Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [3]
As a father he was the product of his time. He never said, “I love you,” and never asked about my feelings. He encouraged me to play football, because that’s what he had done, and tried to make it to as many games as he could.
He expected a certain amount of toughness in me. A broken finger was not an excuse to sit on the bench. When I was fourteen I ripped the cartilage in my left knee and came down with pneumonia the same week, but he woke me up one morning before catching the 6:02 to the city asking whether I would make it to play in the football game that day.
He gave me my first pocketknife and taught me how to use a hammer, a chisel, and a table saw. He’d tell me, “It doesn’t seem right, but it’s safer when your fingers are closest to the blade.” We both still have all xvi Introduction by Brian Rooney
our fingers. He also taught me basic cooking. He showed me how to make a roux to thicken a sauce and to grill a steak medium rare.
He was reckless in ways that were fun. One Halloween he lined me up with my three sisters in the kitchen, handed us each a bar of soap, and told us to get out there and soap some neighbors’ windows. He took us winter camping without a tent—we made our own igloo out of snow. It rained one night and as the igloo melted on my crew-cut head, I saw him standing over the fire trying to dry our clothes.
One year when there was a foot of snow on the ground, my father put my sisters and me on the toboggan, attached a rope to the bumper, and towed us around town with the Country Squire station wagon. He drove with his head hanging out the window, looking back to check on us. Going down steep hills when the toboggan started catching up with the rear wheels, he’d hit the gas and speed up.
He liked doing things with gasoline because during the war the army in Europe had done everything with gas: heating, cooking, even washing their jeeps to give them a low sheen. In the fall we piled up leaves for burning and my father would get out a jug of gasoline, sprinkle it on, step back, and throw in a match. It went whump and the leaves were instantly reduced to ashes. He’d say, “That’s the best thing since the ETO.” The ETO was the European Theater of Operations, bureaucratic jargon for the War, and he never ceased to be amused by the term.
For a man who’s been in the army and hung around newsrooms all his life, he, surprisingly, does not use profanity. The only time I ever heard a dirty word from him was when I asked about the racist joke that got Earl Butz fired from his position as Secretary of Agriculture. When my father repeated it to me I was more shocked to hear the words from his mouth than I was by the joke itself. I was in my twenties and had never heard him use words like that.
He is a ruthless negotiator. One Saturday he said to me, “Come on, kid, we have to go buy a new station wagon.” We drove over to the Ford dealer, where he identified the car he wanted, and made an offer a few hundred dollars below the sticker price, which at the time was a deep discount. The salesman said, “Sir, I can’t sell it for that. It’s the last car of
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its model in the whole New England sales district and I can get full price from someone else.”
My father kicked his toe in the dirt and said, “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but my wife and I wanted two of them exactly alike.” We went home, made hamburgers, and started to watch a football game. When the phone rang and my father answered, all I heard him say was, “Now we’re ready to talk.” The salesman had found an identical station wagon only a few miles away.
It barely does justice to the sight of it to say that my father keeps a messy garage. The wooden shelves he built are loaded