Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  When I first began to like wood, I was attracted to exotic species. Wherever I could find them I bought teak, rosewood, padauk and a wide variety of mahogany. My taste in wood has become more sophisticated now, though, and I find those exotic woods to be out of place in America, so far from where they grew. Now I look for good pieces of native American hardwood.

  A good piece of wood is beautiful and strong and it does what you wish to do with it. Do you wish to make a chair? A table? Perhaps you are skilled enough to make a violin. Maybe you want to build a house, a seesaw, a boat or a fence.

  I turned out the light in the shop, filled the cart with the junk in the car and went down to the house. It’s going to be hard to leave my wood for the winter.

  An All-American Drive

  In 1966 I sold a magazine article for $3,500. It was what people used to call “found money,” because I was already making a living, so I splurged with it. I bought a sports car, the aging American boy’s dream. The car was a Sunbeam Tiger and it cost just about the whole amount, $3,500, and it was some hot little car.

  Twenty-six years later, my little Tiger, painted British Racing Green, with its huge 289-cubic-inch Mustang engine, will still blow past almost anything else on the road, although I don’t drive it that way. You couldn’t buy it from me for $50,000, because there’s nothing I could get for $50,000 that I’d enjoy so much.

  I don’t drive it more than ninety days out of the year because I put it up during the winter, not wanting to subject it to the deleterious effects of ice and salt on the roads.

  An enterprising group at my college, Colgate University, organized a reunion last summer of everyone who had ever played football there. I can take or leave most reunions, but this one sounded like fun and Hamilton, New York, is only a few hours from our country home. I set out early one morning to drive the 120 miles in my top-down Tiger.

  I haven’t felt so free-as-a-breeze as I felt on that drive in a long time. I had no obligations to anyone. It didn’t matter what time I got there so I couldn’t be late, and I didn’t have to do anything when I arrived except eat, drink, and enjoy seeing old friends.

  I went with Robert Frost and chose the road less traveled. I took the small, winding, blacktop country roads for most of the trip.

  There are a lot of people with things to sell on our roadsides these days. I suppose I passed fifty garage sales, lawn sales or tag sales. We’ve all bought more than we need or can use over the years and we’re looking for a way to unload them on unsuspecting passersby who think, as we did when we bought them, that they’re treasures.

  There doesn’t seem to be much difference between a garage sale, a lawn sale and a tag sale. I passed one sign that said:

  TODAY! LAWN SALE IN GARAGE IN BACK

  Andy in his prized Sunbeam Tiger with his grandchildren; Alexis Perkins (front); Ben Fishel (left)

  and Justin Fishel (right) (back)

  A great many people must have bought new lawnmowers this year because I passed at least fifteen secondhand mowers with FOR SALE signs on them. Even though it was a summer day, there were electric and gas-driven snow-removal machines, too. We had so little snow the previous winter that a lot of people obviously decided those machines weren’t worth the space they were taking up in their garage.

  There were places that had signs out front saying ANTIQUES, but it didn’t look to me as though they had anything very old in them. Most of what they were selling could have been in a tag sale. Half dozen of the so-called antique stores had wagon wheels out front to lend authenticity to their claim of having antiques inside. I went in a few but I didn’t buy anything. Most of what they were selling for antiques would have been called junk if I’d had it in the back of my garage or in the basement.

  The towns and villages I drove through were not wealthy, but every one had at least two churches and some as many as four. They had just built a new church in Winfield but I couldn’t see what denomination it was. I don’t think it’s important. Most of the churchgoers in town probably believe pretty much the same thing no matter which church they go to. The difference between a Baptist and a Methodist or a Presbyterian and a Catholic in America’s small towns is more social than philosophical.

  It’s too bad religions can’t get together and share a building. They’d have better churches that way. That’s how the great cathedrals of Europe were built. Everyone in town pitched in. Americans like their individual little churches, though, no matter how plain they are and there’s a case to be made for preferring one to a Gothic cathedral.

  It was Founders’ Day in Sharon Springs. The fire trucks were assembling at one end of town for a parade with odds and ends of uniformed people. As I drove slowly through town, I passed perhaps thirty people seated at intervals on folding chairs, along the main street, waiting for the parade to troop by. I didn’t stay to watch, but it looked to me as though there were going to be more people in the parade than on the sidelines watching it.

  I passed several hospitals and entertained fleeting sad thoughts about pain, unknown to me, behind their windows. I thought how much better a time I was having than the patients inside. I thought how strange it was that we could be so close and yet so remote in spirit from one another.

  Several communities had kiosks set up as you entered town, with signs saying: TOURIST INFORMATION. It has been my experience that the booths that offer tourist information are usually closed.

  I was having a wonderful time enjoying America from the cockpit of my Tiger. It all looked like a cover on an old Saturday Evening Post. I suppose someone else, driving in the other direction, looked at this old guy in his green sports car and fitted me in as part of the Norman Rockwell look, too.

