Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  Football was the thing I knew most about although some of the courses were easy. I took a biology course that was almost identical to, but simpler than, one I’d passed in The Academy. This was a freshman’s dream come true.

  At The Academy the linemen had already begun to trap block, which was considered a fairly sophisticated maneuver at the time, but my career as a football player at Colgate was checkered. I’d been heavy enough to be good in high school, but now at 185 pounds going up against linemen weighing 220 and 230 was a different experience. The first time I tried to move Hans Guenther out of the hole I was supposed to make for the fullback, Hans grabbed me by the shoulder pads, threw me aside, and tackled the fullback behind the line of scrimmage. Colgate had had an all-American guard a few years before my class who weighed even less than I did. The press had picked up the Colgate publicist’s phrase “watch-charm guard” to describe him and it caught on. He was small but very fast and quick—not the same thing on the football field. The freshman coach, Razor Watkins, thought he had another watch-charm guard in me because I was small. He was not prepared for a player who was small and neither fast nor quick.

  No matter how I did on the field, I was determined not to be a jock and let football dominate my life. A lot of the young men on the team were scholarship players who had been recruited to play football. They seemed crude to me and I became more aware than I had been at The Academy that I’d led a sheltered high-school life. None of my friends there had smoked, we didn’t say “shit” or “fuck,” and we didn’t sleep with our girlfriends. Sex was only a rumor to us. I felt a sense of superiority that I recall now with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. I was right but it was self-righteous of me to think so.

  It was nonetheless true though that college often brings out the worst in perfectly good young men and women. First-rate colleges like Colgate that get three times as many applicants as they can accept choose what they think are the best prospects. Go to one of those colleges on a party weekend and you wonder what the college applicants who weren’t selected must be like if these young people attending the college are the cream of the crop.

  I don’t know what happens, but too often kids who have been bright and decent in high school turn into something else in college. I remember hearing of “Pig Night” at Yale where club residents were expected to bring a woman to the party who’d lay anybody. Colgate had fraternities, and there’s some collective evil spirit that prevails in many fraternities and clubs. They offer sanctuary for boors and boorishness.

  Colgate didn’t bring out the best in me. I liked several of the teachers and their courses but I felt superior to a lot of what I saw there because I was looking at superficial things about the college and the students. It had a lot to do with my getting involved with a pacifist movement there.

  Toward the end of my freshman year, I joined the Sigma Chi fraternity even though I felt the fraternity idea was foolish. Our house had been one of the fine old homes in town, and the fraternity had divided it up into a clutch of rabbit warrens that housed fifty of us in near-slum conditions. It was a good group of young men though, and it was an economically and socially practical way to live. The whole hocus-pocus of the fraternity mystique was foolish but dividing a campus up into groups of forty or fifty students and letting them work out their own food and housing is not a bad system.

  For many years now I’ve returned all the Sigma Chi material that comes my way from the national headquarters with a note DECEASED on the envelope but nothing discourages the national organization from trying to honor anyone like me who they think might give them money.

  When I got to college my marks improved dramatically, not through any genetic transformation but because I chose courses suited to a deformed intellect. This was one of the changes college life brought me. Another way I hoped to prove I wasn’t a jock was by deciding to take piano lessons between classes and football practice. The wife of one of the professors undertook, at $2 for each one-hour lesson, to teach me. During my first lesson, I recall thinking that I clearly had more potential as a football player than I had as a musician. Piano playing didn’t come easily to me. The teacher was quite a pretty woman and I was disappointed at myself, considering my motive for taking the lessons, for being thrilled when she put her hand over mine to move it over the keys. I found myself thinking more of the professor’s wife than of the piano.

  My third day of piano lessons turned out to be my last. I went directly from that lesson to football practice. It was a game-style scrimmage between the second team and the first team. During the second half of the scrimmage that day, I was playing opposite Bill Chernokowski, one of those gorilla-like athletes whose weight was mostly at or above the waist. He had short, relatively small legs and a huge torso with stomach to match. There are potbellied men who are surprisingly strong and athletic and “Cherno” was one of those. At 260 pounds he was the heaviest man on the squad.

  As things turned out, it didn’t matter where he carried most of his weight. When he stepped on the back of my right hand in the middle of the third quarter, that ended, for all time, any thought I might have had of being another Vladimir Horowitz.

  At our fiftieth class reunion I had to revise my long-held opinion of Bill Chernokowski when I learned that his daughter was an outstanding cellist and Bill had season tickets to the New York Philharmonic. I couldn’t have been more surprised, as my friend Charlie Slocum used to say, if I’d seen Albert Payson Terhune kick a collie.

  Football became less important to me as I realized I was never going to be an all-American player. My career as a pianist now over, I began to think more about writing. There were two professors who interested me.

  One was Porter Perrin, who was writing a book called Writer’s Guide and Index to English. He became the closest thing I had to a friend on the faculty. The other was a Quaker iconoclast, Kenneth Boulding, who taught economics for the university and pacifism for his own satisfaction at night in meetings with students at his home. I don’t know firsthand that he was brilliant; but it is an adjective that almost everyone used in referring to him.

