever?
Comedian Joe Piscopo used it in a impersonation of him on "Saturday Night Live" and, from then on, it was erroneously linked to Rooney.
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