  I don’t remember what the article was about that earned me $3,500. But the times I’ve had with the Tiger have been worth far, far more.

  Christmas Trees

  The people who think Christmas is too commercial are the people who find something wrong with everything. They say, for instance, that store decorations and Christmas trees in shopping areas are just a trick of business.

  Well, I’m not inclined to think of them that way, and if there are people whose first thought of Christmas is money, that’s too bad for them, not for the rest of us.

  If a store that spends money to decorate its windows has commerce in mind, it doesn’t ruin my Christmas. If I pay nine cents more for a pair of gloves from one of the good stores that spent that much decorating its windows to attract me inside to buy them, I’m pleased with that arrangement. It was good for their gross and my Christmas spirit. I stay away from the places that pretend they’re saving me money by looking drab.

  I like Christmas above any time of the year. It turns gray winter into bright colors and the world with it.

  I like the lights and the crowds of people who are not sad at all. They’re hurrying to do something for someone because they love them and want to please them and want to be loved and pleased in return.

  In New York City, the big, lighted Christmas trees put up along Park Avenue for three weeks every year produce one of the great sights on earth.

  There is a kind of glory to a lighted Christmas tree. It can give you the feeling that everything is not low and rotten and dishonest, but that people are good and capable of being elated just at the thought of being alive this year.

  When I’m looking at a well-decorated Christmas tree, no amount of adverse experience can convince me that people are anything but good. If people were bad, they wouldn’t go to all that trouble to display that much affection for each other and the world they live in.

  Christmas Trees 199

  The Christmas tree is a symbol of love, not money. There’s a kind of glory to them when they’re all lit up that exceeds anything all the money in the world could buy.

  The trees in our homes do not look like the ones in public places and they ought not to. They look more the way we look, and we are all different. They reflect our personalities, and if someone is able
to read palms or tea leaves and know what a person is like, they ought to be able to tell a great deal about a family by studying the Christmas tree it puts up in the living room.

  Christmas trees should be real trees except where fire laws prohibit them from being real. It is better if they are fir or balsam, but Scotch pines are pretty, often more symmetrical and sometimes cheaper.

  Nothing that is blue, gold, silver, pink or any color other than green is a Christmas tree.

  A lot of people are ignoring the Christmas tree tradition, but just to review it, it goes like this:

  You put up the Christmas tree Christmas Eve. You do not put it up three weeks in advance or three days in advance.

  If you have young children, you put them to bed first.

  As the children get older, you let them help decorate the tree. As they get even older, you make them help decorate the tree. When the tree is decorated, you put the presents around it. You do not open presents Christmas Eve.

  The first one down in the morning turns on the Christmas tree lights.

  The best Christmas trees come very close to exceeding nature. If some of our great decorated trees had grown in a remote forest area with lights that came on every evening as it grew dark, the whole world would come to look at them and marvel at the mystery of their great beauty.

  So, don’t tell me Christmas is too commercial.

  Oh, What a Lovely Game

  I was an All-America guard at Colgate University in 1940. I went on to play in the NFL, and later was voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Well, I wasn’t actually an All-America and I never played professional football—you know how old football players and war veterans tend to exaggerate—but I did get into a few games in college when we were ahead by four or five touchdowns and coach Andy Kerr cleared the bench to give the substitutes a break.

  That was as close as I ever got to being either All-America or in the Hall of Fame, but during those years as something less than a Heisman Trophy winner, I acquired a love for football that is undiminished fifty years later. In my view, any other game is tiddlywinks.

  As a freshman at Colgate, I was a 185-pound running guard. In the Single-or Double-Wing formation, devised many years before by one of the great early football coaches, Pop Warner, I pulled to run interference for a halfback or fullback on half the plays. We had Bill Geyer, one of the all-time great players in Colgate history, who had run one hundred yards in ten seconds as a sprinter. He was one of the fastest, toughest, most elusive halfbacks in the nation. Later, he played with the Chicago Bears.

  There was no intermediary, no handoff, in the Single-Wing offense, as there is in today’s game in which the quarterback handles the ball on every play. Everything was Shotgun. When the play was called for Geyer to sweep wide right, the center snapped the ball directly to Bill and he took off.

  Everything went well in practice those first few weeks. I got by the first couple of games okay, but then we went up to Archbold Stadium to play Syracuse. They had a big, fast, rangy end who was responsible for everything that went outside.

  We ran one of those sweeps during the game. From a sprinter’s stance, the Syracuse end started at the same instant Geyer began his outside charge. From my crouched position, I spun to the right and headed for the gap between the end and Geyer.

  With friend and fellow football player Obie Slingerland at The Albany Academy

  The distance between the two was shorter than the distance between me and them and with my speed, which unlike Geyer’s was closer to twenty seconds for a hundred yards, there was no way I could get between them for a block.

  We beat Syracuse that day, as I recall, but Geyer never gave me a lot of credit for the victory.

  My career as a football player in college was one stumbling block after another. I was determined not to let the game dominate my life and become a culturally deprived jock, so I decided; to take piano lessons during the football season.

