Andy Rooney_ 60 Years Of Wisdom And Wit Part 5

1st Exhibitor: Well, it stretches out products like tuna salad by about 30 percent.

Rooney: What do they use it in, in addition to tuna fish?

1st Exhibitor: It goes into egg salads. It's used to extend all kinds of meats, either uncooked as meat patties or it might go into precooked entrees . . . sloppy Joes, chili con carne.

Rooney: Is it any good?

1st Exhibitor: What kind of a question is that?

Rooney: Now, what is this here?

2nd Exhibitor: These are our Morning Star inst.i.tutional link sausagelike flavor product.

Rooney: Sausage . . . like?

2nd Exhibitor: Sausage-like flavor.

Rooney: They're artificial sausage?

2nd Exhibitor: They're artificial sausage. They have no cholesterol, no animal fat.

Rooney: What do do they have? they have?

2nd Exhibitor: Well, they're made out of various vegetable proteins . . . soy protein, wheat protein. We use egg alb.u.men to hold it together. Rooney: Are you a chef?

2nd Exhibitor: No. I'm trained as a biochemist.

Rooney: Now what is this machine?

3rd Exhibitor: This is a mechanical meat tenderizer.

Rooney: You put the meat on there?

3rd Exhibitor: Put the meat on here. It'll pa.s.s through underneath the needle. The needle will come down and penetrate the meat and break down the tissue.

Rooney: So a restaurant could buy this and really buy less expensive meat?

3rd Exhibitor: That's right.

Rooney: Now, I would call that orange juice canned. Not fresh.

4th Exhibitor: Fresh frozen.

Rooney: Fresh frozen. Right.

Rooney (looking at ingredients): Now, "standard chicken base." How, do you p.r.o.nounce that ingredient?

5th Exhibitor: It contains hydrolyzed vegetable protein.

Rooney (reads ingredients): "Salt, chicken fat, monosodium glutamate, dehydrated chicken, dextrose, dehydrated vegetable, spices and spice extract, bicalcium phosphate, citric acid."

5th Exhibitor: Right.

Rooney: That's chicken base?

5th Exhibitor: That's right.

Rooney: It tastes like chicken?

5th Exhibitor: Exactly. Four ounces of it tastes like an extra gallon.

Rooney: You put just four ounces of this hydro . . .

5th Exhibitor: And that's the basis for . . . in other words, if you want chicken noodle, you throw noodles in.

Rooney: How many restaurants don't don't use anything like this? use anything like this?

5th Exhibitor: Almost 100 percent of the restaurants use it. If they don't, then you're way on the other side of the . . . You can't exist today.

Rooney: You mean without the artificial stuff?

5th Exhibitor: It's not artificial really. You've got monosodium glutamate. You've got extracts. You've got fats. The real thing mixed with the chemical. This can feed or this can subst.i.tute or feed a thousand people per chicken, where you might have to take a hundred chickens. . . .

Rooney: The chickens must love it.

5th Exhibitor: You're a nice fellow.

Restaurants are one of the few good examples left of really free enterprise in America. There isn't much government control of them and the good ones prosper. The bad ones usually, though not always, go out of business.

The best restaurants are operated by people who like food better than money. The worst ones are run by people who don't know anything about food or or money. money.

So that's our report on eating out in America. The camera crew is glad it's over because they say they're tired of spending their dinner hour watching me eat.

During the time we've been working on it, many friends and others here at CBS have been stopping me in the hallway to ask one question. It's a question I haven't mentioned so far in the broadcast . . .

But the answer, as of this morning . . . fourteen pounds.

In Praise of New York City It's been popular in recent years to suggest that Nature is the perfect condition, that people have done nothing to the earth since they got here but make a mess of it. Well, that's true about some places but untrue about others.

New York City is as amazing in its own way as the Grand Canyon. As a matter of fact, you can't help thinking that maybe Nature would have made New York City look the way it does if it had had the money and the know-how.

When people talk about New York City, they usually mean the part of the city called Manhattan. Manhattan is a narrow rock island twelve miles long. Being an island is an important thing about New York because even though no one thinks much about it from day to day, they have to go to quite a bit of trouble to get on it and off it. This makes being there something of an event and people don't take it so lightly. New York isn't like so many places that just sort of dwindle away until you're out of town. In New York, it's very definite. You're either there or you aren't there.

