Andy Rooney_ 60 Years Of Wisdom And Wit Part 1

Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit.

by Rooney, Andy.

Introduction.

by Brian Rooney.

It was not clear to me as a child what a writer does for a living. I thought my father just took the train to New York every morning before I was awake and came back in time for dinner. I was aware that he knew some famous people in radio and television, but he was not famous himself. I didn't have a clue what he did.

I went through most of grade school in the 1950s and 1960s with a pair of high black Keds and one pair of blue jeans that I wore every day until they ripped out and my mother bought another pair. I didn't know for many years that at the time it was about all my parents could afford.

My father made his living by the only thing he knew how to do, which was putting words on paper. He was blunt, outspoken, and opinionated. It turns out that he was paid money for being that way. But as a writer he lived by principles that often put his career and family at risk. Sometimes he was fired for what he said, and more than once he quit in disagreement with his bosses. He believes in thought, the written word, and that a person should stand for something more than his own good.

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 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 b.u.mper, 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 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. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Introduction by Brian Rooney.

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 with cans of paint that have turned solid, several C-rations he brought home from World War II, dead tennis b.a.l.l.s, a pair of hickory skis with bear trap bindings, and the rubber rain boots I wore in sixth grade. I'm sure there's a Brooks Brothers tie he tucked on the shelf after cleaning out his car in 1972. He has Ball jars filled with odd nuts and bolts, bottles of glue, and wooden tennis rackets. It's a mixture of useful junk, memories, and things he just can't stand to throw away.

He does not fuss about his looks. He buys good clothes but is permanently rumpled. You could put him in an Armani suit right off the rack and he would look as if he had slept in it. He is not inclined to ornamentation in his person, or in his writing. He is fond of quoting Th.o.r.eau that "if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground." He writes in simple declarative sentences that bear no excess. His clothes are wrinkled but his sentences are not.

As a writer, and as a man, he thinks he can create his own world. He doesn't care much for reading, except the New York Times New York Times. He likes to say, "I'm a writer, not a reader." He does not read fiction and I suspect he has read only a few books cover to cover since he was in college, and maybe not even then. His primary contribution to culture in the family was bringing home a 45 rpm copy of Del Shannon's "Hats Off to Larry." He says, "I am not interested in being diverted from my own thoughts." He doesn't like listening to music or going to the Broadway theater, although he has had season tickets to the New York Giants most of his xviii Introduction by Brian Rooney Introduction by Brian Rooney adult life. His genius as a writer is not knowing much about what anyone else says or thinks. It's knowing exactly what he he thinks. thinks.

Like good writing, he also knows good furniture and food and has worked to make his own, with varying success. He has a collection of expensive tools and piles of beautiful wood. He makes furniture, but if he makes a four-legged table, one leg is likely to be a tad short. He is impatient with details so when he makes a mistake he doesn't start over, he patches with glue, putty, and s.h.i.+ms and keeps going. His pleasure is more in having the idea and doing the work than having the finished piece.

He is an excellent cook and rarely uses a recipe. His popovers may be the best anywhere in America: tall and hollow, crisp on the outside, b.u.t.tery on the inside. He can grill a steak to the perfect pink, make Beef Stroganoff and curried shrimp. He believes there are few things that cannot be made better with salt, garlic, and b.u.t.ter. He makes his own ice cream because that's what you did growing up during the Depression, and it's always fun to lick the paddles when it's done. He makes peppermint ice cream for Christmas.

He is absentminded. One night, back when $ 100 was serious money and he didn't have much, he paid a taxi driver with a hundred dollar bill, thinking it was a single. Making chicken soup with the pressure cooker, he forgot about it until the top blew, spraying greasy broth all over the kitchen walls. He still refers to it as "The Great Chicken Soup Disaster." One year he made wine and corked it in soda bottles. That winter we would wake up in the middle of the night to m.u.f.fled explosions in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

My father resists authority. He doesn't like bosses or people in uniform. Sometimes in New York, just for fun, he'd hail a police car and when it stopped he would say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were a taxi." Several times he has been arrested while standing up to cops who overstepped their authority, only to be kicked loose by the desk sergeant.

