Andy Rooney Hospitalized with After-Surgery Complications

Andy Rooney delivered his last "60 Minutes" commentary on Oct. 2nd, titled "My Lucky Life," and he may be fighting for his life, hospitalized on Tuesday after developing serious complications following surgery.

[You can watch his final essay here, as well as read a transcript.]

CBS said Andy Rooney is in stable condition. At the request of his family, the network gave no additional information about his medical condition. They also did not announced where Rooney has been hospitalized.

Wikipedia says: His wife, Marguerite "Margie" Rooney (née Howard), died in 2004 of heart failure, after 62 years of marriage. Rooney later wrote, "her name does not appear as often as it originally did [in my essays] because it hurts too much to write it." He has four children, including a daughter, Emily Rooney, who is a TV talk show host and former ABC News producer; she currently hosts a nightly Boston-area public affairs program, Greater Boston, on WGBH. Emily's identical twin, Martha, is Chief of the Public Services Division at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. The third daughter, Ellen, is a photographer based in London. His son, Brian Rooney, has been a correspondent for ABC since the 1980s.

Andy Rooney’s first "60 Minutes" essay appeared on July 2, 1978. It was a complaint about people who kept track of how many people died in auto accidents over holiday weekends. It had been scheduled to be a temporary "bit." "A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney" (originally "Three Minutes or So With Andy Rooney") began its life in 1978 as a summer replacement feature for the debate segment "Point / Counterpoint," which featured James Kilpatrick and Shana Alexander. The feature proved popular, and when the fall returned, and the debate segment as well, Rooney's segment was seen in alternate weeks with the debate segment. At the end of the 1978-79 season, "Point / Counterpoint" was dropped.

His last feature, on Oct. 2, was his 1,097th such commentary, and was, as we said, called "My Lucky Life." On it, he said, "I wish I could do this forever. I can't, though."

It's unclear if the surgery mentioned in CBS' statement had anything to do with his retirement. While his life has been lucky thus far, as he said in his final commentary, we hope he has many more years. Once again, you can watch his final essay here, as well as read a transcript.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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