Andy Rooney, 92, said goodbye to "A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney" on Sun night. It was the 1,097th edition of his well-known recording essay, a lawful feature of the CBS programme entrepot "60 Minutes" since 1978. That is a aggregation of things to hit been mystified, troubled, angered, touched or pleased by, and a aggregation of eld over which to be mystified, troubled, angered, touched and pleased by them. Viewer reactions to Rooney's pieces ranged similarly.

"There is so such feat on in the world," Rooney told communicator Morley Safer (a cipher at 79) in the discourse that preceded his terminal "Few Minutes." "I would be ashamed to feature I couldn't indite a column."

His subjects, ranging from the unimportant to the momentous, included cookbooks, automobile names, farm subsidies, the moon, pennies, blazonry control, warning labels, astrology, Clarence Thomas, the homeless, verify companies, Matisse, ghostwriters, broadcasting entrepot shows, categorised ads, Rodney King, Martha Stewart, the commission system, algid remedies, parking for the disabled, digit Irak wars, women on submarines, the NBA, 9/11, the death of Osama containerful Laden, e-books, his eyebrows and the clog on his desk: "Staple remover, digit of the enthusiastic inventions of recent today — meliorate than the staple, I think."

We don't wager whatever nonagenarians on television. Indeed, with Rooney's withdrawal — or semi-retirement, with the entranceway at "60 Minutes," it has been aloud declared, remaining unstoppered to him — that sort will artefact to zero, at small until Betty White's incoming birthday. For this alone, Rooney, who was nearly 60 when his "60 Minutes" separate began, has performed a service, a weekly expiration against a job that habitually marginalizes the grownup citizen. (Is there whatever greater hurt that haw be stipendiary to a exhibit or a meshwork today than that its conference skews old?)

His geezerhood was unresolvable from his voice, for meliorate and worse. He could verify the daylong view, but he could also good same a Negro discover of instance or, whatever would say, discover of touch. Still, that's the incomprehensible nature of the curmudgeon's art, to revilement to the hunch of a concern from a saucer of (sometimes willfully) restricted understanding. (It's where the jokes live.) To digit viewer who accused him of existence ordered in his ways, he responded, "Being ordered in my structure is what I do for a living."

"I don't feature anything that's opprobrious to people," Rooney told Safer, downplaying his importance, though in his going come he also admitted having been "terribly criminal sometimes." (But, he thought, correct most often.) Safer alluded shortly to the 1990 disceptation that had led to his temporary support from CBS — his including "homosexual unions" in a itemize of things that grouping had realized could blackball you — and to the fact that Rooney had been "pretty nasty" at the instance most the objections. But now, as then, he said he was sorry.

As an old-fashioned melting-pot progressive in an geezerhood of indistinguishability politics, he was extremity to intend into pain sometimes. Some of these criticisms had merit; others meet read his rhetoric. (When, for example, he wrote, in his production column, "I undergo every most Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today's ballgame stars are every guys titled Rodriguez to me," he was making a saucer most how lowercase tending he stipendiary to baseball, not most the ethnicity of the grouping who played it.)

Yet in a instance when hurt passes for recreation and "Tell us what you think" has embellish a playing model, the poorest of Rooney's transgressions are exceeded without interpret a cardinal today a day. And different whatever among the rowdier lineage of commentators who today conception the air, Rooney has ever been selection — if not ever at prototypal — to learn, to excuse and, modify when he did not concord with his critics, to expose their criticisms. That he desirable his actuality to yours — "I don't undergo who Lady Gaga is," he said recently, "and kids today belike don't undergo who Ella Fitzgerald was" — did not needs represent a judgment.

Over the terminal pair of years, the pieces had grown shorter, inferior free-associatively discursive. There was a ontogeny breathiness to his speech, a softness to his consonants, a lightening of the material and a intensifying of the jowls. To Safer's discourse most how he likeable older age, Rooney replied, "I dislike it. I mean, I'm gonna die, and that doesn't appeal to me at all." But his composition has remained crisp, and his thinking, if somewhat more to the point, idiosyncratic.

The test broadcast of "A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney" constituted, as had whatever episodes before it, a statement of Rooney himself in the world, with the camera pulled backwards a lowercase far to allow the grouping he worked with and the grouping who watched him. (Was he rattling as difficult a case as he could sometime seem? Yes, the respond seemed to be, and no.) But it mostly afraid what it meant to him to be a writer. He got into television, he said, "because I didn't conceive anyone was stipendiary sufficiency tending to the cursive word," and he never intellection of himself as a broadcasting personality, but "a illustrator who reads what he's written," in an try to verify the truth.

"I conceive that if every the actuality were famous most everything in the world," he said, "it would be a meliorate locate to live."

He has mitt the expose brief of that goal. "This is a time I've dreaded," he said. "I desire I could do this forever. I can't, though. But I'm not retiring. Writers don't retire, and I'll ever be a writer."

robert.lloyd@latimes.com