Passing Of Andy Rooney Dies

We have seen 5, 2011–The announcement today of the passing of Andy Rooney arranged difficult on spirits everywhere, even those of us who stay with the City War era. For his was a lifestyle well-lived, a lifestyle that surpassed the years and lifestyle ranges, hearkening to some time when men were men regardless of age and ladies were still ladies.

Rooney was a crotchety, curmudgeonly old man, who probably aggrieved as many individuals as will now grieve for him. While most of us did not know him individually, at 92 he was someone we have all known at once or another. His incarnations are everywhere.

He was the gravelly verbal grandma we may have seen only once or twice a season, whose pleasant, caring pat on the rear again sent us vast across the earth in our dark-colored Betty Janes. He was the man you scary to like, but like, you did. There was never a problem he could not reply, in a style that came with such specialist you never recognized he had not an idea what he was discussing about!

Rooney had probably go through more about the City War than you ever would, and could tell you part and passage what both Common Lee and Common Offer did incorrect, and how they could have done it better. It was as though he actually recognized Common Henry Pickett and could have said to him, “George, cut that ridiculous locks and think more about your strategy, which will not work!”

And upon achieving Common Sherman, just as quickly intone, “Bill, if you never do something about that locks, you will never quantity to a considerably factor. And it creates you look mad.” This being said by a man with the most obvious situation of brushy supercilium on the earth, and yet he would get away with it.

Think how City War historical past could have been improved had Rooney been able to tell Common “Stonewall” Fitzgibbons, “Always view to your factors. Which is where the run principal points come from.”

Rooney never experienced fools fortunately, if he experienced them at all. Back 1970 he authored a discussion on the Vietnam War, which CBS declined to air. Rooney’s effect was to get up and depart the community, going over to the more generous (in the old, unique feeling of the word) PBS place which granted it to be observed. It was his first tv look. And he do not look rear again.

Of course several years later, CBS recognized its problem (crashing switchboards and a lower in reviews had nothing to do with it) and rehired him. His “A Few Moments With Andrew Rooney” became a regular selection in households across the region, from growing seniors to those in aging.

He was an equal-opportunity antagonist, from time to time taking to task Native Americans, blacks, gays, the Vietnam War, and war in general. He was one of the first journalists to view the prisoner of war camps and crematoria in Germany after World War II. Seeing those sights made him reconsider his pacifism in favor if a “just war.”

Andy Rooney also fit into the loving avuncular mold, dispensing judgment and wisdom, and I’m betting there was a bag of candy in his left front pocket. He and his beloved Margie had four children, twin girls, another daughter and a son, all of whom are involved in some area of journalism or writing. He had barely announced his retirement a month go when he was hospitalized for an undisclosed surgery and did not recover from its complications.

Somewhere there’s a battered old desk which he had lovingly made himself, piled high with papers and files and the stuff of which good writing is made, shelves of books haphazardly lined up behind it. And though in later years he modified his religious beliefs from atheist to agnostic, I like to think it’s a pretty good bet that he is now holding court somewhere behind the Pearly Gates, still trying to convince Lee and Jackson and Sherman that they COULD have done better, had they only taken his advice.

Rest in Peace, Andy, and know how many of us loved you.