In an early "60 Minutes" essay that won him the third of his four Emmy Awards, his compromise to the grain embargo against the Soviet Union was to sell them cereal. Mainly, his essays struck a chord in viewers by pointing out life's unspoken truths or more often complaining about its subtle lies, earning him the "curmudgeon" status he wore like a uniform. In typical themes, Rooney questioned labels on packages, products that didn't seem to work and why people didn't talk in elevators. Rooney asked thousands of questions in his essays over the years, none, however, began with "Did you ever?
Comedian Joe Piscopo used it in a impersonation of him on "Saturday Night Live" and, from then on, it was erroneously linked to Rooney. Rooney was also mistakenly connected to racism when a politically charged essay highly insensitive to minorities was written in his style and passed off as his on the internet in Over the next few years, it found its way into the e-mail boxes of untold thousands, causing Rooney to refute it in a "60 Minutes" essay, and again, as it continued to proliferate, in a Associated Press article a year later.
Many assumed he wrote the screed because Rooney's longtime habit of writing or speaking plainly on sensitive topics had left him open to attacks in the past by activist groups. The racist essay was one of the many false Rooney quotes and essays bouncing around the Internet.
The racism charge angered and hurt Rooney deeply, especially because as a young soldier in the early s, he got himself arrested in Florida for refusing to leave the seat he had chosen among blacks in the back of an Army bus.
At the height of the AIDS crisis, Rooney had his biggest run-in with a group and it had dire consequences. His words sometimes landed Rooney in hot water. CBS suspended him for three months in for making racist remarks in an interview, which he denied. Rooney, who was arrested in Florida while in the Army in the s for refusing to leave a seat among blacks on a bus, was hurt deeply by the charge of racism.
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. The Associated Press learned the danger of getting on Rooney's cranky side. On Rooney's next "60 Minutes" appearance, he invited those who disagreed to make their opinions known. The AP switchboard was flooded by some 7, phone calls and countless postcards were sent to the AP mail room. I don't know why that is.
Even in petty things in my life I tend to strike back. It's a lot more pleasurable a sensation than feeling threatened. Bush administration launched it in After the fall of Baghdad in April , he said he was chastened by its quick fall but didn't regret his "60 Minutes" commentaries. Andrew Aitken Rooney was born on Jan. With another former Stars and Stripes staffer, Oram C. Hutton, Rooney wrote four books about the war.
They included the book, "Their Conqueror's Peace: A Report to the American Stockholders," documenting offenses against the Germans by occupying forces. Rooney and his wife, Marguerite, were married for 62 years before she died of heart failure in They had four children and lived in New York, with homes in Rowayton, Conn.
National Library of Medicine. In the end, CBS, faced with an overwhelmingly negative public response to his suspension, reinstated Rooney after only three weeks. On Oct. The son of a traveling salesman father, Rooney was born Jan.
In the process, Sgt. Rooney flew with the 8th Air Force on the first American bombing raid over Germany and covered the invasion of France after landing on a Normandy beach four days after D-day in June Rooney was earning his living freelancing magazine stories when a chance meeting with Arthur Godfrey in an elevator at CBS in New York City in changed his fortune.
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