He has lived by a series of rules he set for himself and people around him. He says, "There are standards in this world." His rules are a mixture of low-brow philosophy and simple maxims for an orderly life that have both literal and figurative meaning. When we were kids he'd in Introduction by Brian Rooney xix xix struct us: "The last one in at night turn out the light over the garage." Anyone who didn't 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 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 [image]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 people, good and bad, so it can't be luck. The process by which each of us acquires a reputation isn't independent of our character. It almost always depends more on the decisions we make than on chance occurrences.

The trouble with this smug thesis is that anyone crossing a street can be hit by a truck and the accident alters the person's life no matter how wise he or she was in making choices, so we can't claim luck never enters in. Maybe my life wouldn't have been much different if "Doc" Armstrong hadn't owned the pharmacy and been head of the draft board in the pleasant college town of Hamilton, New York.

It was sometime in May and there were still a few weeks of cla.s.ses left of my junior year at Colgate University. My life was never the same again.

Most of my cla.s.smates had registered for the draft in their hometowns. Thinking the draft board in a college town would be sympathetic to the idea of letting students finish college before serving, I had chosen to register in Hamilton instead of in my hometown, Albany.

I had come to Colgate fresh out of The Albany Academy, a private school. My friends at public school thought The Academy was elitist, which I thought was wrong at the time. Now I think they were right but that there's a case to be made for the kind of elitism that existed there. In some part, at least, it was excellence. The Academy was an exceptionally fine secondary school that graduated a high percentage of people who succeeded in making good lives for themselves. Everyone in the senior cla.s.s, known at The Academy as the Sixth Form, went on to college. The other boys and girls in Albany thought of us as rich kids because the tuition was $400 a year. Some few cla.s.smates were from rich families and no one let them forget it. We kidded Walter Stephens about being brought to school every day in a chauffeur-driven Pierce Arrow and our remarks to him were not very good-natured. In a world where everyone strives to make money, it's strange that a family with a breadwinner who achieves that goal is stigmatized and charged with the epithet "Rich!"

My father's $ 8,000 a year was considered good money during the Great Depression. When I was eight or nine, we moved out of a respectable middle-cla.s.s house in the residential heart of Albany to a much nicer one with chestnut woodwork, a fireplace, and downstairs playroom, still in the city but further out. In addition to that home in Albany, we owned a cottage on Lake George, seventy miles north. There we had a Fay-Bowen, a cla.s.sic old wooden boat, and I had my own outboard attached to a st.u.r.dy rowboat. My sister, Nancy, had a canoe. She wanted a fur cape for Christmas when she was seventeen but she didn't get that.

Dad traveled through the South for the Albany Felt Company as a salesman and he was worldly wise but my mother ran things. Part of her expertise was making Dad think he was boss. She was a great mother to have and I've often wondered how she was able to get so much satisfaction from doing for us what so many mothers today do without satisfaction. She liked to play bridge but I don't think she ever read a book. Being a mother was her full-time occupation.

Life at The Academy was very good. We used the school almost like a country club, often meeting there on Sat.u.r.day morning to use the facilities or plan our day if we didn't have a team game scheduled. The Academy was not a military school, but it was founded in 1812 and during the Civil War it had formed a student battalion. The tradition was continued and once a week for about an hour and a half we put on funny old Civil Warstyle formal uniforms and marched in practice for Albany parades and our own compet.i.tive Guidon Drill. It was my first brush with military life. Although it was years before the thought occurred to me that I'd ever serve in the U.S. Army, I learned to detest everything about anything military at an early age. One day when we were to parade on the football field, I refused to march because I claimed it would damage the carefully kept field.

In the student battalion, everyone's aim was to become an officer in his Sixth Form year. The choices were made by two military aides who came to the school just once a week and a committee from the regular faculty. Shortly before the choices were to be made as to who the officers would be, Colonel Dormer, the school's military adviser who was with the New York State National Guard, lined up the Fifth Formers in the battalion and said that anyone who did not want to be considered for a position as one of the officers in his senior year should step forward.