The twenty-eight bridges and tunnels don't connect Manhattan with New Jersey and the four other boroughs. They're for entering and leaving New York. Where from or where to is of secondary importance. It may be some indication of the significance of the event that it costs $1.50 to cross the George Was.h.i.+ngton Bridge entering New York, nothing to cross leaving it.

The Brooklyn Bridge is a cathedral among bridges. Coming to Manhattan across it every morning is like pa.s.sing through the Sistine Chapel on your way to work. You couldn't be going to an unimportant place.

Although two million people work on the little island, only half a million of those who work there live there. As a result, a million and a half people have to get on it every morning and off it every night. That's a lot of people to push through twenty-eight little tunnels and bridges in an hour or so, but it's this arterial ebb and flow that produces the rhythm to which this heartless city's heart beats. There must be something worth coming for when all those people go to that much trouble to get there.

Although it isn't the outstanding thing about it to the people who live or work there, New York is best known to strangers for what it looks like. And, of course, it looks tall.

The World Trade Center has two towers, each a quarter of a mile high. The New York office worker isn't overwhelmed by the engineering implications of flus.h.i.+ng a toilet 106 floors above the street.

The buildings of the city are best seen from above, as though they were on an architect's easel. It's strange that they were built to look best from an angle at which hardly anyone ever sees them. From the street where the people are, you can't see the buildings for the city. The New Yorker doesn't worry about it because he never looks up.

You have to talk about tall buildings when you talk about New York, but to anyone who has lived for very long with both, the people of the city are of more continuing interest than the architecture. There is some evidence, of course, that the New Yorker isn't all that separate from his environment. If dogs and masters tend to look alike, so probably do cities and their citizens.

The New Yorker takes in New York air. For a short time it trades molecules with his bloodstream and he is part city. And then he exhales and the city is part him. They become inextricably mingled, and it would be strange if the people didn't come to look like the city they inhabit. And to some extent like each other.

While the rest of the nation feels fiercely about New York-they love it or they hate it-New Yorkers feel nothing. They use the city like a familiar tool. They don't defend it from love or hate. They shrug or nod in knowing agreement with almost anything anyone wants to say about it. Maybe this is because it's so hard to say anything about New York that isn't true.

New Yorkers don't brood much, either. They go about their business with a purposefulness that excludes introspection. If the rest of the country says New Yorkers lack pride because they have so little to be proud of, the New Yorker shrugs again. He has no argument with the South or the Midwest or Texas or California. He feels neither superior nor inferior. He just doesn't compare the things in New York with those anywhere else. He doesn't compare the subway with Moscow's or with the Metro in Paris. Both may be better, but neither goes to Brooklyn or Forest Hills and for this reason doesn't interest the New Yorker one way or the other.

New York is essentially a place for working but not everyone works in a gla.s.s cube. The island is crowded with highly individual nests people have made for themselves. There are 100,000 Waldens hidden in the stone and steel caverns.

[image]

At the Stork Club in Manhattan with fellow Arthur G.o.dfrey colleagues; left to right: Andy, Chuck Horner, Mug Richardson, Frank Dodge, Hank Miles The places people work and live are as different as the people. If a Hollywood facade is deceptive because it has nothing behind it, a New York facade is deceptive because it has so much. You can't tell much about what's inside from what you see outside. There are places within places. Houses behind houses. Very often in New York ugliness is only skin deep.

New York is the cultural center of mankind, too. Art flourishes in proximity to reality, and in New York the artist is never more than a stone's throw from the action. The pianist composes music three blocks from a fight in Madison Square Garden. A poet works against the sound of a jackhammer outside his window.

There are wonderfully good places to live in New York, if you have the money. A lot of New Yorkers have have the money. Some of the grand old brownstones of an earlier era have been restored. There are no living s.p.a.ces more comfortable anywhere. There are charming and unexpected little streets hidden in surprising places throughout the city. They attract the artist, the actor, the musician. The insurance salesman lives on Long Island. the money. Some of the grand old brownstones of an earlier era have been restored. There are no living s.p.a.ces more comfortable anywhere. There are charming and unexpected little streets hidden in surprising places throughout the city. They attract the artist, the actor, the musician. The insurance salesman lives on Long Island.

The city is crowded with luxury apartments, so even if you don't own your own brownstone, there's no need to camp out.

The average living place is an apartment built wall to wall with other apartments, so that they share the efficiency of water and electricity that flows to them through the same conduits. They're neither slums nor palaces.

If you can afford $2,500 a month for a three-bedroom apartment, you can live in a living room with Central Park as your front yard.

