I used to like watching “60 Minutes” on Sunday nights, and even when I found the topics not particularly interesting, I couldn’t miss the end of the program and have “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney.”

Rooney’s take on life, beginning in 1978, was to impart his philosophical wisdom upon the issues of the day or just about trivial matters like keeping watches in a drawer we never use and then wondering what time it is all day long.

Rooney’s insightful commentary about life is still relevant today, some 10 years after his last appearance on TV. In fact, he had said two things about the Christmas season that are timeless.

“One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas Day. Don’t clean it up too quickly,” he said.

I would get out the big black garbage bags and gather up all the wrapping paper, thinking how we spent countless hours shopping for every toy for the kids and they took no more than 10 minutes to rip open all the packages. Rooney was right. Now that I hand my teenagers gift cards and money for Christmas, I miss those days when they were little and how wide their eyes opened when they bounded down the stairs and saw what Santa had brought them.

Rooney said, “Good Christmas decorations are better than bad decorations, but bad decorations are better than none at all.” I had put up a skinny artificial tabletop tree for my mother when she lived alone. She battled depression most of her life and complained to me about not wanting any decorations. Yet I insisted. When I turned on the lights of her tree, I always got a smile in return.

Rooney was suspended a few times by CBS for making controversial remarks, some for which he made on the air apologies. Of course, he was under the watchful eye of his superiors of which he said, “We need people who can actually do things. We have too many bosses and too few workers.”

On the topic of making enough money to live a life of luxury, he said, “Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occur when you’re climbing it.” He added this comment about wealth. “I’d like to be rich enough so I could throw away the soap after the letters are worn off.”

His opinions about party politics appropriately describe their philosophies. “Democrats believe people are basically good but must be saved from themselves by their government. Republicans believe people are basically bad, but they’ll be OK if they’re left alone.”

As he grew older on the show and with all of us all moving through the years with him, Rooney reflected several times about becoming advanced in age. Although he praised teachers for giving us a strong foundation, he said this about acquiring knowledge.

“The best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.”

Speaking of the elderly, he threw a paradox at us one night about living into our senior years, which is my favorite quote of his. “ … The idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.”

After “60 Minutes” did an episode about the vitality of a group of young African children, Rooney’s segment was about the emotional difficulty old people experience when they think back to their own childhoods. “Death is a distant rumor to the young,” he said, pointing out that the rumor becomes a certain truth when we get old enough to think more about it. He once made a grand statement about life and death by comparing them to an ordinary, everyday object we all have in our houses.

“I’ve learned that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.”

If he were alive today, he wouldn’t need to make up too many new quips about what’s happening in America. He could just pull the ones he has out of his bag. For example, he often poked fun at organized religion and eventually he declared himself an atheist. He acquired many of his viewpoints as a journalist in World War II combat zones. He was awarded the Bronze Star and was one of the first from the media to have visited and reported about the Nazi concentration camps. His war experiences had him questioning how a supreme being could have allowed such atrocities.

One Sunday might, Rooney made this remark about religion that might be considered controversial today because of the extremism of some Christian groups.

“I’d be more willing to accept religion, even if I didn’t believe it, if I thought it made people nicer to each other, but I don’t think it does.”

He had concerns about the unruly behavior of society back in the later years of the 20th century, and if he could see us today, he might even say it’s worse now. In one segment, he talked about how simple human kindness was declining in America, and for that reason alone, there was a huge rise in dog ownership.

“The average dog is a nicer person than the average person,” he said. That could be proven true today as a survey reported that there are nearly 77 million dogs currently living in American households.

In just “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” he liked to poke fun at life and our behaviors, but inside his humor was a serious look at issues and problems in the 20th century world. He was the perfect medicine for the ills of society, and if he could live forever, he’d never run out of topics to talk about.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.