Andy Rooney was an Albany native, an often listless student, a military journalist who witnessed D-Day and toured Nazi death camps, and finally a nationally known curmudgeon whose commentaries capped episodes of “60 Minutes” during the decades when it defined television news. This excerpt from Paul Grondahl’s new biography “Andy Rooney: A Lucky Life” (out this week from SUNY Press) describes another side of Rooney: the paterfamilias with a certain heedlessness about personal safety, and a man who came perilously close to achieving his dream of performing an emergency tracheotomy. For more on “A Lucky Life,” read Jack Rightmyer’s Q&A with Grondahl in today’s Unwind section.
Brian Rooney joked at his dad’s memorial service that Andy Rooney did not heed the “measure twice, cut once” rule of woodworking.
He made twin beds one year but forgot to measure them for a single mattress. As a result, he had to order expensive custom mattresses. His bullheaded nature got him into trouble in other ways. He tried his hand at making wine one year when his children were young, without paying attention to wine-making tips. He figured he knew what to do and poured the wine in bottles before it had finished the fermentation process.
“At three or four in the morning, we heard wine bottles exploding in the basement,” Brian Rooney recalled…