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would hear about it in the morning. Another rule was, “You meet the train, you don’t wait for it.” As a teenager I would deliver him to the rail station, and he would climb the steps and reach the platform just as the doors opened. He thought less of the guys who had stood there waiting, wasting their time. He laid down the rule that, “The keys to the car belong in the ignition.” He didn’t want to fumble around looking for the keys to four cars casually dropped somewhere in the kitchen by one of six drivers. That ended one summer night in 1969 when the Thunderbird was stolen out of the driveway. When the cops who returned the car asked how the thieves had gotten hold of the keys, my father said, “They were in the ignition, where they belong.”

My father likes to say “the same things keep happening to the same people.” This is his idea of fate as determined by personality. He was always impressed by the B17 pilots who brought the plane back to base all shot up when everyone else on board was ready to give up and die. His theory was that whatever thing in that guy that had gotten him into Yale and made him a pilot would also drive him to success in later life. “The same things keep happening to the same people.” As a little boy I found this disturbing, particularly when I was cast as “third elf ” in the Christmas play.

He can be a terror in a restaurant. If the food is not good, he says so to the waiter, the maitre’d, or anyone in the line of fire. The rule at work here: “If you want the attention of the chef, you have to start by being mean to the busboy.” My favorite of all was his rule for civic involvement. We lived in a small town with a volunteer fire department. When the fire horn blew, no matter the hour, my father would leave the dinner table, or pull everyone out of bed in their pajamas, pack us all into the Ford Country Squire wagon, and peel out of the driveway to speed toward the glow on the horizon. He said, “When your neighbor’s house is on fire, you have an obligation to go and watch it burn.”

But the rule above all rules was this: “If all the truth were known about everything, the world would be a better place.” He thinks governments should not have secrets and that there is no opinion or information too xx Introduction by Brian Rooney

dangerous or hurtful that it cannot be told. Good ideas and good people would rise in a world in which all the truth were known. In his personal life, he believes in blunt honesty, which he will deliver anywhere from the breakfast table to the boss’s office to the whole country. Just about every one of my parents’ best friends went through a period when they were so mad they refused to speak to him.

His gruffness hides sentimentality. He clings to life and the people he loves like that old stuff in the garage. He would not likely weep at a wedding, but I know that over the years he has woken up in the middle of the night thinking about Obie Slingerland, his smiling high school quarterback, the best athlete anyone ever saw, who was killed flying a fighter in the Pacific. He still wakes up thinking about Obie. And when my mother died, he curled up on the bed like a child, crying her name. He loves life and wishes it would never end.

If your parents live long enough, you get to know them more as people than parents. I have come to know my father’s failings, and boy, has he got some. Sometimes he carried his principles to the extreme, and he has not always lived by his own rules. But also I appreciate even more that he has stood for something all his life when so many people have not, and that while he became rich and famous, it could just as easily have gone the other way and he would not have done anything differently. I learned that a writer lives by his words.

Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

Part I

The Beginnings of a Writing Life

Drafted

People who have lived well and successfully are more apt to dismiss luck as a factor in their lives than those who have not. It’s clearly true that over a lifetime the same things keep happening to the same