And there he'd be, more than 1,000 times, grumbling about some small bit of modern flotsam or jetsam that he found ridiculous or annoying. He pondered whether there was a real Mrs. Smith at Mrs. Smith's Pies, he wondered why clothing manufacturers kept hat sizes and neck sizes so out of sync, he railed against most every technological advance of the last three decades. He was like your favorite, if sometimes annoying, eccentric old uncle — if your favorite uncle also happened to be an enormously talented writer, something Rooney's critics sometimes overlooked.
And boy, did Rooney have critics. Some took objection to his targets, which did, at times, make him appear sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and, increasingly, life-as-we-know-it phobic. (There's a reason no TV star, and probably no human being, is universally beloved.) Some simply saw him as out of touch, a charge the young always feel free to lob at the old.
And almost all, even those who liked him, found some occasion or other to criticize — or at least gently mock — his famous on-air style. Odds are if you watched 60 Minutes on a regular or even irregular basis, you can do the imitation yourself: the slouch, the scrunched-up face that made it look like he just tasted something he didn't like, the "did you ever notice" whine that led into that week's observation.
Yet here's the part some of his "did you ever" critics missed: In his extensive prime, Rooney had a knack for noticing things most of us had indeed missed, until he pointed them out and you said, "Yes. That's right." And he delivered those observations in tight little essays that were a marvel of craftsmanship, a lost art in these days of spontaneous TV news talk that usually consists of one commonplace opinion stretched out over hours on end.
On Oct. 25, the network said Rooney was hospitalized after developing serious complications after minor surgery.
For millions of Americans, Rooney was a welcome visitor into their homes on Sunday evenings, an old familiar face appearing for a few minutes at the tail end of one of the most highly rated programs in television history.
And if some viewers of the award-winning pioneer TV newsmagazine saw him as a friend, neighbor or relative, they knew what to expect from the man who offered his opinions on a broad array of topics.
Wry. Curmudgeonly. Whimsical. An articulate Everyman. Unruffled yet quizzical. A crank. A complainer. The man of a thousand questions.
Those are just some of the words journalists have used to describe the man TV Guide called "America's favorite grump."
Seated behind his desk in his small, cluttered office at CBS in New York, Rooney spoke into the camera as though the viewer at home had just dropped in for a brief visit to see what was on his mind that week.
There was always something.
Designer jeans: "The facts of the advertising greatly exceed the fact of the average American posterior."
Bank names: "Trust is a word banks like in their names. There are certain names they'd never use, 'Bankorama,' for instance."
Baseball: "My own time is passing fast enough without some national game to help it along."
But Rooney didn't just spend his few minutes on seemingly trivial matters. In 2003, for example, he turned his attention to the French for failing to support the war in Iraq.
"You can't beat the French when it comes to food, fashion, wine or perfume, but they lost their license to have an opinion on world affairs years ago," he said. "The French lost World War II to the Germans in about 20 minutes."
With Rooney, as his "60 Minutes" colleague Mike Wallace once said, "What you see is what you get."
"I have never, never come across a man I admire more, respect more," Wallace said during a discussion of journalism in World War II at the Smithsonian Institution in 2004.
When the 1979-80 TV season started, Alexander and Kilpatrick were gone and "A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney" was well on its way to becoming a "60 Minutes" institution.
For his part, Rooney preferred being known simply as a "writer." And he was not enamored with the celebrity that came with appearing on television each week.
"A writer should be sitting over in the corner watching the dance and not be out there dancing," he told the Saturday Evening Post in 1984. "I'm not too keen about my recent well-known-ness; I don't handle it very well. If somebody comes up to me on the street and says, 'Hey, I like your stuff,' well, I can't hate that. But it never stops there. Pretty soon he wants to be my best friend. I tend to be rude to people like that."
As for autograph seekers, Rooney refused to scrawl his name when he was stopped by a fan. At one point, whenever asked for an autograph, he would take the proffered piece of paper and write, "No."
Rooney was the personification of the crusty newsroom veteran. He wore a suit and tie on camera, but you had the feeling that as soon as the camera lights were turned off he shed the coat, loosened the tie and rolled up his shirt sleeves.
With his bulldog face, bushy eyebrows and somewhat whiny delivery, the stocky Rooney was irresistible fodder for parody.
Comedian Joe Piscopo did a winning whining Rooney rendition on "Saturday Night Live" in the 1980s, employing a Rooney-esque refrain, "Did you ever wonder?" (For the record, Rooney told Newsday in 1989 that he examined all of his old "60 Minutes" copy and never used that line.)
Rooney's weekly TV showcase led to a three-times-a-week nationally syndicated newspaper column that appeared in several hundred newspapers.
He also wrote 16 books, many of them best-selling collections of his work, including "A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney," "Pieces of My Mind" and "Sincerely, Andy Rooney."
Rooney was just as outspoken off-camera as on, and his penchant for speaking his mind occasionally got him into hot water.
In 1990, he was suspended for three months without pay by CBS News in the wake of his remarks about blacks and gays attributed to him in the Advocate gay magazine.
The Feb. 27, 1990, edition of the Advocate quoted Rooney as saying, "Blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children." It also contained a letter written by Rooney, in which he called the homosexual sex act "repugnant" and homosexuality "not normal."
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times after his suspension, Rooney categorically denied making the statement attributed to him about blacks during his phone interview with the Advocate. But he did confirm that he wrote the letter to the magazine commenting on gays in response to criticisms of his views on homosexuality.
The son of a traveling salesman father, Rooney was born Jan. 14, 1919, in Albany, N.Y. He attended the Albany Academy and was a student at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., when he was drafted into the Army in 1941.
Rooney was assigned to the 17th Field Artillery Regiment, part of the 13th Field Artillery Brigade. After shipping out to England, he applied for a reporter's job with the London edition of the Stars and Stripes.
Rooney, who chronicled his four years with the Stars and Stripes in his 1995 book, "My War," wrote more than 200 stories for the newspaper.
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 1944.
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 1949 led to his being hired to write for Godfrey's daily radio show and later his two television programs over the next six years. He also wrote for CBS News public affairs programs such as "The Twentieth Century."
After teaming up with Reasoner in 1962 as a writer and producer, Rooney won his first Writers Guild of America Award for the Reasoner-narrated "The Great Love Affair," a look at America's obsession with automobiles.
Rooney won his first Emmy Award for his script for "Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed," one of the specials narrated by Bill Cosby in the 1968 CBS News series "Of Black America."
In 2003, he was awarded an Emmy for lifetime achievement.
Rooney's wife of 62 years, Marguerite (Marge), a longtime Connecticut high school math teacher, died in 2004.
All about: CBS News, 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney, New York, New York Giants
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