#60 minutes andy rooney dies tv#

More recently, he was one of television’s few voices to strongly oppose the war in Iraq at the time it began.

It’s a lot more pleasurable a sensation than feeling threatened.” Even in petty things in my life I tend to strike back. “One of my major shortcomings - I’m vindictive. “Your piece made me mad,” Rooney told Moore two years later. The AP switchboard was flooded by some 7,000 phone calls.

On Rooney’s next “60 Minutes” appearance, he invited those who disagreed to make their opinions known. In 1996, AP television writer Frazier Moore wrote a column suggesting it was time for Rooney to retire. The Associated Press learned the danger of getting on Rooney’s cranky side. Gay rights groups were mad during the AIDS epidemic when Rooney mentioned homosexual unions in saying “many of the ills which kill us are self-induced.” Indians protested when Rooney suggested that Native Americans who made money from casinos weren’t doing enough to help their own people. CBS suspended him for three months in 1990 for allegedly racist remarks in an interview, which he denied making. Rooney’s words occasionally got him in trouble, too. Comic Joe Piscopo satirized Rooney’s squeaky voice with the refrain, “Did you ever wonder …” The segment of Rooney’s musings quickly became a favorite feature of television’s oldest and most successful newsmagazine. In fact, he said, the Fourth of July is “one of the safest weekends of the year to be going someplace.” Rooney complained about people who keep track of how many people die in car accidents on holiday weekends. “A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney” aired on “60 Minutes” for the first time on July 2, 1978. Rooney Goes to Washington,” whose lighthearted but serious look at government won him a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. He returned to CBS three years later as a writer and producer of specials.

#60 minutes andy rooney dies tv#

He went on TV for the first time, reading the essay on PBS and winning a Writers Guild of America award for it. Rooney angrily left CBS in 1970 when it refused to air his heated essay about the Vietnam War. Nobody knows that I’m a writer and producer. “But nobody knows I can do it or ever did it. 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 Americans 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. 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, he looked ahead to Barack Obama’s upcoming inauguration with a look at past inaugurations. “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. We’ll pick a week next year and we’ll all agree not to go anywhere for seven days,” he told viewers. “Let’s make a statement to the airlines just to get their attention. Rooney began his “60 Minutes” commentaries in 1978 and was still at it three decades later, railing about how unpleasant air travel had become. He won three Emmy Awards, including one for his story revealing there was no Mrs. But he was just as likely to use his weekly television essay to discuss the old clothes in his closet, why banks need to have important-sounding names or whether there was a real Mrs. Rooney, also a syndicated newspaper columnist, talked about what was in the news. Just a month ago, Rooney delivered his last regular essay on the CBS newsmagazine.ĬBS said he died Friday night in New York from complications from a recent surgery. NEW YORK - Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator who spent more than 30 years wryly talking about the oddities of life for “60 Minutes,” died Friday night, CBS said.