Ever wonder how I got to be Andy Looney and you didn’t? I’ve been wondering myself, so I figured you were, too. Posted on 11/05/2011 4:30:31 PM PDT by BluesDuke
If it seemed at times as though Andy Rooney was old enough to have been—God help us!—the Father of His Country, well, you can be forgiven for that. He seemed at least to have been old enough to have been the father of CBS, if William S. Paley hadn’t already done the job. For a decent amount of time, he may have been America’s favourite grouse. For an indecent amount of time, he may have seemed just like a grouse with an air-tight contract. For once upon a time, he might have been the model for a certain one among the Seven Dwarfs.
He could be funny. He could be infuriating. He could be boring. Sometimes it seemed as though he were being paid too handsomely to be all three. And the lines between them got as thick as his unkempt eyebrows as often as not.
Well, I liked the old bird anyway. Maybe it’s because I envied him. If I shot my big mouth privately the way he did on television, I wouldn’t get suspended with pay (as happened to him a time or two), I’d be run out of town and maybe out of three states and counting. And they wouldn’t bother putting me on a rail.
Mostly, I think I liked him because he wasn’t the only man on this planet to complain about his drawerful of useless keys or his mailbox crammed with spam—--oops! in those days we called it junk mail--—but he got paid like a football player to kvetch about it. Which reminds me—--the old bird thought football was a sacred cow and baseball was the dung. Well, I thought he was full of it.
Maybe it was because Rooney was his age. I mean, he became 60 Minutes‘ resident grouse at an age when most people were still thinking about retiring and, as did he, had already lived their professional lifetime. Once upon a time he was a real reporter with a real reporting resume that only began with Stars and Stripes. Only who the hell needed that? When 60 Minutes reached out and touched him, Rooney found his true calling. Anyone can be a real reporter. It takes genius to flap your yap about nothing much on television every Sunday night.
Love or loathe him, love or loathe his views, you had to admire the fact that the old bird was an old bird and didn’t quit until he entered his tenth decade. That gives aid and comfort to guys like me who are knocking on the door of 56 and know the jig would otherwise be up in nine years.
When Mr. Rooney got drydocked over his 2003 remarks that women had no business being sideline reporters for NCAA or NFL game coverage, I couldn’t resist zapping him with the following little satire. Mr. Rooney died Friday night of complications from surgery at 92. I’d like to reprint that satire now in his memory.
Ever wonder how I got to be Andy Looney and you didn’t? I’ve been wondering myself, so I figured you were, too.
After all, I can’t write my way out of The Cat in the Hat. I’m as funny now as a fat farm breaking off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar. And I’ve run out of most of my best material ever since they told me I’d better knock it off about the junk mail or I’d be sued by the country’s junkmen.
Well, now I’m in hot water again. It’s funnier than when my soap gets into hot water, but I’m not allowed to make any more shrinking soap jokes, either. The soap opera people don’t like grumpy old men getting smart about the product that made those people necessary.
Uh-oh. I just got this e-mail. Yes, I get e-mail. Even a fossil like me had to surrender to the computer age. Which proves that CBS are hypocrites when it comes to gun control. Not to mention reckless, if they’re trusting me with a computer. Computers are dangerous enough without being in my hands.
Anyway, here’s what the e-mail says: “Dear Mr. Looney: ‘The product that made those people necessary?’ Please stop stealing my material. My paralegal can beat up your lawyer. Sincerely, Yogi Berra.”
OK, Yogi, you win this one. I’ll quit stealing your material if you quit making those insufferable AFLAC commercials. I know Joe Garagiola needs the job, but the duck suit fits him worse than the leisure suit fit me.
I’ll never understand why I suffer halfwit former baseball players gladly. But maybe it’s because they remind me how much I love football. Football is perfect for a simpleton like me. Four quarters. Fifty guys on the field trying to kill each other like suicide bombers. All over something that isn’t even shaped like a real ball. What’s better than that?
And their soap never melts slowly. Come to think of it, their soap never melts. Within a foot of those guys, it disintegrates. Maybe I’ve been too hard on soap all these years, after all. But maybe I’m saying that now because a lot of people want to wash my mouth out with it.
You see, I’ve done it again. I’ve shot my big mouth off and got a lot of people mad at me. I don’t like when people get mad at me. It makes me feel like I’m standing in for a really worthy target—--like the people who still pay me six figures to rant my head off about the hotel keys I keep collecting that don’t fit anyplace sensible anymore.
I just don’t get it this time. All I said was that women don’t belong on the football field as sideline reporters. It’s not like I said they don’t belong in the media, for heaven’s sake. But, ok, I should have said men don’t belong on the football field as sideline reporters, either. The reason nobody belongs on the football field as a sideline reporter is that there’s nothing to report in the first place.
Now, if I’d said that in the first place, I’d have saved my credibility. If there’s any reporter who knows when there’s nothing to report, it’s me. And I report nothing better than anybody else in this business.
But cut me a little slack. I’m old enough to be the father of half the countries on earth. The old gray brain just ain’t what it used to be, ever since I came back from covering the War of 1812. And as long as someone needs a reporter who’s as good as I am at reporting nothing, I’ll have a nice paying job.
His story about going to war as a pacifist and realizing that he was wrong was interesting.
Even then, you could blame a college professor for leading a student astray.
Why is that?
You gotta have somethin'
Or you'll be like NBC
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
Or you're CBS to me
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
Ya can't even flee from ABC
"I hate it. I mean, I'm gonna die," Rooney told Morley Safer, when asked how he liked old age in an interview that accompanied his final 60 Minutes broadcast, "and that doesn't appeal to me at all." He would have gotten a good piece out of his own passing; it's a shame we won't get to see it.Come to think of it, it would have been interesting to hear Grumpy on his own death . . .
commie icon.
That's on of the few reasons I occasionally wish I was older than I am, but then, I'd probably be dead.
The funniest thing I remember about him was on a couple of interviews he was asked about General Patton and both times he flew into a rage because he hated him so much.
It was called old-time radio.Take heart: Just about all the old-time radio you can handle listening to!That's on of the few reasons I occasionally wish I was older than I am, but then, I'd probably be dead.
And the best part: now you (as I) can listen to it not as clanking nostalgia but as living, breathing art.
You can also read my regular Examiner.com column on old-time radio . . .
8:}
Ever wonder why so many people in the MSM are committed leftists? 8:}Wouldn't that be something along the line of wondering why so many skies are blue?
Having been raised around grumpy old curmudgeons, there is something very American about older guys who speak their mind whether they are right or not.There sure is. We usually call them at least one of our grandfathers and a few of our uncles. And sometimes we call them politicians.
He wrote a book “Pieces of My Mind” that had one of the funniest essays I ever read about a morning where he set out to accomplish many things, and got thwarted, distracted, etc. and never got anything done.
I wish I still had that book.
He was describing a day where he made a “Things to do list” and the first item was to split some firewood. He got his axe, but the blade felt dull so he decided to sharpen it. However, his sharpening wheel had a wobble, so he needed to disassemble it, dropped a special screw behind his workbench, went to the hardware store to get another screw .... (it went on and on with one simple thing leadding to a thousand more things to do). Very funny the way he wrote it.
Nasty old liberal bites the dust...
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