MICKEY ROONEY: Peace at Last?

MICKEY ROONEY
Peace at Last?

Part 1:

Mickey Rooney(1920-2014) was an American film actor and entertainer whose film, television, and stage appearances span nearly his entire lifetime. He died yesterday.

He received multiple awards, including a Juvenile Academy Award, an Honorary Academy Award, two Golden Globes and an Emmy Award. Working as a performer since he was a child, he was a superstar as a teenager for the films in which he played Andy Hardy, and he has had one of the longest careers of any actor, spanning 92 years actively making films in ten decades, from the 1920s to the 2010s. For a younger generation of fans, he gained international fame for his leading role as Henry Dailey in The Family Channel's The Adventures of the Black Stallion.

He was married 8 times, had 9 kids, and appears to have never found peace maritally; on his death he was separated from with his last marital partner of 46 years. Rooney had 19 grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren. You can read the details of his life-narrative at Wikipedia.

Part 2:

The year 1937 was a big one for Rooney. That year he was selected to portray Andy Hardy in A Family Affair. Rooney's role was to provide comic relief. The film was an unexpected success, and led to 13 more Andy Hardy films between 1937 and 1946. Rooney also received top billing, that same year, as "Shockey Carter" in Hoosier Schoolboy. Rooney made his first film alongside Judy Garland in 1937 with Thoroughbreds Don't Cry. It was here that Rooney came into the life of my family. The year 1937 was a big one in the history of a Cause I have been associated with now for more than 60 years.1

I won't give you chapter and verse of Rooney's life and the many ways in which a certain synchronicity played itself out between his life, my life, and the lives of my parents. In 1944, the year I was born, Rooney enlisted in the United States Army. His first television series, The Mickey Rooney Show: Hey, Mulligan, appeared on NBC television for 32 episodes between August 28, 1954 and June 4, 1955.

My mother, thinking TV would have a bad effect on my studies, sold our television shortly after this series, but I remember Rooney even though I was only eleven in 1955. He is even more in my memory-bank since I was not to have a TV in my home again until 1977 during my second marriage when I was in my 30s.

Part 3:

What a roller-coaster ride
your life was, Mickey!!. I
only saw you occasionally
after those TV episodes in
the 1950s; you popped-up
in all sorts of movies & TV
programs before and after I
retired.2 Now you are gone!!

I wish you well in that Land
of Light which I'm told is a
better place than this one in
which one suffers the slings
and arrows of an outrageous
fortune and, sometimes, takes
arms against a sea of troubles.

To die, to sleep, as the Bard
put it, to end the heartache &
the 1000 natural shocks that
flesh is heir to. Mickey, 'tis a
consummation to be wished.3

1 In 1937 the North American Baha'i community launched a series of teaching and consolidation, service and social activism plans which I have been associated with now for more than 60 years.
2 I retired in 1999 after a 50 year student and employment life: 1949 to 1999, and slowly reinvented myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist.
3 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I, in the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy.

Ron Price
7 April 2014.