Several hundred thousand people do have Central Park for a front yard and it's certainly the greatest park on earth. It's a world of its own. No large city ever had the foresight to set aside such a substantial portion of itself to be one complete unbuilt-on place. It occupies 25 percent of the total area of Manhattan and yet any proposition to take so much as ten square feet of it to honor a Polish general or an American President brings out its legion of defenders.

There are crimes committed in the Park, but to say the Park is unsafe is like saying banks are unsafe because there are holdups. Life is unsafe, for that matter.

Most American cities have rotted from the center and the merchants have all moved to a place under one roof out in the middle of a suburban parking lot. Downtown was yesterday. New York is still vital at its core. It's the ultimate downtown. And if the biggest businesses are centered in New York so are the smallest.

Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's are all here and so are the big grocery chains. But the place you probably buy your food is around the corner at a butcher's where you can still see both sides of a piece of meat.

If you want a rare and exotic cheese from Belgium, it's available, or maybe you need a gear for a pump made in 1923. All there somewhere in the city. If you're seven feet tall, there's a store that'll take care of you or they can fit you with pants if you have a waist that measures sixty-four inches. There's nothing you can't buy in New York if it's for sale anywhere in the world.

Money doesn't go as far in New York but it doesn't come as far, either. All the numbers for all the money in American are handled in Wall Street on lower Manhattan. The banks, the businesses and even the government do most of their money shuffling and dealing there.

If a civilization can be judged on its ability not only to survive but to thrive in the face of natural obstacles, New York's civilization would have to be called among the most successful. For example, for what's supposed to be a temperate climate, New York has some of the most intemperate weather in the world. It's too hot in the summer, too cold in winter. During all its seasons, the wind has a way of whipping the weather at you and the rain is always coming from an angle that umbrella makers never considered.

The funny thing about it is that Nature and New York City have a lot in common. Both are absolutely indifferent to the human condition. To the New Yorker, accustomed to inconvenience of every kind, the weather is simply one more inconvenience.

New Yorkers learn young to proceed against all odds. If something's in the way, they move it or go under it or over it or around it, but they keep going. There's no sad resignation to defeat. New Yorkers a.s.sume they can win. They have this feeling that they're not going to be defeated.

People talk as though they don't like crowds, but the crowd in New York bestows on the people it comprises a blessed anonymity. New Yorkers are protected from the necessity of being individuals when being one serves no purpose. This blending together that takes place in a crowd is a great time-saver for them.

New York can be a very private place too. There's none of the neighborliness based solely on proximity that dominates the lives you share your life with in a small town. It's quite possible to be not merely private but lonely in a crowd in New York. Loneliness seldom lasts, though. For one thing, troubles produce a warmth and comrades.h.i.+p like nothing else, and New York has so many troubles shared by so many people that there's a kind of common knowingness, even in evil, that brings them together. There is no one with troubles so special in New York that there aren't others in the same kind of trouble.

There are five thousand blind people making their way around the city. They're so much a part of the mix, so typical as New Yorkers, that they're treated with much the same hostile disregard as everyone else. Many of the blind walk through the city with the same fierce independence that moves other New Yorkers. They feel the same obligation to be all right. "I'm okay. I'm all right."

It might appear to any casual visitor who may have taken a few rides about town in a taxicab that all New Yorkers are filled with a loudmouthed ill will toward each other. The fact of the matter is, though, that however cold and cruel things seem on the surface, there has never been a society of people in all history with so much compa.s.sion for its fellowman. It clothes, feeds, and houses 15 percent of its own because 1.26 million people in New York are unable to do it for themselves. You couldn't call that cold or cruel.

Everyone must have seen pictures at least of the great number of poor people who live in New York. And it seems strange, in view of this, that so many people still come here seeking their fortune or maybe someone else's. But if anything about the city's population is more impressive than the great number of poor people, it's the great number of rich people. There's no need to search for buried treasure in New York. The great American dream is out in the open for everyone to see and to reach for. No one seems to resent the very rich. It must be because even those people who can never realistically believe they'll get rich themselves can still dream about it. And they respond to the hope of getting what they see others having. Their hope alone seems to be enough to sustain them. The woman going into Tiffany's to buy another diamond pin can pa.s.s within ten feet of a man without money enough for lunch. They are oblivious to each other. He feels no envy; she no remorse.

There's a disregard for the past in New York that dismays even a lot of New Yorkers. It's true that no one pays much attention to antiquity. The immigrants who came here came for something new, and what New York used to be means nothing to them. Their heritage is somewhere else.

