Eulogy

By Andy Rooney

If all reporters of news were as fastidious with the facts and as perspicacious with their presentation as was BOB TROUT, the nation's opinion of reporters would be greatly higher than it is.

When old friends die, unintended we assign them a rank in our memory. Bob Trout will be in the top row in the memory of anyone who knew him. We were not close friends, but I knew him first in London in 1943 and last at lunch three weeks ago. Walter Cronkite, Bob Trout and I were to have appeared together last Friday at the University of Texas in Austin. Bob called to say he felt unwell. "Unwell" is all he would have said.

Bob refused to fly; when he disappeared to Spain, as he often did, he went by ship. In 1964 he arrived at the G.O.P. Convention in San Francisco by train without his beloved wife Kit. "We don't feel good traveling on the same train together," he said. Recently, childless and bereft of Kit, he found life less worth living. To paraphrase the poet, "She first deceased ... he for a little tried/ To live without her ... liked it not and died."

Bob Trout changed in personality and demeanor less over the 57 years I knew him than any other friend I ever had. If you knew him once, you knew him forever.

--Andy Rooney, 60 Minutes commentator