by Andy Rooney
It barely does justice to the sight of it to say that my father keeps a messy garage. The wooden shelves he built are loaded with cans of paint that have turned solid, several C-rations he brought home from World War II, dead tennis balls, a pair of hickory skis with bear trap bindings, and the rubber rain boots I wore in sixth grade. I’m sure there’s a Brooks Brothers tie he tucked on the shelf after cleaning out his car in 1972. He has Ball jars filled with odd nuts and bolts, bottles of glue, and wooden tennis rackets. It’s a mixture of useful junk, memories, and things he just can’t stand to throw away.
He does not fuss about his looks. He buys good clothes but is permanently rumpled. You could put him in an Armani suit right off the rack and he would look as if he had slept in it. He is not inclined to ornamentation in his person, or in his writing. He is fond of quoting Thoreau that “if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.” He writes in simple declarative sentences that bear no excess. His clothes are wrinkled but his sentences are not.
As a writer, and as a man, he thinks he can create his own world. He doesn’t care much for reading, except the New York Times. He likes to say, “I’m a writer, not a reader.” He does not read fiction and I suspect he has read only a few books cover to cover since he was in college, and maybe not even then. His primary contribution to culture in the family was bringing home a 45 rpm copy of Del Shannon’s “Hats Off to Larry.” He says, “I am not interested in being diverted from my own thoughts.” He doesn’t like listening to music or going to the Broadway theater, although he has had season tickets to the New York Giants most of his xviii Introduction by Brian Rooney
adult life. His genius as a writer is not knowing much about what anyone else says or thinks. It’s knowing exactly what he thinks.
Like good writing, he also knows good furniture and food and has worked to make his own, with varying success. He has a collection of expensive tools and piles of beautiful wood. He makes furniture, but if he makes a four-legged table, one leg is likely to be a tad short. He is impatient with details so when he makes a mistake he doesn’t start over, he patches with glue, putty, and shims and keeps going. His pleasure is more in having the idea and doing the work than having the finished piece.
He is an excellent cook and rarely uses a recipe. His popovers may be the best anywhere in America: tall and hollow, crisp on the outside, buttery on the inside. He can grill a steak to the perfect pink, make Beef Stroganoff and curried shrimp. He believes there are few things that cannot be made better with salt, garlic, and butter. He makes his own ice cream because that’s what you did growing up during the Depression, and it’s always fun to lick the paddles when it’s done. He makes peppermint ice cream for Christmas.
He is absentminded. One night, back when $ 100 was serious money and he didn’t have much, he paid a taxi driver with a hundred dollar bill, thinking it was a single. Making chicken soup with the pressure cooker, he forgot about it until the top blew, spraying greasy broth all over the kitchen walls. He still refers to it as “The Great Chicken Soup Disaster.” One year he made wine and corked it in soda bottles. That winter we would wake up in the middle of the night to muffled explosions in the basement.
My father resists authority. He doesn’t like bosses or people in uniform. Sometimes in New York, just for fun, he’d hail a police car and when it stopped he would say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were a taxi.” Several times he has been arrested while standing up to cops who overstepped their authority, only to be kicked loose by the desk sergeant.
He has lived by a series of rules he set for himself and people around him. He says, “There are standards in this world.” His rules are a mixture of low-brow philosophy and simple maxims for an orderly life that have both literal and figurative meaning. When we were kids he’d in
Introduction by Brian Rooney xix
struct us: “The last one in at night turn out the light over the garage.” Anyone who didn’t would hear about it in the morning. Another rule was, “You meet the train, you don’t wait for it.” As a teenager I would deliver him to the rail station, and he would climb the steps and reach the platform just as the doors opened. He thought less of the guys who had stood there waiting, wasting their time. He laid down the rule that, “The keys to the car belong in the ignition.” He didn’t want to fumble around looking for the keys to four cars casually dropped somewhere in the kitchen by one of six drivers. That ended one summer night in 1969 when the Thunderbird was stolen out of the driveway. When the cops who returned the car asked how the thieves had gotten hold of the keys, my father said, “They were in the ignition, where they belong.”
My father likes to say “the same things keep happening to the same people.” This is his idea of fate as determined by personality. He was always impressed by the B17 pilots who brought the plane back to base all shot up when everyone else on board was ready to give up and die. His theory was that whatever thing in that guy that had gotten him into Yale and made him a pilot would also drive him to success in later life. “The same things keep happening to the same people.” As a little boy I found this disturbing, particularly when I was cast as “third elf ” in the Christmas play.
He can be a terror in a restaurant. If the food is not good, he says so to the waiter, the maitre’d, or anyone in the line of fire. The rule at work here: “If you want the attention of the chef, you have to start by being mean to the busboy.” My favorite of all was his rule for civic involvement. We lived in a small town with a volunteer fire department. When the fire horn blew, no matter the hour, my father would leave the dinner table, or pull everyone out of bed in their pajamas, pack us all into the Ford Country Squire wagon, and peel out of the driveway to speed toward the glow on the horizon. He said, “When your neighbor’s house is on fire, you have an obligation to go and watch it burn.”