It put me in a terrible spot. Everyone wanted to be an officer. I wanted to be one but my negative att.i.tude toward the battalion was so well known to everyone that the colonel was, in a way, challenging me to put up or shut up. I had no choice but to step forward as the only person in the school announcing that he did not want to be considered for the honor of being an officer in the battalion.

The colonel thanked me for being honest and dismissed us. It was lucky for me that several teachers on the faculty disliked the battalion as much as I did. When the announcement of their choice for officers was made three days later, my name was on the list. Because I was captain of the football team, president of the Beck Literary Society, and "one of the guys," it would have been difficult for them to leave me off the list because it would have called for an explanation to the younger kids in the school. And then some of the faculty members like Herbert Hahn were my friends. They knew, even though I had stepped forward in that bravado gesture, that I desperately wanted to be chosen. (Mr. Hahn otherwise distinguished himself in my eyes by stating in cla.s.s one day in about 1936, "Hitler will get nowhere in Germany.") The only problem for me at The Academy was that my marks were poor. That was a constant problem. My mother always signed my report cards and hid them from my father when he returned from a trip because she knew Dad would be angry about them. He had successfully made his way from the tiny b.a.l.l.ston Spa High School to Williams College and he couldn't understand my bad grades. Although I was puzzled over them, I never gave in to the idea that I was stupid even though there was some evidence of that. There were things I did well and it was easy for me to think about those and ignore failing marks in Latin, geometry, and French. It was further depressing evidence of how much we're like ourselves all day long, all our years. I still see traces of the way I performed in The Academy at age sixteen in things I do today. We're trapped with what we have and with what we have not. No amount of resolve changes our character. I do a lot of woodworking as a hobby and, considering how different the craft is from writing, it's interesting-and sometimes discouraging-for me to note, in introspective moments, how close my strengths and weaknesses in making a chest of drawers are to the strengths and weaknesses in my writing. I feel the same helplessness with my shortcomings on paper and in my shop as I do when it occurs to me that I'm overweight, not primarily because I eat too much but that I eat too much primarily because of some genetic shortcoming I got from my father and share with my sister.

Football was one of the things I liked best at The Academy. We had a good bunch of fellows on the team and a coach known as "Country" Morris who was just right. He knew the game and he was a decent man who expected decency from all of us. He had been a football star at the University of Maryland and he looked just the way a coach should look on the football field with his leather-elbowed jacket and his baseball cap pulled down over his eyebrows and c.o.c.ked at a jaunty angle.

I was five feet nine inches, weighed 175 pounds, and played guard on offense and tackle on defense. Because of the att.i.tude other kids in town had toward us at The Academy, it was particularly satisfying to beat one of the public high schools or a parochial school, and we did that quite often during the four years I played. My friend Bob Baker was a good football player but his family fell on hard times and he had to leave The Academy in the Fourth Form and go to Albany High and then play against us.

I was in or near tears for three days after the high-school game my senior year. We were undefeated during the season and heavy favorites to beat the high school. The high-school game ended in a scoreless tie and it was as if we had lost fifty to nothing. It seemed so important. Bob Baker was exultant and I suppose it took away some of the pain of his having had to leave The Academy.

In college, I soon realized I had conflicting interests. I was interested in writing, football, and philosophy. I thought I wanted to be a writer but didn't know where to start. What is called "English" in college is generally disappointing to anyone interested in learning how to write because, while I enjoyed having to read Byron, the English courses I was taking didn't have anything to do with learning how to put words down on paper in an interesting way. The courses I was getting were in English reading, not English writing. I didn't know at the time that you can't teach someone how to write. And I was discouraged to find grammar and English usage so much more complex than I'd previously thought it then to be.

