He wrote “An Essay on Doors” in 1964, and continued with contemplations on bridges, chairs and women. With Rooney as the writer, they collaborated on several news specials, including an Emmy-winning report on misrepresentations of black people in movies and history books. Rooney wrote for CBS stars such as Arthur Godfrey and Garry Moore during the 1950s and early 1960s, before settling into a partnership with newsman Harry Reasoner. His last wish from fans: If you see him in a restaurant, just let him eat his dinner. True to his occasional crotchety nature, though, he complained about being famous or bothered by fans. He said he probably hadn’t said anything on “60 Minutes” that most of his viewers didn’t already know or hadn’t thought. He told viewers that Calvin Coolidge’s 1925 swearing-in was the first to be broadcast on radio, adding, “That may have been the most interesting thing Coolidge ever did.”įor his final essay, Rooney said that he’d live a life luckier than most. In early 2009, as he was about to turn 90, Rooney looked ahead to President Barack Obama’s upcoming inauguration with a look at past inaugurations. “We’ll pick a week next year, and we’ll all agree not to go anywhere for seven days.” “Let’s make a statement to the airlines just to get their attention,” he said.
More than three decades later, he was railing about how unpleasant air travel had become. In fact, he said, the Fourth of July is “one of the safest weekends of the year to be going someplace.” He complained about people who keep track of how many people die in car accidents on holiday weekends. Looking for something new to punctuate its weekly broadcast, “60 Minutes” aired its first Rooney commentary on July 2, 1978. “And they say, `Hey, yeah!’ And they like that.” “I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn’t realize they thought,” Rooney once said. He won one of his three Emmy Awards for a piece on whether there was a real Mrs. But he was just as likely to discuss the old clothes in his closet, why air travel had become unpleasant and why banks needed to have important sounding names.
Rooney talked on “60 Minutes” about what was in the news, and his opinions occasionally got him in trouble. Rooney had gone to the hospital for an undisclosed surgery, but major complications developed and he never recovered. But his life after the end of “A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney” was short: He died Friday night, according to CBS, only a month after delivering his 1,097th and final televised commentary.
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