Andy Rooney Memorialized by Family and Friends

Longtime OPC member Andy Rooney would have loved the January 12 memorial service in Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center starring his four children, his girlfriend and his friends from CBS.

His son, Brian Rooney, flawlessly emceed the ceremony with clarity and humor. Brian, a longtime ABC News correspondent and soon-to-be CBS News contributor, lovingly showed that he, too, has his father’s talent as a storyteller and writer. “My father was a character, but it was not an act,” Brian said. “What you saw was the same show that ran at the end of the dinner table.”

After Rooney died at 92 of complications from a surgical procedure just a month after retiring from CBS, his family began sifting through the mountains of memorabilia he had saved, including a CBS check for $6,000 he never cashed and letters he had written to various top CBS executives, letters so virulent or insulting that it was a wonder he was not fired, Brian said. To one new CBS News President, Rooney wrote: “Keep in mind, I have more experience being bossed than you have bossing.”

Andy Rooney’s powers of observation were the key to his popularity, Brian said. “He knew his thoughts so precisely that they were the thoughts of millions of other people who did not realize it until he put it into words…he saw the universal in the particular.”

Each of Rooney’s daughters: Emily, Martha and Ellen recalled how he loved to tease them regularly by telephone. Emily — a TV host and producer in Boston — said her father liked to sign off with: “Call if you get work.” Martha, a librarian at the National Institutes of Health, said her dad loved calling at 4:55 p.m. to say he was checking to see if his “tax dollars” were still at work. Ellen, a photographer and editor in London, recalled her father’s usual gambit was: “What time is it there anyway?” Brian Rooney also treated everybody with some of his father’s favorite family rules. As a supporter of the volunteer fire department that covered the Rowayton section of Norwalk, Connecticut, where he lived, Rooney regularly dragged his children out of bed to see local fires. Brian loved this one: “When your neighbor’s house is on fire, you have an obligation to go watch it burn down.”

CBS News chairman Jeff Fager summed up Andy: “He didn’t know how to sugarcoat anything. What came out of him, under any circumstance, was pure unvarnished truth as he saw it.” Fager continued: “Andy was also the unofficial conscience of CBS News. If something happened at CBS News he didn’t like, that went against the finest traditions of our organization, he would say so, even if it meant taking on the owner of the company.”
After being introduced as “Andy Rooney’s girlfriend,” Beryl Pfizer, who frequently attended OPC events with Andy, put the finishing touch on the celebration of his life. She said: “What strikes me is how lucky we all were to have him in our lives and how lucky I was to have him in mine.”

Watch an excerpt of the memorial service >>