Looking back at some of the things I wrote for Porter Perrin's "creative writing" cla.s.ses, it's difficult to know why he thought I was worth encouraging. A good teacher hands out more encouragement than pupils deserve as a matter of teaching technique. You hear it from the teacher on the tennis court next to you. "Nice shot!" he says to the pupil who finally gets one over the net. Mr. Perrin did that with me and at least it gave me enough confidence, false though it may have been, to keep going.

Philosophy was all new to me. I had not known there were ideas like the ones we argued over in cla.s.s. The great philosophers seemed to be maddeningly fair and indecisive, always too willing to consider another explanation. I had not known there was such a thing as pure thought for thought's sake only, independent of any practical result of having had it. I was fascinated by the application of philosophy to religion and became more convinced than ever that the mysteries of life, death, and the universe were insoluble and that G.o.d was as much a question as an answer.

Football was the thing I knew most about although some of the courses were easy. I took a biology course that was almost identical to, but simpler than, one I'd pa.s.sed in The Academy. This was a freshman's dream come true.

At The Academy the linemen had already begun to trap block, which was considered a fairly sophisticated maneuver at the time, but my career as a football player at Colgate was checkered. I'd been heavy enough to be good in high school, but now at 185 pounds going up against linemen weighing 220 and 230 was a different experience. The first time I tried to move Hans Guenther out of the hole I was supposed to make for the fullback, Hans grabbed me by the shoulder pads, threw me aside, and tackled the fullback behind the line of scrimmage. Colgate had had an all-American guard a few years before my cla.s.s who weighed even less than I did. The press had picked up the Colgate publicist's phrase "watch-charm guard" to describe him and it caught on. He was small but very fast and quick-not the same thing on the football field. The freshman coach, Razor Watkins, thought he had another watch-charm guard in me because I was small. He was not prepared for a player who was small and neither fast nor quick.

No matter how I did on the field, I was determined not to be a jock and let football dominate my life. A lot of the young men on the team were scholars.h.i.+p players who had been recruited to play football. They seemed crude to me and I became more aware than I had been at The Academy that I'd led a sheltered high-school life. None of my friends there had smoked, we didn't say "s.h.i.+t" or "f.u.c.k," and we didn't sleep with our girlfriends. s.e.x was only a rumor to us. I felt a sense of superiority that I recall now with a mixture of pride and embarra.s.sment. I was right but it was self-righteous of me to think so.

It was nonetheless true though that college often brings out the worst in perfectly good young men and women. First-rate colleges like Colgate that get three times as many applicants as they can accept choose what they think are the best prospects. Go to one of those colleges on a party weekend and you wonder what the college applicants who weren't selected must be like if these young people attending the college are the cream of the crop.

I don't know what happens, but too often kids who have been bright and decent in high school turn into something else in college. I remember hearing of "Pig Night" at Yale where club residents were expected to bring a woman to the party who'd lay anybody. Colgate had fraternities, and there's some collective evil spirit that prevails in many fraternities and clubs. They offer sanctuary for boors and boorishness.

Colgate didn't bring out the best in me. I liked several of the teachers and their courses but I felt superior to a lot of what I saw there because I was looking at superficial things about the college and the students. It had a lot to do with my getting involved with a pacifist movement there.

Toward the end of my freshman year, I joined the Sigma Chi fraternity even though I felt the fraternity idea was foolish. Our house had been one of the fine old homes in town, and the fraternity had divided it up into a clutch of rabbit warrens that housed fifty of us in near-slum conditions. It was a good group of young men though, and it was an economically and socially practical way to live. The whole hocus-pocus of the fraternity mystique was foolish but dividing a campus up into groups of forty or fifty students and letting them work out their own food and housing is not a bad system.

For many years now I've returned all the Sigma Chi material that comes my way from the national headquarters with a note DECEASED on the envelope but nothing discourages the national organization from trying to honor anyone like me who they think might give them money.

