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, and his mother, Irma Iris Harrison, was the daughter of a wheat farmer and worked as a lieutenant for the Army Nursing Corps and a nurse at the physiotherapy ward in the Walter Reed Hospital, where she met Roger's father. Roger Mudd received a B.A. from Washington and Lee University in 1950 (where one of his classmates was author Tom Wolfe) and a Master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953. He is a member of Delta Tau Delta International Fraternity.
He 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, Mudd did 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. 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 a semester.
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