Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  Black dots and then white parachutes appeared in the wake of the falling forward section of the plane. From the slowly twisting tail section, where Dick Castillo fought, there came nothing except, just as it dropped into the undercast and was lost to the others’ view, one last spurt of whitish tracer fire that arced up into the sky, and then there was no more.

  It was always that last burst of fire that streaked across the minds of the Liberator gunners in their huts those dull evenings. Every now and then word came from the Red Cross that another of the Rugged Buggy crew had turned up as a prisoner of war in Germany. The gunners kept waiting for word from Dick Castillo.

  Combat is hard to catch in words. You say, maybe, twentymillimeter shells smashed the turret, ripped through the fuselage. But no phrase will tell the empty five seconds in the guts of every man aboard as they waited and even felt to know whether that had been THE attack. Or you say, Fire began to glow within the engine nacelle and eat slowly back into the wing, and no words you own can measure the limitless courage it takes for men in that plane to watch flame consume the very thing that bears them aloft, yet struggle not just to live but to strike back.

  You write down what they did and tell how things were. But that isn’t all of combat. Combat is shells and fire and no oxygen, and it is also, maybe mostly, what happens in an airman’s guts and his mind. The splitsecond things you can tell. They happen and are dealt with by reflex, and there is no element of mind in them. But sometimes, after the splitsecond things have happened, there follow long minutes and hours that airmen call the time “the men get separated from the boys.” Those are the minutes and hours of eternity in which fires smother under extinguisher foam or roar on to explode fuel tanks and bombs, in which shattered tail surfaces stick by shreds to get you home or flutter off and start the crazy, spinning plunge to earth. Such times are of the mind and the viscera, and speak an infinite horror; you can tell little of them.

  Part II

  Mr. Rooney Goes to Work

  Early days in the CBS television studios

  After the Second World War, Andy Rooney returned to Albany, New York, to embark on a freelance writing career. In 1949, after finishing Conquerors’ Peace, a book on postwar Europe, Rooney joined CBS to write for the radio and TV personality Arthur Godfrey on his shows Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and Arthur Godfrey Time. In 1956 he left Arthur Godfrey, and by 1959, he had started to write for The Garry Moore Show—a popular CBS comedy program. In 1962 Rooney began collaborating with CBS newsman Harry Reasoner to write and produce a series of popular hour-long specials narrated by Reasoner on everything from bridges and chairs to women and the English language. By the 1970s Rooney was writing and producing a series of trenchant primetime 60 Minutes segments on war, New York City, Washington, dining, and working in America. In his signature forthright style, Rooney reported the pieces from the ground up, crisscrossing America to take its collective pulse, all the while opining, conjecturing, cracking wry jokes, and sharing his refreshingly honest wisdom.

  Chairs

  T here is so much that is unpleasant and dull about living that we ought to take every opportunity presented to us to enjoy the enjoyable things of life. None of us can afford to become immune to the sensation of small pleasures or uninterested in small interests. A chair, for instance, can be a small and constant joy, and taking pleasure from one a sensation available to almost all of us all the time.

  It is relatively easy to say who invented the light bulb but impossible to say who built the first chair. They took one out of King Tut’s tomb when they opened it in 1922 and King Tut died fourteen hundred years before Christ was born and that certainly wasn’t the first chair, either. So they’ve been around a long time. If there was a first man, he probably sat in the first chair.

  Chairs have always been something more than a place for us to bend in the middle and put our posteriors on other legs in order to take the weight off our own. They have been a symbol of power and authority, probably because before the sixteenth century only the very rich owned real chairs. The others sat on the floor at their feet in most countries.

  A throne is the ultimate place to sit down and there are still something like twenty-five countries in the world that have thrones, and leaders who actually sit on them.

  The Peacock Throne of Persia is one of the most elaborate, but I don’t know what happened to that. It belonged to the King of Persia, but Persia is called Iran now and, of course, they don’t have a king. The leaders they have now usually sit on the floor. I suppose this is their way of reacting against the idiocy of a throne but I hope they haven’t discarded theirs. It was crusted with rubies and diamonds and was supposed to be worth $100 million twenty years ago. In today’s market I should think it would bring $500 million, although I don’t know who it would bring it from.

  I’ve seen pictures of it but, personally, I wouldn’t give them $ 50 million for it, and if the average American housewife got hold of it, she’d probably put a slipcover over it.

  I didn’t mean to get off on thrones but some kings and queens have more than one. Queen Elizabeth has one in every Commonwealth country, presumably in the event she wants to sit down if she visits one of them. She has five in London alone and several more at palaces around England. I’d hate to have to reglue a throne.

  If the United States had a king, I suppose there’d be a throne in the White House. Too bad there isn’t, in a way. It could be more of a tourist attraction than the Washington Monument.

  Theoretically the royal chair is never sat in by anyone but a nation’s ruler, but it’s hard to believe that a few of the cleaning ladies and some of the kids around the castle don’t test it out once in a while. I can imagine the guards in a state prison fooling around in the electric chair, too. “Hey, Joe. Look at me. Throw the switch!”