When I got to college my marks improved dramatically, not through any genetic transformation but because I chose courses suited to a deformed intellect. This was one of the changes college life brought me. Another way I hoped to prove I wasn't a jock was by deciding to take piano lessons between cla.s.ses and football practice. The wife of one of the professors undertook, at $2 for each one-hour lesson, to teach me. During my first lesson, I recall thinking that I clearly had more potential as a football player than I had as a musician. Piano playing didn't come easily to me. The teacher was quite a pretty woman and I was disappointed at myself, considering my motive for taking the lessons, for being thrilled when she put her hand over mine to move it over the keys. I found myself thinking more of the professor's wife than of the piano.

My third day of piano lessons turned out to be my last. I went directly from that lesson to football practice. It was a game-style scrimmage between the second team and the first team. During the second half of the scrimmage that day, I was playing opposite Bill Chernokowski, one of those gorilla-like athletes whose weight was mostly at or above the waist. He had short, relatively small legs and a huge torso with stomach to match. There are potbellied men who are surprisingly strong and athletic and "Cherno" was one of those. At 260 pounds he was the heaviest man on the squad.

As things turned out, it didn't matter where he carried most of his weight. When he stepped on the back of my right hand in the middle of the third quarter, that ended, for all time, any thought I might have had of being another Vladimir Horowitz.

At our fiftieth cla.s.s reunion I had to revise my long-held opinion of Bill Chernokowski when I learned that his daughter was an outstanding cellist and Bill had season tickets to the New York Philharmonic. I couldn't have been more surprised, as my friend Charlie Sloc.u.m used to say, if I'd seen Albert Payson Terhune kick a collie.

Football became less important to me as I realized I was never going to be an all-American player. My career as a pianist now over, I began to think more about writing. There were two professors who interested me.

One was Porter Perrin, who was writing a book called Writer's Guide and Index to English. Writer's Guide and Index to English. He became the closest thing I had to a friend on the faculty. The other was a Quaker iconoclast, Kenneth Boulding, who taught economics for the university and pacifism for his own satisfaction at night in meetings with students at his home. I don't know firsthand that he was brilliant; but it is an adjective that almost everyone used in referring to him. He became the closest thing I had to a friend on the faculty. The other was a Quaker iconoclast, Kenneth Boulding, who taught economics for the university and pacifism for his own satisfaction at night in meetings with students at his home. I don't know firsthand that he was brilliant; but it is an adjective that almost everyone used in referring to him.

When the college opened after preseason football, I had cla.s.ses with both men. Boulding stammered badly and even though you knew it shouldn't have, it influenced the way you thought about him. During a cla.s.s lecture, you were driven to pay careful attention because of the difficulty of following his broken speech. He was always surprising us, too. He'd be expounding some theory of economics that we barely understood when suddenly he'd drop in some mildly witty or unexpected remark. The cla.s.s would erupt in raucous laughter, more from the sense of relief the cla.s.s felt when Boulding got it out than by the humorous content of it.

When Boulding posted a notice on the bulletin board about a meeting of all those opposed to our entry into the war, I took that second opportunity to separate myself from the other football players and started going to his meetings. For some reason opposing the war seemed like an intellectual stand to take. It still seemed that way to Vietnam protesters. It was almost like not watching television now. There's a whole subculture in America of people who are proud of themselves for not watching television. They take every opportunity to tell anyone they can get to listen. I suffered something like that syndrome in opposing the war.

Boulding was a good teacher. The best teachers are not the ones who know most about the subject. The best teachers are the ones who are most interested in something something-anything, and not necessarily the subject they teach. Boulding was consumed with the idea of pacifism and I've often thought of him as a good example of how little it matters that a college teacher is professing theories that are counter to popular and acceptable ideas of economics, religion, race, or government. His students were constantly propagandized by him but they ended up sorting things out for themselves. Being exposed to a communist professor in the 1930s didn't make communists of many students. Being exposed to the pacifist ideas of Kenneth Boulding didn't do his students any harm although if the parents of many of my cla.s.smates had sat in on some of those evening sessions in Boulding's home, they might have been reluctant to pay the next tuition bill to Colgate.