  When the college opened after preseason football, I had classes with both men. Boulding stammered badly and even though you knew it shouldn’t have, it influenced the way you thought about him. During a class lecture, you were driven to pay careful attention because of the difficulty of following his broken speech. He was always surprising us, too. He’d be expounding some theory of economics that we barely understood when suddenly he’d drop in some mildly witty or unexpected remark. The class would erupt in raucous laughter, more from the sense of relief the class felt when Boulding got it out than by the humorous content of it.

  When Boulding posted a notice on the bulletin board about a meeting of all those opposed to our entry into the war, I took that second opportunity to separate myself from the other football players and started going to his meetings. For some reason opposing the war seemed like an intellectual stand to take. It still seemed that way to Vietnam protesters. It was almost like not watching television now. There’s a whole subculture in America of people who are proud of themselves for not watching television. They take every opportunity to tell anyone they can get to listen. I suffered something like that syndrome in opposing the war.

  Boulding was a good teacher. The best teachers are not the ones who know most about the subject. The best teachers are the ones who are most interested in something—anything, and not necessarily the subject they teach. Boulding was consumed with the idea of pacifism and I’ve often thought of him as a good example of how little it matters that a college teacher is professing theories that are counter to popular and acceptable ideas of economics, religion, race, or government. His students were constantly propagandized by him but they ended up sorting things out for themselves. Being exposed to a communist professor in the 1930s didn’t make communists of many students. Being exposed to the pacifist ideas of Kenneth Boulding didn’t do his students any harm although if the p
arents of many of my classmates had sat in on some of those evening sessions in Boulding’s home, they might have been reluctant to pay the next tuition bill to Colgate.

  Quakers, like Christian Scientists, are frequently such decent, gentle, and seemingly reasonable people that they are not often considered to be religious fanatics. But they are generally more zealous than other Christians—most of whom, God knows, are zealous enough. The further a religion is from mainstream, the more devoted its followers are likely to be to it, and Quakers are down a long little rivulet.

  Boulding may have been an economics genius, but he was definitely a religious nut. I was caught up with some of his ideas before I knew that and became convinced of the truth of one of his statements I’ve since seen attributed to both Plato and Benjamin Franklin: “Any peace is better than any war.” I liked that a lot.

  It was Boulding’s contention that the conflict in Europe was none of the United States’ business and even if it had been, war was an immoral way to pursue interests. The argument made sense to me, which gives you some idea how sensible I was when I was twenty.

  On September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland to begin World War II, I was in Hamilton where I’d arrived three weeks before classes began for football practice under the legendary head coach, Andy Kerr. I was so consumed with the game that one of the most momentous events in all history, Hitler’s blitzkrieg, barely got my attention. I’d buy the New York Times several days a week but I didn’t read much of it.

  NAZIS TAKE BREST-LITOVSK

  TURKS MASS ON SYRIAN BORDER

  I couldn’t have told you what country Brest-Litovsk was in nor did I have any idea what disagreement the Turks had with the Syrians.

  It still was ten years before Senator Joseph McCarthy aroused the moderate and liberal population to protest his demagogic effort to expose and make jobless any American who ever had a conciliatory thought about socialism or communism. Before the war the isolationist Congressman Martin Dies Jr. of Texas had already formed an Un-American Activities Committee that was McCarthy’s forerunner. Isolationism was a popular movement, and outside the House it was organized as a group with the populist name “America First.”

  I participated in a debating society contest and the issue of the argument was “Resolved, that the American Press should be under the control of a Federal Press Commission.” I’m pleased to be able to report that I was on the right side of that argument although I think the sides were chosen by a flip of a coin. We won the debate, but the fact that it could have been proposed as a subject for debate says something about the times—and we didn’t have any easy time winning. The proposition would not be seriously considered today.

  I didn’t want to go to Europe to fight and die for what seemed to me to be someone else’s cause. I hear the faint, far-away-and-long-ago echo of my own voice every time a congressman proclaims that “we shouldn’t sacrifice the life of a single American boy” when the question comes up about our moving in to save a few hundred thousand poor souls being slaughtered in some foreign land. I decided I must be a Conscientious Objector. It was always capitalized because it was a formally recognized category of draft resisters.

  This was when “Doc” Armstrong ended up forcing my hand, although he couldn’t have known it since I’d never spoken with him. I had no idea that “Doc,” the friendly, homespun tradesman with the goldrimmed spectacles, was the head of the draft board. If “Doc” was around today, he could step into a role as the druggist in any pharmaceutical company’s television commercial. His was the first drugstore I’d ever seen that didn’t have a soda fountain, and that should have made me realize that “Doc” was a no-nonsense guy. There was something else I didn’t know about “Doc” that I learned later. He was commander of the Madison County chapter of the American Legion and thought that every red-blooded American boy should serve his country—as he had in World War I—and right now.

  He was not impressed by my attempt to delay enlisting by registering in Hamilton instead of Albany. It seemed to me as though I’d been hit by a truck the day I got the draft notice, sometime in May, a few weeks before the end of my junior year, stating I was to report for duty in the United States Army.