  The closest thing we ever had to a throne was that big rocking chair John Kennedy intimidated people with. A visiting dignitary could be disarmed by its folksy charm and overwhelmed by its size and mobility.

  There’s nothing else like chairs that we have in such great numbers. We know how many cars there are in this country and how many television sets, but we don’t have the vaguest idea how many chairs there are. I’ll bet if everyone sat down in one, there’d still be fifty empty chairs left over for each one of us.

  Over the past fifty years the most-used piece of furniture in the house has been the kitchen chair. Like anything that gains wide acceptance, it turns out to be useful for a lot of things it wasn’t built to do. The kitchen chair is for sitting on, for throwing clothes over, for hanging jackets on, for putting a foot on when you’re lacing a shoe and as an allpurpose stepladder for changing light bulbs or for getting down infrequently used dishes from high and remote parts of kitchen cabinets. It has usually been painted many times, hurriedly.

  If the kitchen chair isn’t the most sat on, the one the American working man comes home to every evening must be. (The American working woman doesn’t have a chair of her own.) It’s the one in which he slumps for endless hours watching football games on television. It’s the one in which he is portrayed in cartoons about himself and it’s usually the most comfortable chair in the house. It’s a chair you sit in, not on.

  It isn’t so much that the American male takes this throne as his prerogative. It’s that women don’t usually like a chair that mushy. It’s a comfortable chair, though, and for all its gross, overfed appearance, I’m not knocking it. It serves as a bed when it’s too early to go to bed. It’s a place where you can take a nap before turning in for a night’s sleep.

  In big cities you see a lot of overstuffed chairs being thrown away outside apartment houses. I always think of the old Eskimo women they put out on an ice floe to die.

  The kitchen chair and the overstuffed living-room chair are the most sat on, and there are always a few chairs in every home that no one ever sits on. Everyone in the household understands about it. There are no rules. It is just not a chair you sit on. I
t may be in the hall by the front door, used mostly for piling books on after school. Or it may be silk brocade with a gold fringe, in the back bedroom. It may be antique and uncomfortable or imperfectly glued together and therefore too fragile for the wear-and-tear that goes with being sat on regularly.

  Sometimes there is no reason that anyone can give why a chair isn’t sat on. It’s like the suit or dress in the closet that is perfectly good but never worn. The unsat-upon chair in a home really isn’t much good for anything except handing down from one generation to the next.

  In hotels they often put two chairs not to be sat in on either side of the mirror across from the elevator on every floor.

  There aren’t as many dining-room chairs as there used to be because there aren’t as many dining rooms. Now people eat in the kitchen or they have picnics in front of the television set in the living room. It’s too bad, because there’s something civilized and charming about having a special place for eating. It’s a disappearing luxury, though. These days everything in a house has to be multi-purpose, folding, retractable or convertible.

  Dining-room chairs on thick rugs were always a problem. They made it difficult or impossible for a polite man to slide a chair under a woman. As soon as any of her weight fell on the chair, the legs sank into the pile and stopped sliding. If she was still eight inches from where she wanted to be, she had to put her hands under the seat and hump it toward the table while the man made some futile gestures toward helping from behind her. It took a lot of the grace out of the gesture.

  The other trouble with a good set of dining-room chairs was that at Christmas or any other special occasion when you wanted them most, there weren’t enough of them. This meant bringing a chair or two in from the kitchen or the living room and ruining the effect of a matched set.

  If dining-room chairs are the most gracious, folding chairs are the least. I suppose someone will collect those basic folding, wood chairs they kept in church basements and sell them as antiques someday soon, but they’re ugly and uncomfortable. Maybe they were designed to keep people awake at town meetings.

  The Morris chair was invented by an English poet named William Morris. He’s better known for his chair than his poetry. A man takes immortality from anywhere he can get it, but it seems a sad fate for a poet to be remembered for a chair. I make furniture myself and I hate to think of any table I’ve made outlasting my writing, but I suppose it could happen.

  Very few chairs survive the age in which they were designed. The Windsor chair is one of a handful of classics that have. The Hitchcock is another. If the time comes when we want to place a time capsule to show people on another planet in another eon what we sat on, we should put a Windsor chair in to represent us. You have to choose something better than average as typical.

  The rocking chair probably comes closer than any other article of furniture to delineating past generations from present ones. People sat in them and contemplated their lives and the lives of people they could see passing by from where they sat. People don’t contemplate each other much from chairs anymore. When anyone passes by now, he’s in a car going too fast for anyone to identify him. No one is sitting on the front porch watching from a rocker anyway.

  Rockers were good furniture. They were comfortable and gave the user an air of ease and contentment. They give the person sitting in one the impression he’s getting somewhere without adding any of the headaches that come with progress.

  From time to time furniture makers say there’s a revived interest in rocking chairs, but I doubt this. For one thing, the front porch has probably been closed in to make the living room bigger and anyway people don’t want anything as mobile or folksy as a rocker in a living room filled with electronic gear.

