Roger Harrison Mudd (February 9, 1928 – March 9, 2021) was an American broadcast journalist who was a correspondent and anchor for CBS News and NBC News. He also worked as the primary anchor for The History Channel. Previously, Mudd was weekend and weekday substitute anchor for the CBS Evening News, the co-anchor of the weekday NBC Nightly News, and the host of the NBC-TV Meet the Press and American Almanac TV programs. Mudd was the recipient of the Peabody Award, the Joan Shorenstein Award for Distinguished Washington Reporting, and five Emmy Awards. Early life and career Mudd was born in Washington, D.C. His father, John Kostka Dominic Mudd, was the son of a tobacco farmer and worked as a map maker for the United States Geological Survey. His mother, Irma Iris Harrison, was the daughter of a farmer and was a nurse and lieutenant in the United States Army Nurse Corps serving in the physiotherapy ward in the Walter Reed Hospital, where she met Roger's father. Roger attended DC Public Schools and graduated from Wilson High School in 1945. Mudd earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from Washington and Lee University, where one of his classmates was author Tom Wolfe, in 1950, and a Master of Arts in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953. Mudd was a member of Delta Tau Delta international fraternity. He was initiated as an alumnus member of Omicron Delta Kappa at Washington and Lee in 1966. Mudd began his journalism career in Richmond, Virginia, as a reporter for The Richmond News Leader and for radio station WRNL. At the News Leader, he worked at the rewrite desk during spring 1953 and became a summer replacement on June 15 that year. The News Leader ran its first story with a Mudd byline on June 19, 1953. At WRNL radio, Mudd presented the daily noon newscast. In his memoir The Place to Be, Mudd describes an incident from his first day at WRNL in which he laughed hysterically on-air after mangling a news item about the declining health of Pope Pius XII, mispronouncing his name as "Pipe Poeus". Because Mudd failed to silence his microphone properly, an engineer intervened. WRNL later gave Mudd his own daily broadcast, Virginia Headlines. In the fall of 1954, Mudd enrolled in the University of Richmond School of Law, but dropped out after one