Quakers, like Christian Scientists, are frequently such decent, gentle, and seemingly reasonable people that they are not often considered to be religious fanatics. But they are generally more zealous than other Christians-most of whom, G.o.d knows, are zealous enough. The further a religion is from mainstream, the more devoted its followers are likely to be to it, and Quakers are down a long little rivulet.

Boulding may have been an economics genius, but he was definitely a religious nut. I was caught up with some of his ideas before I knew that and became convinced of the truth of one of his statements I've since seen attributed to both Plato and Benjamin Franklin: "Any peace is better than any war." I liked that a lot.

It was Boulding's contention that the conflict in Europe was none of the United States' business and even if it had been, war was an immoral way to pursue interests. The argument made sense to me, which gives you some idea how sensible I was when I was twenty.

On September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland to begin World War II, I was in Hamilton where I'd arrived three weeks before cla.s.ses began for football practice under the legendary head coach, Andy Kerr. I was so consumed with the game that one of the most momentous events in all history, Hitler's blitzkrieg, barely got my attention. I'd buy the New York Times New York Times several days a week but I didn't read much of it. several days a week but I didn't read much of it.

n.a.z.iS TAKE BREST-LITOVSK.

TURKS Ma.s.s ON SYRIAN BORDER.

I couldn't have told you what country Brest-Litovsk was in nor did I have any idea what disagreement the Turks had with the Syrians.

It still was ten years before Senator Joseph McCarthy aroused the moderate and liberal population to protest his demagogic effort to expose and make jobless any American who ever had a conciliatory thought about socialism or communism. Before the war the isolationist Congressman Martin Dies Jr. of Texas had already formed an Un-American Activities Committee that was McCarthy's forerunner. Isolationism was a popular movement, and outside the House it was organized as a group with the populist name "America First."

I partic.i.p.ated in a debating society contest and the issue of the argument was "Resolved, that the American Press should be under the control of a Federal Press Commission." I'm pleased to be able to report that I was on the right side of that argument although I think the sides were chosen by a flip of a coin. We won the debate, but the fact that it could have been proposed as a subject for debate says something about the times-and we didn't have any easy time winning. The proposition would not be seriously considered today.

I didn't want to go to Europe to fight and die for what seemed to me to be someone else's cause. I hear the faint, far-away-and-long-ago echo of my own voice every time a congressman proclaims that "we shouldn't sacrifice the life of a single American boy" when the question comes up about our moving in to save a few hundred thousand poor souls being slaughtered in some foreign land. I decided I must be a Conscientious Objector. It was always capitalized because it was a formally recognized category of draft resisters.

This was when "Doc" Armstrong ended up forcing my hand, although he couldn't have known it since I'd never spoken with him. I had no idea that "Doc," the friendly, homespun tradesman with the goldrimmed spectacles, was the head of the draft board. If "Doc" was around today, he could step into a role as the druggist in any pharmaceutical company's television commercial. His was the first drugstore I'd ever seen that didn't have a soda fountain, and that should have made me realize that "Doc" was a no-nonsense guy. There was something else I didn't know about "Doc" that I learned later. He was commander of the Madison County chapter of the American Legion and thought that every red-blooded American boy should serve his country-as he had in World War I-and right now.

He was not impressed by my attempt to delay enlisting by registering in Hamilton instead of Albany. It seemed to me as though I'd been hit by a truck the day I got the draft notice, sometime in May, a few weeks before the end of my junior year, stating I was to report for duty in the United States Army.

I had long, soph.o.m.oric, philosophical discussions with my friends about resisting the draft. A young man I'd been in school with at The Albany Academy, Allen Winslow, had already refused to serve and was the first person to go to prison for that offense during World War II. I admired him.

Unwilling as I was, over the few months I had between the time I was drafted and the day I had to report, I wisely concluded that I probably wasn't smart enough to be a Conscientious Objector even though I [image]As a young Stars and Stripes Stars and Stripes reporter in England reporter in England agreed with those who were. All the Conscientious Objectors I knew, like Boulding, seemed bright, deep, introspective, and a little strange. I liked those traits in a person even though I didn't have them myself.