But the rule above all rules was this: “If all the truth were known about everything, the world would be a better place.” He thinks governments should not have secrets and that there is no opinion or information too xx Introduction by Brian Rooney
dangerous or hurtful that it cannot be told. Good ideas and good people would rise in a world in which all the truth were known. In his personal life, he believes in blunt honesty, which he will deliver anywhere from the breakfast table to the boss’s office to the whole country. Just about every one of my parents’ best friends went through a period when they were so mad they refused to speak to him.
His gruffness hides sentimentality. He clings to life and the people he loves like that old stuff in the garage. He would not likely weep at a wedding, but I know that over the years he has woken up in the middle of the night thinking about Obie Slingerland, his smiling high school quarterback, the best athlete anyone ever saw, who was killed flying a fighter in the Pacific. He still wakes up thinking about Obie. And when my mother died, he curled up on the bed like a child, crying her name. He loves life and wishes it would never end.
If your parents live long enough, you get to know them more as people than parents. I have come to know my father’s failings, and boy, has he got some. Sometimes he carried his principles to the extreme, and he has not always lived by his own rules. But also I appreciate even more that he has stood for something all his life when so many people have not, and that while he became rich and famous, it could just as easily have gone the other way and he would not have done anything differently. I learned that a writer lives by his words.
Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit
Part I
The Beginnings of a Writing Life
Drafted
People who have lived well and successfully are more apt to dismiss luck as a factor in their lives than those who have not. It’s clearly true that over a lifetime the same things keep happening to the same people, good and bad, so it can’t be luck. The process by which each of us acquires a reputation isn’t independent of our character. It almost always depends more on the dec
isions we make than on chance occurrences.
The trouble with this smug thesis is that anyone crossing a street can be hit by a truck and the accident alters the person’s life no matter how wise he or she was in making choices, so we can’t claim luck never enters in. Maybe my life wouldn’t have been much different if “Doc” Armstrong hadn’t owned the pharmacy and been head of the draft board in the pleasant college town of Hamilton, New York.
It was sometime in May and there were still a few weeks of classes left of my junior year at Colgate University. My life was never the same again.
Most of my classmates had registered for the draft in their hometowns. Thinking the draft board in a college town would be sympathetic to the idea of letting students finish college before serving, I had chosen to register in Hamilton instead of in my hometown, Albany.
I had come to Colgate fresh out of The Albany Academy, a private school. My friends at public school thought The Academy was elitist, which I thought was wrong at the time. Now I think they were right but that there’s a case to be made for the kind of elitism that existed there. In some part, at least, it was excellence. The Academy was an exceptionally fine secondary school that graduated a high percentage of people who succeeded in making good lives for themselves. Everyone in the senior class, known at The Academy as the Sixth Form, went on to college. The other boys and girls in Albany thought of us as rich kids because the tuition was $400 a year. Some few classmates were from rich families and no one let them forget it. We kidded Walter Stephens about being brought to school every day in a chauffeur-driven Pierce Arrow and our remarks to him were not very good-natured. In a world where everyone strives to make money, it’s strange that a family with a breadwinner who achieves that goal is stigmatized and charged with the epithet “Rich!”
My father’s $ 8,000 a year was considered good money during the Great Depression. When I was eight or nine, we moved out of a respectable middle-class house in the residential heart of Albany to a much nicer one with chestnut woodwork, a fireplace, and downstairs playroom, still in the city but further out. In addition to that home in Albany, we owned a cottage on Lake George, seventy miles north. There we had a Fay-Bowen, a classic old wooden boat, and I had my own outboard attached to a sturdy rowboat. My sister, Nancy, had a canoe. She wanted a fur cape for Christmas when she was seventeen but she didn’t get that.
Dad traveled through the South for the Albany Felt Company as a salesman and he was worldly wise but my mother ran things. Part of her expertise was making Dad think he was boss. She was a great mother to have and I’ve often wondered how she was able to get so much satisfaction from doing for us what so many mothers today do without satisfaction. She liked to play bridge but I don’t think she ever read a book. Being a mother was her full-time occupation.
Life at The Academy was very good. We used the school almost like a country club, often meeting there on Saturday morning to use the facilities or plan our day if we didn’t have a team game scheduled. The Academy was not a military school, but it was founded in 1812 and during the Civil War it had formed a student battalion. The tradition was continued and once a week for about an hour and a half we put on funny old Civil War–style formal uniforms and marched in practice for Albany parades and our own competitive Guidon Drill. It was my first brush with military life. Although it was years before the thought occurred to me that I’d ever serve in the U.S. Army, I learned to detest everything about anything military at an early age. One day when we were to parade on the football field, I refused to march because I claimed it would damage the carefully kept field.
