Andy Rooney Biography Quotes 42 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Andrew Aitken Rooney was born on January 14, 1919, in Albany, New York. Raised in upstate New York, he developed an early interest in writing and observation that would eventually define his voice as a commentator. After local schooling, he enrolled at Colgate University. His studies were interrupted by World War II, a turning point that set him on the path to journalism.

World War II and Reporting Beginnings
Drafted into the U.S. Army, Rooney was assigned to write for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that chronicled the day-to-day realities of service members overseas. Based largely in the European theater, he covered the air war and the massive operations of the Eighth Air Force. In that setting, he honed a clear, direct prose style and a habit of noticing the telling detail. The work brought him into proximity with other notable voices from the wartime press corps, including Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin, and immersed him in the logistics, danger, and moral complexity of modern war. The experiences would later form the backbone of his memoir My War and inform his skepticism toward euphemism and cant in public life.

From Print to Television
After the war, Rooney returned to the United States and began a career in broadcasting, first as a writer and producer. He joined CBS, where his facility with concise, conversational essays found a natural home. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he wrote for news and variety programs, developing short-form commentaries that used everyday objects and ordinary frustrations as gateways to larger points about taste, waste, and common sense. He collaborated with Harry Reasoner on a series of highly crafted television essays, learning how the cadence of spoken words, the rhythm of images, and a stubborn point of view could fuse into a distinctive signature.

60 Minutes and A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney
In 1978, Rooney became a regular presence at the end of 60 Minutes, the newsmagazine created by Don Hewitt and populated by formidable correspondents such as Mike Wallace and Morley Safer, later joined by Ed Bradley, Lesley Stahl, and Steve Kroft. His closing segment, A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney, quickly became part of the program's identity. Sitting at a cluttered desk, often with a typewriter and sheaves of paper, he would consider the small things that most viewers recognized but seldom articulated: the design of a chair, the packaging of a product, the absurdities of bureaucracy, the marketing of holidays, and the slipperiness of language.

These essays were not mere curmudgeonly riffs. They were structured with a beginning, middle, and end, enjoyed a precise sense of timing, and typically folded a sharp observation into a plainspoken conclusion. His colleagues sometimes disagreed with his angles, but they recognized the craft that made his two or three minutes feel complete. Rooney's cadence, both in writing and delivery, emphasized ordinary words arranged to maximum effect. That signature style and the power of 60 Minutes' audience made him one of the most widely heard essayists on American television.

Voice, Themes, and Influence
Rooney's voice combined skepticism with humor. He distrusted fads, inflated language, and anything that tried too hard to sell itself. He prized utility, clarity, and thrift. When he turned to public controversies, he tended to approach them from the perspective of common sense rather than partisanship, sometimes delighting and sometimes exasperating viewers who came for agreement and stayed for his willingness to argue with received wisdom. Inside CBS, where figures like Walter Cronkite set standards of authority in traditional anchoring, Rooney represented a different tradition: the essayist who sought truth through irritation, candor, and the careful choice of words.

Controversies and Public Response
Rooney's plain speaking could provoke backlash. In 1990 he was briefly suspended from 60 Minutes following criticism of a column and remarks attributed to him; he disputed some of the quotations and apologized for others. The controversy fueled a broader discussion about satire, offense, and the boundary between commentary and prejudice. Viewer response was intense and mixed, but the depth of his audience's connection to his work was evident in the strong reaction to his absence and his eventual return. Over time, the program and the network reaffirmed that his place on 60 Minutes was to express a perspective that was unmistakably his own.

Books and Print Work
Alongside television, Rooney wrote prolifically. Collections such as Not That You Asked... and A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney gathered his broadcast essays and newspaper columns, while Years of Minutes distilled decades of his television work. My War offered a sustained, first-person narrative of his WWII experiences, giving readers the fuller context behind the sensibility that later informed his television persona. In print as on screen, he favored short sentences, concrete nouns, and a structure that built from detail to inference, inviting readers to arrive at his conclusions with him.

Family and Personal Life
Rooney married Marguerite, known as Margie, during World War II, and their marriage lasted for many decades until her death in 2004. They raised a family, and two of their children, Emily Rooney and Brian Rooney, pursued journalism in their own right, a reflection of the media world in which they grew up. Friends and colleagues often noted that even off camera he sounded like himself on camera: skeptical, amused by human foibles, and stubborn about words and tools. He valued the quiet discipline of writing, the routines of work, and time at home in New York.

Later Years and Retirement
Rooney's segment anchored the final minutes of 60 Minutes for more than three decades. He continued filing essays into his 90s, an unusual longevity in broadcast journalism and a testament to the enduring appeal of his viewpoint. In early October 2011, he delivered a final on-air essay announcing his departure from the program. Weeks later, on November 4, 2011, he died in New York at the age of 92, following complications from surgery. The proximity of his retirement and death gave his final broadcast an elegiac cast, and viewers who had watched him for years treated it as a farewell to a familiar presence.

Legacy
Andy Rooney's legacy is that of the American television essayist brought to its highest craft. He demonstrated that a few minutes at the end of a newsmagazine could become an institution if the voice was consistent, the observations honest, and the writing exact. His work bridged the world of World War II correspondents and the world of late-20th-century television, connecting the blunt clarity of wartime reportage to the domestic texture of everyday life. Among the many personalities who shaped CBS News, from Don Hewitt to Mike Wallace and Morley Safer, he occupied a unique niche: the contrarian whose loyalty was to clarity and the well-turned sentence. For viewers and readers, that is how he is most often remembered.

Our collection contains 42 quotes who is written by Andy, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Truth - Justice - Writing - Sports.

Other people realated to Andy: Dan Rather (Journalist), Harry Reasoner (Journalist)

• Andy Rooney eyebrows: Famous for his bushy eyebrows.
• Andy Rooney Ali G: He walked out of a spoof interview with Ali G and later said he didn’t get it.
• Andy Rooney books: A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney; My War; Not That You Asked...; Years of Minutes.
• Andy Rooney movies: Not a movie actor; he was a TV commentator (often confused with Mickey Rooney).
• Andy Rooney young: WWII-era Army journalist for Stars and Stripes.
• Andy Rooney cause of death: Complications following minor surgery (2011).
• How old was Andy Rooney? He became 92 years old

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