Paul Grondahl has, since 2017, headed the New York State Writers Institute — terrifically, making it a huge community asset.
He likes to retell his landing in Albany as a young fella, in 1981, and soon one night finding a single light on at State University offices. Thus connecting with William Kennedy, before the latter’s authorial success which led to founding the Writers Institute.
Reminds me of my meeting someone at that same campus, in 1988. A singles event, a bleak scene. Having resolved against any gals under 30, I disregarded one looking half that. But finally, I remarked upon her incongruous youth. “I’m 28,” she replied. “Oh!” thought I. “Close enough!”
Her poetry life was profiled in the Albany Times-Union in 2022 by Grondahl. (I married that Therese Broderick.) After almost half a century with the paper, Paul still pens such columns weekly. As lauded by the Writers Institute’s Mark Koplik in his barnburner intro of Paul at a recent public event.
It was for Paul’s new book. Decades before, he’d followed up on my own 1973 tome, Albany’s O’Connell Machine, with a landmark bio of its Mayor Corning. His latest is one of Andy Rooney (1919-2011).
A local product, a journalist who for 33 years delivered a closing commentary on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Rooney thus became a cultural icon. His TV shtick showed him to be an iconoclastic observer. Highly talented — after a sketchy start in life. He remained kind of rough around the edges, as Paul’s bio unsparingly relates. While calling Rooney a “modern-day sage of the ordinary, who in his flinty opinions, homespun humor, and common sense embodied the spirit of Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Will Rogers.”
Parts of the book read like a novel. Rooney cultivated a curmudgeonly persona, but it was genuine. Grondahl quotes him at one point, about some acerbic remark, saying people might take him as kidding, but that in fact he was just being rude. That itself might sound like a jest. Yet it seems it was not; quite an admission. If Rooney did cultivate a crusty persona, it came naturally to him.
Shortly after relating a really nasty piece of late Rooney behavior, Grondahl plunges us back into WWII. Till then, Rooney was a no-account. In the army, mainly to escape an officer he disliked, he applied for the Stars & Stripes. Unexpectedly hired, this was Rooney’s making.
Heroic and masterful as a journalist, that stint was followed by some hard times as he struggled to make it as a civilian writer. Eventually he climbed his way to TV.
Grondahl showed clips of a few Rooney 60 Minutes commentaries. One explained the difference between morning people and night people, switching back and forth between his impersonating each. Thoroughly delicious.
Another clip had Rooney with a pile of pennies, which he deemed worthless. To prove it, he showed videos of pennies experimentally placed on well-travelled sidewalks. Nobody picked them up. Not even when there were several. A dime would be taken eventually. A quarter, fast.
Pennies — no longer minted — due to inflation are today worth a fraction of what they were then. Yet I’ve always picked them up. Still do.
I told Paul that, when I handed him the book for signing. He connected it with my involvement in coins. “Ever find a rare one?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “But I did get a good one in change once — at a coin store!”*
* A broadstruck cent, a mint error, accidentally struck outside the collar, thus noticeably larger than the norm, and quite scarce.
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