Former ‘60 Minutes’ commentator Andy Rooney dies

NEW YORK (AP) ― Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator who spent more than 30 years wryly talking about the oddities of life for the TV news magazine “60 Minutes,” died Friday night, CBS said. He was 92.

Just a month ago, Rooney delivered his last regular essay on the CBS news magazine.

CBS said he died Friday night in New York from complications from a recent surgery.

Rooney, also a syndicated newspaper columnist, talked about what was in the news. But he was just as likely to use his weekly television essay to discuss the old clothes in his closet, why banks need to have important-sounding names or whether there was a real Mrs. Smith who made Mrs. Smith’s Pies.

He won four Emmy Awards, including one for his story revealing there was no Mrs. Smith.

Rooney began his “60 Minutes” commentaries in 1978 and was still at it three decades later, railing about how unpleasant air travel had become. “Let’s make a statement to the airlines just to get their attention.

We’ll pick a week next year and we’ll all agree not to go anywhere for seven days,” he told viewers.

“I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn’t realize they thought,” Rooney once said. “And they say, ‘Hey, yeah!’ And they like that.”

For many years, “60 Minutes” improbably was the most popular program on U.S. television and a dose of Rooney was what Americans came to expect for a knowing smile on the night before they had to go back to work.

In early 2009, as he was about to turn 90, he looked ahead to Barack Obama’s upcoming inauguration with a look at past inaugurations. He told viewers that Calvin Coolidge’s 1925 swearing-in was the first to be broadcast on radio, adding, “That may have been the most interesting thing Coolidge ever did.”

“Words cannot adequately express Andy’s contribution to the world of journalism and the impact he made ― as a colleague and a friend ― upon everybody at CBS,” said Leslie Moonves, CBS Corp. president and CEO.