  I had long, sophomoric, philosophical discussions with my friends about resisting the draft. A young man I’d been in school with at The Albany Academy, Allen Winslow, had already refused to serve and was the first person to go to prison for that offense during World War II. I admired him.

  Unwilling as I was, over the few months I had between the time I was drafted and the day I had to report, I wisely concluded that I probably wasn’t smart enough to be a Conscientious Objector even though I

  As a young Stars and Stripes reporter in England

  agreed with those who were. All the Conscientious Objectors I knew, like Boulding, seemed bright, deep, introspective, and a little strange. I liked those traits in a person even though I didn’t have them myself.

  One of my dominating characteristics has always been that I’m not strange. I’m average in so many ways that it eliminates any chance I ever had of being considered a brooding, introspective intellectual.

  When Boulding died in 1993, several people wrote me saying I’d been unfair in some of the things I’d said about him. Our opinions of people tend to alter slowly over the years and, if we don’t update our relationship by talking to them, become untrue. I have opinions of a great many people that must be unfair and untrue, but I’ve repeated them so often they’re set in my mind and serve my purpose when I’m casting characters for stories that illustrate a point. My opinion of Kenneth Boulding settled and changed moderately over the years without my having come on any new facts to justify the change. It may not be accurate. On the other hand, of course, it may be accurate.

  After months of anguishing over it I realized that, while I was an objector, I could not honestly claim to be a conscientious one. On July 7, 1941, I reported for duty.

  Meeting Marge

  I’d been writing to Marge Howard, a girl I’d first met in Mrs. Munson’s dancing class when we were thirteen. We had gone together, off and on, all through high school and college. I’d frequently made the drive from Colgate to Bryn Mawr, outside Philadelphia, where she was in college. She still points out that she was a year ahead of me in college although a year behind in age. It was a seven-hour drive each way and that took a lot of time out of the weekend.

  One Friday afternoon I’d left after my one o’clock class and was driving a little too fast somewhere between New York and Philadelphia. In order to get to Bryn Mawr by 6 p.m. I was saving time by changing my clothes as I drove. This was before highways were “super” and at a time when all state policemen rode Indian motorcycles. A lot of the young men who showed up at Bryn Mawr on weekends were from nearby Princeton and, in order to fit in and conceal my Colgate affiliation, I had brought gray flannel slacks and a sports jacket and I wore Spaulding dirty white bucks (from buckskin) with red rubber soles. They were part of the Ivy League uniform of the era. It was said of a well-dressed Princeton student, “He’s really ‘shoe.’”

  With my knees raised, I was holding the steering wheel on a straight course while I pulled my old corduroy pants down around my ankles with my two hands in anticipation of changing them for the gray flannels. I knew when I saw the flashing red light on the trooper’s motorcycle behind me that I was in big trouble. The corduroys were in a never-never land, half on and half off, and when the cop came up to the side of my car and looked in the window he must have decided I was not only a speeder but a sex pervert. He ordered me to follow him to the house of a justice of the peace, with whom I assumed he had a business arrangement, and I paid a cash fine of $12, which was all but a few dollars of the money I had.

  M argie graduated in the spring of 1941, a short time before I got my draft notice, and she was using her Bryn Mawr degree in art history to teach French, a language about which she knew very little, in a girls’ school in Albany. In February or M
arch we decided, long distance and me on a pay phone, to get married. I forget why we thought it was a good idea. Most of our friends were delaying marriage until after the war.

  There was a major family argument over who would perform the ceremony. I was already set in disbelief and Margie, although brought up Catholic, had stopped going to church when she was sixteen. Margie’s mother had always served fish on Fridays and was a serious mass-going Catholic. She was adamant that her daughter be married “in the church.”

  My mother’s strongest religious belief was that she was not Catholic. She had always gone to great pains to point out that, even with the name Rooney, we were Presbyterians. My father and mother both grew up in the small town of Ballston Spa, New York, and there had been a moderate influx of Irish immigrants to the area in the late 1800s. My mother’s parents were English and my father’s had come from Scotland although their Irishness was not far behind them. When my father and mother were growing up, most of the Irish in Ballston were doing what first-generation immigrants have traditionally done in America— working at menial jobs and doing the housework for the establishment. It was a desire to distance herself from them that produced this Irish denial in my mother. It made me understand how benign prejudice can be at its inception.

  After a lot of letter writing and telephoning during which we tried to come to some amicable agreement, Margie’s father, an eminently sensi

  Marge Rooney, on board the Staten Island Ferry

  ble orthopedist who was in no way religious, wrote me a letter that was not unfriendly but was brief and to the point. He was obviously tired of the dinner-table conversation he was getting on the subject from Margie’s mother.

  “I don’t give a damn who performs the ceremony,” he wrote, “but if you’re going to do it, I wish you’d do it and get it over with.” I wish I had the letter. I don’t know what happens to life-altering pieces of paper like that. I suppose I threw it away.