  Comfort in a chair is often in direct ratio to the relationship between the height of the feet and the height of the head. People are always trying to get their feet up. Very likely there is an instinct for self-preservation here because the closer anyone’s feet are to being on a level with the head, the less work the heart has to do to get the blood pumped around.

  During the years between World War I and World War II, everyone’s dream of a vacation was a boat trip somewhere on the Mauretania, the Leviathan or one of the Queens to Europe. In their dreams, the man and the woman were stretched out in the bright sunshine on deck chairs in mid-Atlantic. Not many people go by boat anywhere anymore, though, and the deck or steamer chairs were redesigned and moved to the backyard. The wood in those deck chairs has been replaced by tubular aluminum and the canvas by plastic straps. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on the deck of the Mauretania in a stiff breeze.

  At some time in the last hundred years, we reached the point where more people were working sitting down than on their feet. This could be a milestone unturned by social historians. We have more and more white-collar people and executives sitting in chairs telling people what to do and fewer and fewer people on their feet actually doing anything.

  The sitting executives found that they weren’t satisfied not moving at all, so they invented a chair for executives that swivels, rolls forward, backward or sideways and tilts back when the executive, who used to have his feet on the ground, wants to lean back and put them on his mahogany desk.

  In many offices the chairs provided for men and for women are symbols that irritate progressive women. The chairs often represent clear distinctions in the relative power of the sexes there. The executive male has his bottom on a cushion, his elbows on armrests. At the desk outside his office, the secretary, invariably a woman, sits erect in a typing chair about as comfortable as an English saddle.

  It’s a strange thing and probably says a lot about our rush through life that the word “modern” has an old-fashioned connotation to it when you’re talking about design. I think of Art Deco as modern. It must be because what we call “modern” is just a brand-new design about to become obsolete. Someone is always coming up with what is known as a modern chair. It looks old and silly in a few years but is still referred to as modern.

  There are modern chairs that have not become obsolete because they’re so good. Some of them are forty years old but they’re still called modern. Charles Eames designed that plastic bucket seat on tubular legs that will not go out of style. Mies van der Rohe designed the Barcelona chair that you have in the outer lobby of your office if you’re a rich company. That’s going to last like the Windsor and the Boston rockers because it’s comfortable and simply attractive.

  Considering how much time we spend sitting, it’s strange our chairs don’t fit us better. No size 6 woman would think of wearing a size 14 dress but a size 48 man who weighs 250 pounds is expected to sit in the same size chair a 98-pound woman sits in. To some extent a chair in a room is considered community property, but in most homes a family arranges itself in the same way day after day when it settles down, and more attention ought to be given chair sizes.

  Certain purposeful chairs have been well done but with no regard to the size or shape of the occupant. The electric chair, the dentist’s chair, the theater seat or the airplane seat are mostly well designed, but again every chair is the same size. We’re not. I suppose it would be difficult to sell theater tickets by seat size or for a dentist to have more than one chair depending on whose tooth ached. But the fact remains: people don’t take the same size chair any more than they take the same size shoe.

  Even though most public seating furniture must have seemed comfortable to the people who designed it, it seems to have been designed and sat on for the test under laboratory conditions. These conditions don’t exist in a movie theater or on a crowded airplane.

  In the theater chair, the shared armrest has always been a problem. The dominant personality usually ends up using the one on both sides of the seat in which he or she is sitting and the occupants of the adjacent seats get either none or one, depending on who flanks them on the other side. The shared armrest may be part of what’s known as the magic of the theater, but it’s a co
nstant source of irritation to anyone watching a bad movie.

  The average airplane chair is a marvel of comfort and we could all do worse than to have several installed in our own homes. The problem on board, of course, is the person in the seat next to you. The seats are usually lined up three across, and if the plane is full the middle seat can make a trip to Europe a nightmare. It is no longer a comfortable place of repose; it’s a trap and you’re in it.

  At a time when all of us are looking for clues to our character, it’s unusual that no one has started analyzing us from the way we sit in chairs. It must be at least as revealing of character as a person’s handwriting and an even more reliable indicator of both personality and attitude than, say, palm-reading.

  The first few minutes after you sit down are satisfying ones, but no matter how good it feels to get off your feet, you can’t stay in one position very long. Sooner or later that wonderful feeling you got when you first took the weight off your feet goes away. You begin to twitch. You are somehow dissatisfied with the way your body is arranged in the chair but uncertain as to what to do about it.

  Everyone finds his own solution for what to do with feet. No two people do exactly the same thing. The first major alteration in the sitting position usually comes when the legs are crossed. The crossing of legs seems to satisfy some inner discontent, the scratching of a psychosomatic itch deep inside.

  It’s amusing to see how often we use a chair designed to be used one way in a manner so totally different that even the originator could not have imagined it. We straddle a chair, sitting on it backwards with our arms where our backs are supposed to be and our chin on our arms; we sit sideways in a lounge chair with our legs draped over one arm and our backs leaning against the other arm. We rock back in chairs that are not rockers, ungluing their joints. We do things to chairs we wouldn’t do to our worst enemy, and chairs are among our best friends.