Andy Rooney's Daily Pleasure
This story was first published on March 15, 2009.
The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney.
I've been working in the same office for 30 years now, if you can call this work. We get eight newspapers every day and I keep them where they're easy to get at. We get The New York Times, the Daily News, the New York Post, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsday and The New York Observer. I don't read all of them, I just get them.
We figured it would take anyone a couple of days to read just one edition of The New York Times, so if you read all of it, you'd get behind every day when another paper came before you'd finished the one that came the day before.
Reading the paper every morning is one of the high points of my day and I'm worried. I don't like to say so, but some papers have gone out of business and more papers are going to go out of business. I don't think saying so is going to make them go any faster.
You may know me from television, but I write a newspaper column for the Tribune Media Syndicate and my relationship to newspapers goes back to before there was television when I was 12 years old. I loved newspapers then and I love them now.
I used to deliver 27 newspapers near our house in Albany, N.Y. Each paper cost the customer a nickel a day and I got a nickel a week for each of them from the distributor, so I was making $1.35 a week. Not bad. I don't want CBS to hear this because they'd probably think that was about right.
Three of us, Alfie Gordon, Bobbie Reidy and I saved what we made delivering newspapers and shoveling snow or raking leaves and went to the movies every Saturday. We always sat in the same seats. Every theater had an organist who played before the movie began. I wish they'd bring back the organ, Buck Rogers, Lorna Doone and double features. I'd start going to the movies again, after I read the newspaper.
Written by Andy Rooney