In the student battalion, everyone’s aim was to become an officer in his Sixth Form year. The choices were made by two military aides who came to the school just once a week and a committee from the regular faculty. Shortly before the choices were to be made as to who the officers would be, Colonel Dormer, the school’s military adviser who was with the New York State National Guard, lined up the Fifth Formers in the battalion and said that anyone who did not want to be considered for a position as one of the officers in his senior year should step forward.
It put me in a terrible spot. Everyone wanted to be an officer. I wanted to be one but my negative attitude toward the battalion was so well known to everyone that the colonel was, in a way, challenging me to put up or shut up. I had no choice but to step forward as the only person in the school announcing that he did not want to be considered for the honor of being an officer in the battalion.
The colonel thanked me for being honest and dismissed us. It was lucky for me that several teachers on the faculty disliked the battalion as much as I did. When the announcement of their choice for officers was made three days later, my name was on the list. Because I was captain of the football team, president of the Beck Literary Society, and “one of the guys,” it would have been difficult for them to leave me off the list because it would have called for an explanation to the younger kids in the school. And then some of the faculty members like Herbert Hahn were my friends. They knew, even though I had stepped forward in that bravado gesture, that I desperately wanted to be chosen. (Mr. Hahn otherwise distinguished himself in my eyes by stating in class one day in about 1936, “Hitler will get nowhere in Germany.”)
The only problem for me at The Academy was that my marks were poor. That was a constant problem. My mother always signed my report cards and hid them from my father when he returned from a trip because she knew Dad would be angry about them. He had successfully made his way from the tiny Ballston Spa High School to Williams College and he couldn’t understand my bad grades. Although I was puzzled over them, I never gave in to the idea that I was stupid even though there was some evidence of that. There were things I did well and it was easy for me to think about those and ignore failing marks in Latin, geometry, and French. It was further depressing evidence of how much we’re like ourselves all day long, all our years. I still see traces of the way I performed in The Academy at age sixteen in things I do today. We’re trapped with what we have and with what we have not. No amount of resolve changes our character. I do a lot of woodworking as a hobby and, considering how different the craft is from writing, it’s interesting—and sometimes discouraging—for me to note, in introspective moments, how close my strengths and weaknesses in making a chest of drawers are to the strengths and weaknesses in my writing. I feel the same helplessness with my shortcomings on paper and in my shop as I do when it occurs to me that I’m overweight, not primarily because I eat too much but that I eat too much primarily because of some genetic shortcoming I got from my father and share with my sister.
Football was one of the things I liked best at The Academy. We had a good bunch of fellows on the team and a coach known as “Country” Morris who was just right. He knew the game and he was a decent man who expected decency from all of us. He had been a football star at the University of Maryland and he looked just the way a coach should look on the football field with his leather-elbowed jacket and his baseball cap pulled down over his eyebrows and cocked at a jaunty angle.
I was five feet nine inches, weighed 175 pounds, and played guard on offense and tackle on defense. Because of the attitude other kids in town had toward us at The Academy, it was particularly satisfying to beat one of the public high schools or a parochial school, and we did that quite often during the four years I played. My friend Bob Baker was a good football player but his family fell on hard times and he had to leave The Academy in the Fourth Form and go to Albany High and then play against us.
I was in or near tears for three days after the high-school game my senior year. We were undefeated during the season and heavy favorites to beat the high school. The high-school game ended in a scoreless tie and it was as if we had lost fifty to nothing. It seemed so important. Bob Baker was exultant and I suppose it took away some of the pain of his having had to leave The Academy.
In college, I soon realized I had conflicting interests. I was interested in writing, football, and philosophy
. I thought I wanted to be a writer but didn’t know where to start. What is called “English” in college is generally disappointing to anyone interested in learning how to write because, while I enjoyed having to read Byron, the English courses I was taking didn’t have anything to do with learning how to put words down on paper in an interesting way. The courses I was getting were in English reading, not English writing. I didn’t know at the time that you can’t teach someone how to write. And I was discouraged to find grammar and English usage so much more complex than I’d previously thought it then to be.
Looking back at some of the things I wrote for Porter Perrin’s “creative writing” classes, it’s difficult to know why he thought I was worth encouraging. A good teacher hands out more encouragement than pupils deserve as a matter of teaching technique. You hear it from the teacher on the tennis court next to you. “Nice shot!” he says to the pupil who finally gets one over the net. Mr. Perrin did that with me and at least it gave me enough confidence, false though it may have been, to keep going.
Philosophy was all new to me. I had not known there were ideas like the ones we argued over in class. The great philosophers seemed to be maddeningly fair and indecisive, always too willing to consider another explanation. I had not known there was such a thing as pure thought for thought’s sake only, independent of any practical result of having had it. I was fascinated by the application of philosophy to religion and became more convinced than ever that the mysteries of life, death, and the universe were insoluble and that God was as much a question as an answer.