Andrew Aitken Rooney (January 14, 1919 â€" November 4, 2011) was an
American radio and television writer who was best known for his weekly
broadcast "A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney", a part of the CBS News
program 60 Minutes from 1978 to 2011. His final regular appearance on
60 Minutes aired on October 2, 2011; he died a month later at the age
of 92.Andrew Aitken Rooney was born in Albany, New York, the son of
Walter Scott Rooney (1888â€"1959) and Ellinor (Reynolds) Rooney
(1886â€"1980). He attended The Albany Academy, and later attended
Colgate University in Hamilton in central New York, where he was
initiated into the Sigma Chi fraternity, before he was drafted into
the United States Army in August 1941.Rooney began his career in
newspapers in 1942 while in the Army where he began writing for Stars
and Stripes in London. He was one of six correspondents who flew on
the second American bombing raid over Germany in February 1943, flying
with the Eighth Air Force. He was the first journalist to reach the
Ludendorff Bridge after the 9th Armored Division captured it on March
7, 1945. He was 32 km (20 mi) to the west when he heard that the
bridge had been captured. "It was a reporter's dream," he wrote. "One
of the great stories of the war had fallen into my lap." The bridge
capture was front-page news in America. Rooney rated the capture of
the bridge as one of the top five events of the entire European war,
alongside D-Day.He was one of the first American journalists to visit
the Nazi concentration camps near the end of World War II, and one of
the first to write about them. During a segment on Tom Brokaw's The
Greatest Generation, Rooney stated that he had been opposed to World
War II because he was a pacifist. He recounted that what he saw in
those concentration camps made him ashamed that he had opposed the war
and permanently changed his opinions about whether "just wars" exist. Andy Rooney Biography, NetWorth, Height, Age, Weight, Family, Married, Son, Daughter