One of my dominating characteristics has always been that I'm not strange. I'm average in so many ways that it eliminates any chance I ever had of being considered a brooding, introspective intellectual.

When Boulding died in 1993, several people wrote me saying I'd been unfair in some of the things I'd said about him. Our opinions of people tend to alter slowly over the years and, if we don't update our relations.h.i.+p by talking to them, become untrue. I have opinions of a great many people that must be unfair and untrue, but I've repeated them so often they're set in my mind and serve my purpose when I'm casting characters for stories that ill.u.s.trate a point. My opinion of Kenneth Boulding settled and changed moderately over the years without my having come on any new facts to justify the change. It may not be accurate. On the other hand, of course, it may be be accurate. accurate.

After months of anguis.h.i.+ng over it I realized that, while I was an objector, I could not honestly claim to be a conscientious one. On July 7, 1941, I reported for duty.

Meeting Marge.

I'd been writing to Marge Howard, a girl I'd first met in Mrs. Munson's dancing cla.s.s when we were thirteen. We had gone together, off and on, all through high school and college. I'd frequently made the drive from Colgate to Bryn Mawr, outside Philadelphia, where she was in college. She still points out that she was a year ahead of me in college although a year behind in age. It was a seven-hour drive each way and that took a lot of time out of the weekend.

One Friday afternoon I'd left after my one o'clock cla.s.s and was driving a little too fast somewhere between New York and Philadelphia. In order to get to Bryn Mawr by 6 p.m. I was saving time by changing my clothes as I drove. This was before highways were "super" and at a time when all state policemen rode Indian motorcycles. A lot of the young men who showed up at Bryn Mawr on weekends were from nearby Princeton and, in order to fit in and conceal my Colgate affiliation, I had brought gray flannel slacks and a sports jacket and I wore Spaulding dirty white bucks (from buckskin) with red rubber soles. They were part of the Ivy League uniform of the era. It was said of a well-dressed Princeton student, "He's really 'shoe.'"

With my knees raised, I was holding the steering wheel on a straight course while I pulled my old corduroy pants down around my ankles with my two hands in antic.i.p.ation of changing them for the gray flannels. I knew when I saw the flas.h.i.+ng red light on the trooper's motorcycle behind me that I was in big trouble. The corduroys were in a never-never land, half on and half off, and when the cop came up to the side of my car and looked in the window he must have decided I was not only a speeder but a s.e.x pervert. He ordered me to follow him to the house of a justice of the peace, with whom I a.s.sumed he had a business arrangement, and I paid a cash fine of $12, which was all but a few dollars of the money I had.

M argie graduated in the spring of 1941, a short time before I got my draft notice, and she was using her Bryn Mawr degree in art history to teach French, a language about which she knew very little, in a girls' school in Albany. In February or March we decided, long distance and me on a pay phone, to get married. I forget why we thought it was a good idea. Most of our friends were delaying marriage until after the war.

There was a major family argument over who would perform the ceremony. I was already set in disbelief and Margie, although brought up Catholic, had stopped going to church when she was sixteen. Margie's mother had always served fish on Fridays and was a serious ma.s.s-going Catholic. She was adamant that her daughter be married "in the church."

My mother's strongest religious belief was that she was not Catholic. She had always gone to great pains to point out that, even with the name Rooney, we were Presbyterians. My father and mother both grew up in the small town of b.a.l.l.ston Spa, New York, and there had been a moderate influx of Irish immigrants to the area in the late 1800s. My mother's parents were English and my father's had come from Scotland although their Irishness was not far behind them. When my father and mother were growing up, most of the Irish in b.a.l.l.ston were doing what first-generation immigrants have traditionally done in America- working at menial jobs and doing the housework for the establishment. It was a desire to distance herself from them that produced this Irish denial in my mother. It made me understand how benign prejudice can be at its inception.

After a lot of letter writing and telephoning during which we tried to come to some amicable agreement, Margie's father, an eminently sensi [image]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 d.a.m.n 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, a.s.sumed that Margie was Catholic through the circ.u.mstance 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."