Andy Rooney, 1919–2011

Andy Rooney’s characteristic bluntness landed him his first job at CBS. As a freelance writer in 1949, he found himself standing in an elevator next to Arthur Godfrey, the network’s biggest radio star. Rooney remarked that Godfrey’s show could use better writing. Godfrey hired him on the spot, launching a career in radio and television that spanned 60 years.

Born in Albany, N.Y., Rooney embraced journalism early, working as a “copyboy for the Albany Knickerbocker News” while still in high school, said The Wall Street Journal. World War II interrupted his studies at Colgate University, and he was drafted into the Army, where he wrote for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.

Even as a reporter, Rooney had a front seat in the theater of war, said USA Today. He flew along on bombing missions over Germany, covered the invasion of France in 1944, and was among the first Americans to “be sickened by the specter of Hitler’s concentration camps” at Buchenwald. He was awarded the Bronze Star for reporting under heavy fire during the “grueling three-week siege” of a Nazi stronghold in Normandy. The war, he wrote in his memoir My War, was “the ultimate experience for anyone in it….Life is real at war, concentrated and intense. It is lived at full speed.”

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Rooney joined CBS in 1949 and soon became a writer for news shows like The Twentieth Century and News of America, said CBSNews.com. By the mid-1960s, his name was a “familiar credit at the end of CBS News programs.” He appeared on 60 Minutes during the 1960s and 1970s, but did not begin delivering the “wry, humorous, and contentious” essays that came to define his career until 1978.

That weekly segment on 60 Minutes made Rooney “one of the most popular broadcast figures in the country,” said The New York Times. Although the “homespun philosopher” would often talk about things he liked, such as football, he was better known for grumbling about the many things he didn’t like—everything from “the incomprehensibility of road maps” to “outsize cereal boxes that contained very little cereal.”

But his gruff nature sometimes “landed Rooney in hot water,” said the Associated Press. He offended gay-rights groups by suggesting, at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1989, that “homosexual unions” were hazardous to one’s health. He was suspended by CBS in 1990 for supposedly making racist remarks in a magazine interview. Rooney denied the statements attributed to him, and cited his arrest in Florida in the 1940s for “refusing to leave a seat among blacks on a bus” as proof that he was no racist.

Signing off after his 1,097th essay last month, Rooney took the chance to put his reputation as a curmudgeon into perspective. “Of all the things I’ve complained about,” he said, “I can’t complain about my life.”