He loved his life and he lived it on his own terms. Jeff Fager, CBS News chairman and “60 Minutes” executive producer, said “it’s hard to imagine not having Andy around. “Words cannot adequately express Andy’s contribution to the world of journalism and the impact he made - as a colleague and a friend - upon everybody at CBS,” said Leslie Moonves, CBS Corp. 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.” 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. Rooney won one of his four 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. “Andy always said he wanted to work until the day he died, and he managed to do it, save the last few weeks in the hospital,” said his “60 Minutes” colleague, correspondent Steve Kroft. 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. Andy Rooney so dreaded the day he had to end his signature “60 Minutes” commentaries about life’s large and small absurdities that he kept going until he was 92 years old.Įven then, he said he wasn’t retiring.
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