Old million-dollar buildings are constantly being torn down and replaced by new fifty-million-dollar ones. In London, Rome, Paris, much of the land has only been built on once in all their long history. In relatively new New York, some lots have already been built on four times.

Because strangers only see New Yorkers in transit, they leave with the impression that the city is one great mindless rush to nowhere. They complain that it's moving too fast, but they don't notice that it's getting there first. For better and for worse, New York has been been where the rest of the country is going. where the rest of the country is going.

The rest of the country takes pride in the legend on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled ma.s.ses . . . / The wretched refuse of your teeming sh.o.r.e. . . . " Well, for the most part it's been New York City, not the rest of the country, that took in those huddled ma.s.ses.

Millions of immigrants who once arrived by s.h.i.+ps stopped off in New York for a generation or two while the city's digestive system tried to a.s.similate them before putting them into the great American bloodstream. New York is still trying to swallow large numbers of immigrants. They don't come by boat much anymore and they may not even be from a foreign country. The influx of a million Puerto Ricans in the 1960s produced the same kind of digestive difficulties that the influx of the Irish did in the middle 1800s.

New York's detractors, seeing what happens to minority groups, have said there is just as much prejudice here as anywhere. New York could hardly deny that. The working whites hate the unemployed blacks. The blacks hate the whites. The Puerto Ricans live in a world of their own. The Germans, the Hungarians, the Poles live on their own blocks. Nothing in this pot has melted together. The Chinese and the Italians live side by side in lower Manhattan as though Ca.n.a.l Street was the Israeli border. There's no intermingling, and in a city with almost two million Jews even a lot of Jews Jews are anti-Semitic. are anti-Semitic.

In spite of it all, the city works. People do get along. There is love.

Whether New York is a pleasure or a pain depends on what it is you wish to fill your life with. Or whether you wish to fill it at all. There is an endless supply of satisfaction available to anyone who wishes to help himself to it. It's not an easy city, but the cups of its residents runneth over with life.

It's a city of extremes. There's more of everything. The range of notes is wider. The highs are higher. The lows lower. The goods, the bads are better and worse. And if you're unimpressed by statistics, consider the fact that in 1972 the cops alone in New York City were charged with stealing $73 million worth of heroin. There are 1,700 murders in an average year.

Neither of those statistics is so much a comment on crime as it is a comment on the size and diversity of New York City.

No one keeps a statistic on Life. The probability is that, like everything else, there's more of it in New York.

An Essay on War We are all inclined to believe that our generation is more civilized than the generations that preceded ours.

From time to time, there is even some substantial evidence that we hold in higher regard such civilized attributes as compa.s.sion, pity, remorse, intelligence and a respect for the customs of people different from ourselves.

Why war then?

Some pessimistic historians think the whole society of man runs in cycles and that one of the phases is war.

The optimists, on the other hand, think war is not like an eclipse or a flood or a spell of bad weather. They believe that it is more like a disease for which a cure could be found if the cause were known.

Because war is the ultimate drama of life and death, stories and pictures of it are more interesting than those about peace. This is so true that all of us, and perhaps those of us in television more than most, are often caught up in the action of war to the exclusion of the ideas of it.

If it is true, as we would like to think it is, that our age is more civilized than ages past, we must all agree that it's very strange that in the twentieth century, our century, we have killed more than 70 million of our fellowmen on purpose, at war.

It is very, very strange that since 1900 more men have killed more other men than in any other seventy years in history.

Probably the reason we are able to do both-that is, believe on one hand that we are are more civilized and on the other hand wage war to kill-is that killing is not so personal an affair in war as it once was. The enemy is invisible. One man doesn't look another in the eye and run him through with a sword. The enemy, dead or alive, is largely unseen. He is killed by remote control: a loud noise, a distant puff of smoke and then . . . silence. more civilized and on the other hand wage war to kill-is that killing is not so personal an affair in war as it once was. The enemy is invisible. One man doesn't look another in the eye and run him through with a sword. The enemy, dead or alive, is largely unseen. He is killed by remote control: a loud noise, a distant puff of smoke and then . . . silence.

The pictures of the victim's wife and children, which he carries in his breast pocket, are destroyed with him. He is not heard to cry out. The question of compa.s.sion or pity or remorse does not enter into it. The enemy is not a man, he is a statistic. It is true, too, that more people are being killed at war now than previously because we're better at doing it than we used to be. One man with one modern weapon can kill thousands.