#1 - Andy Rooney Is Dead

And who shall carry the torch?

“What torch?” my eldest son would say.  “Who cares?”  He is 20. About six or eight years ago, he flipped through the channels and caught Rooney doing his “60 Minutes gig.”  “Who IS this guy?”   He looked as if he had just opened the door of the dark farmhouse on the dead-end road and discovered the bloodspattered walls and butchered bodies.

That was another moment when I realized how truly old – if not by numerals, then by eras – I was.  Andy Rooney was something of a role model when I got out of college and started a career as a newspaper reporter.  Perhaps not as much as Erma Bombeck, because she was much funnier and she was female.  But both had managed to write and get paid – and get paid handsomely – for it.

My poor son did not see the point.  Here was an old man, with clown-like eyebrows that would scare the pants off children of every culture, probably complaining about something inconsequential like why cotton is stuffed into pill bottles.  Why on earth would a major network like CBS deem this fit to air, he must have thought.  Instead, we could be watching, say, videos of people being hit in the crotch by errant golf clubs, or reality TV show contestants downing live insects.

Is there a cotton ball torch that needs to be carried on after Rooney’s demise at age 92, less than two months after he officially signed off the air with his last essay? 

Certainly not that I would be qualified, either by gender or literary expertise.

First, there are no women in their 90s employed on U.S. TV newscasts anywhere in any way, shape or form.  At least in front of the camera, and, I am pretty sure, in any capacity behind it, as well.  If there were, she would have had to have not just eyebrows thinned, shaped and colored, but face and perhaps other body parts lifted.  Erma Bombeck never lived to 92, so she was spared this.

Also, while Rooney was praised for being “curmudgeonly,” a woman in the same position would have been called, to be blunt, which is precisely my point here, an “old bitch” (so don’t be blunt, galpals).  Women still aren’t supposed to have strong opinions.  If they do, like Hillary Clinton or even (not in the same league) Michelle Bachmann, they have to be very careful about how they present them.  In my current profession, aggressive male financial advisors are called one word:  successful.  Aggressive women financial advisors?  See the term above, and add “pushy” in front of it.

So I have spent a good deal of my adult life trying to NOT get myself worked up over things that might piss me off like cotton in pill bottles.  OK, you might get a good column out of it if you are Rooney, but it would just make me seem like a disagreeable biddy who is a Negative Nellie and will stroke out too soon.  There are bigger fish to fry if you want to bitch; you pick your battles.  So perhaps I will not be able to capture that curmudgeonly essence.

Nor do I have the national and international reporting background Rooney had.  For a short time, I was a small-time small-town newspaper reporter and, for an even shorter time, columnist.  I loved it.  I couldn’t live on the poverty-level wages, though. 

A friend I made at one paper 30-some years ago told me recently – as we, both in our 50s, had made the technological leap to corresponding on Facebook and writing for other media, after his long print journalism career had ended with the closing of the beloved and venerable Seattle PI – that I should write again.  Often.  I was good at it, he said, and it’s like being given a gift of a beautiful voice, you almost are required to sing.  You should write, he told me, in those blunt words.  (He’s a boy, he can do that.)

He’s right.  Not about me being particularly good, but about me writing often again.  Over the years, writing has been therapy, heartfelt communication with friends, a process that resulted in self-knowledge and self-expression, and a paycheck, al beit meager. 

It may be all or none of those things here, I don’t know.  But I bet I’m going to enjoy it.  Because, like Rooney, I don’t have to care if anyone else does, including 20-year-old kids who perhaps will never understand the importance good journalism and column-writing ever had to either this nation or the individuals in it who were lucky enough to be the beneficiaries of freedom of speech and barrels of cheap ink.

So, here’s the deal.  I’m going to write.  Because I want to.  And whether good or not, qualified or not, whether people think I’m riding on Andy’s considerable coattails to which I have no right, I’m going to be blunt and call it AndyRooney’sTorch.   Except it will have to be AndyRooneysTorch, without the apostrophe, because symbols like that throw the world wide web into a tizzy.  And that would have pissed Andy off and he would have gotten a column out of it.  Or two.

This will have to change, of course, when his estate sues me, or even threatens to.  But, til then, I’m going with it.

Andy Rooney, according to CBS colleague Steve Hartman’s report, did 1097 essays.  If I write one a week  -- though probably not as good, and probably not ever televised, certainly by a major network --  in 22 years I will have done more than he (I hope that math is right, I’m an English major). 

And I will not yet be 92.  We will see where my eyebrows will be then.  I am betting my psyche will be in a better place.  And my heart will be a little lighter, at least.

1096 to tie, 1097 to win.

(Any other writers out there care to join me?  Game on!  It’ll be a win-win.)