Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [13]
After a lot of letter writing and telephoning during which we tried to come to some amicable agreement, Margie’s father, an eminently sensi
Marge Rooney, on board the Staten Island Ferry
ble orthopedist who was in no way religious, wrote me a letter that was not unfriendly but was brief and to the point. He was obviously tired of the dinner-table conversation he was getting on the subject from Margie’s mother.
“I don’t give a damn who performs the ceremony,” he wrote, “but if you’re going to do it, I wish you’d do it and get it over with.” I wish I had the letter. I don’t know what happens to life-altering pieces of paper like that. I suppose I threw it away.
After reading Dr. Howard’s letter, I realized that I didn’t really care who married us either. It was a ceremonial formality, the religious overtones of which meant nothing to me.
Travel was difficult and the prenuptial negotiations had been so contentious that neither my parents nor Dr. Howard came to the event conducted in a bare-bones Army chapel used for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish services. The priest, a lieutenant named Joseph Farrell, who was chaplain for the regiment, assumed that Margie was Catholic through the circumstance of birth, and inasmuch as I had told him I was not Catholic or anything else, decided it was what he called a “mixed marriage.”
He was very friendly and casual about it, but he thought he ought to get permission from some higher authority in the church so he called the living quarters of his bishop. The bishop was on the golf course at the time but someone on the other end of the phone said he was commissioned to act in his name.
“Mixtae religionis,” our priest said. “Okay?”
Evidently it was okay with this anonymous and somewhat suspect stand-in and we were married on the authority of a cleric well down the hierarchical ladder from the pope. I suppose I was predetermined to dislike this likable priest, and it seemed to me that Chaplain Farrell had a condescending air about himself during the ceremony which suggested that he felt marriage was for lesser mortals than himself.
We had dinner that night with a group of friends of Margie’s father and mother who were staying at The Pinehurst Inn, near Southern Pines, North Carolina, which was for a time one of the great resort hotels in the country. Most of them were doctors and their wives, and I was uncomfortable with what I considered the off-color stories they were telling. “Off-color” is what we used to call a dirty joke. After dinner I returned directly to the barracks at Fort Bragg and, on the very next day, before we’d had a chance to live any married life, the Seventeenth Field Artillery was ordered south from North Carolina to Camp Blanding, Florida, and we were all restricted to the base until the move, which took place ten days later.
A Missive to Marge from England 19
A missive to Marge from england
Nov 30, 1942
Dearest Marg,
I have never put so many words on paper in one day in my life but I can’t go another day without writing you.
Eight days ago I was transferred from the 17th to The Stars & Stripes. And except for frequent trips out of town I will be living permanently in London. The first week has been hell. I am not a good newspaper man, nor do I write particularly well at this point. But what I need is work and I’m getting it.
In the week with the paper I have seen more of England than Desk of Cook’s Tours and have seen things Cook will never see. I have been out for four days covering the major air fields in the British Isles with a photographer. We got some good shots, and several stories—the best of which are not for publication.
Thursday I am going up with some sort of a formation of Flying Fortresses on what they are calling a “sortie.” There are twenty other newsmen going so I hardly think we will hit