  The wife of a history professor undertook, at $2 for each one-hour lesson, to teach me. During my first lesson, I recall thinking that it was quite probable that I had more potential as a football player than I had as a musician. My first day of piano lessons also turned out to be my last. I went directly from that lesson to football practice. It was a gamestyle scrimmage between substitutes and the first team, with officials. During the second half of the scrimmage that day, I was playing opposite Bill Chemowkowski, one of those ape-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. At 260 pounds, “Cherno” was the heaviest man on the squad.

  As things turned out, it didn’t matter where he carried most of his weight or how much of it there was. 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 Horowitz. My hand still is slightly deformed, and I often look at it with the same sense of pride with which I view the television Emmys in my bookcase.

  One of the saddest days of my life was the day I realized I’d played my last game of football. It was as final as death. As a young boy, I’d played in vacant lots—back in the days when there were vacant lots— every Saturday during the fall. By the time I got to high school, I knew I loved the game better than any other.

  I played all through high school and in college and then, one day, it was over. It was like the day my dog died.

  It probably wouldn’t occur to anyone who never played that even second stringers love the game. You don’t have to be a star to enjoy playing football. You hear parents advise their children to learn to play a safer sport, a sport like golf or tennis that they can enjoy all their lives. I understand that argument but, as bad as I felt on that last day, I wouldn’t trade my football days for golf if I could have started playing when I was eight and grown up to be Arnold Palmer.

  People who have played football at any level watch a game with a different eye than someone who has never played. For one thing, they tend to watch the man playing the position they played. If you played center, you watch the center a lot. If you played end, you watch the ends.

  I hear people say they can see the game better at home on television than they can see it sitting in the stadium. No one who knows much football thinks it’s as good to watch at home as it is at the stadium. Watching at home is better than not watching football at all, but it isn’t the same as being there.

  The biggest difference in being there is that, good as the pictures, commentary, and replays are on television, the person at home is watching a small part of the total game that someone else has chosen to show him. What you watch is not your choice. At the stadium, the fans can watch what they want to watch anywhere on the field. I concede that if a person is not a knowledgeable football fan, he or she might get more out of watching it on television.

  I often miss completely something that has happened to the ball carrier, because I’m watching what the guard is doing to the nose tackle or vice versa.

  Every team played a seven-man defensive line when I played, with only one linebacker—always the toughest kid on the block. We all played both ways, of course, offense and defense. If they hadn’t changed the rules, Joe Montana might have had to play free safety on defense. I don’t know how that would have worked out for Joe, but I think New Orleans fullback Ironhead Heyward could hold his own as a middle linebacker on defense.

  The great Frank Gifford, the most graceful football player I ever watched, was one of the last to play both offense and defense for the Giants.

  Even relatively new football fans have seen a lot of rule changes. One of my prized possessions is a Spalding Official Football Guide that belonged to my uncle, who played for Williams College in 1900.

  In those days they had to make only five yards for a first down (in three downs), and the literary style of the old rule book should embarrass the current rules committee.

  “The game progresses,” the rule book reads, “in a series of
downs, the only limitation being a rule designed to prevent one side from continually keeping possession of the ball without any material advance, which would be manifestly unfair to the opponents.

  “In three attempts to advance the ball, a side not having made five yards toward the opponent’s goal must surrender possession of the ball.

  “It is seldom that a team actually surrenders the ball in this way,” the rule book continues in its elegant prose, “because, after two attempts, if the prospects of completing the five-yard gain appear small, it is so clearly politic to kick the ball as far as possible that such a method is more apt to be adopted.”

  Eat your heart out, John Madden!

  In 1925, the NFL player limit was sixteen. As late as 1944, a team still was limited to a roster of twenty-eight players. And, of course, the uniform has changed.

  One of the primary rules of life is that nothing seems to help, and that certainly is true of the protective equipment used by football players. Everything a player wears to a game today is better than the equipment of thirty-five years ago, but I don’t notice that there are any fewer injuries. Of course, modern-day collisions involve bigger, stronger people. Early helmets were felt-padded leather. Today’s plastic helmets are part protector, part lethal weapon.

  Players used to make some individual choices about their uniforms. What a player wore frequently was not very uniform at all. There were players who liked stockings and players who didn’t. In the NFL today, stockings are mandatory. I played next to a center who had an interesting theory. He refused to wear an athletic supporter because he felt he was safer from injury in this sensitive area if his private parts weren’t confined like sitting ducks.

  There was no rule against grabbing the facemask until 1956, for a simple reason—there were no facemasks. A lot of teeth were lost. I remember Bill Farley coming back to the huddle, leaning over, and spitting his front teeth on the ground as he listened to the signal for the next play. Broken noses were common—but not considered serious. Stanley Steinberg wore a huge rubber protector over his nose that looked like part of a clown’s costume. He held it in place by clenching a mouthpiece attached to it between his teeth.