Andy Rooney really did have a point

     I'm going to miss Andy Rooney. I said that when he signed off with his last on-camera column last month, and I have to say I wasn't surprised to hear that he died this past week.
     In that last 60 Minutes piece, he said he wasn't going to retire, because writers don't retire. They may not be on the payroll any more, and some might argue that anyone who is 92 is past his time, perhaps irrelevant, but really wise people know better. I'm one of the wiser people on this. I can relate to Andy Rooney.
     Some people have complained for years that Rooney was no longer relevant, perhaps never had been relevant, as far as real journalists go. But Andy wrote about people, and people are always relevant.
     A lot of things that people do and say are irrelevant, and Andy was at his best when he was pointing that out. I like to do that, too, and I've even had people tell me I'm just like him; I suspect they were not fans of Andy Rooney.
     Andy was not the first columnist, of course, and not the first one to write the kinds of things that he did. He actually started on 60 Minutes as a staff writer, not a commentator, and did not start doing his columns on television until 1978.
     Those who said I just copied Andy were not aware that I started writing columns like that in 1969, first for the Hanover Evening Sun, and then for the Carroll County Times in the mid-1970s, when it was still a weekly. If I was influenced by anybody, it was the late Jim Bishop, Reporter. That's how he signed his Hearst Syndicated column; Jim Bishop, Reporter, because he had worked a beat, and even when he moved over to the column, he said he was still reporting on the human condition.
     He had a pal at Hearst named Bob Considine who would write a pretty good "people" column, too. They wrote books; Bishop wrote The Day Christ Died, and The Day Lincoln Was Shot, almost as if he was a reporter covering the events. I think he won the Nobel, or the Pulitzer, or some big prize like that, and Considine had a wall full of plaques, too, but that's not why they wrote the kinds of columns they did. I think they knew that by illuminating even the abject silliness of people, they were validating the humanity of all of us.
     Small truths add up to more than large opinions. Andy Rooney knew that. And life is short, even if you string it out to 92 years, as he did. He was a war reporter in Europe when I was in diapers; 25 years later, I was doing the same job in Asia.
     The actors come and go, but the human drama is the longest running show on the planet.