Roger Mudd, the longtime political correspondent and anchor for NBC and CBS who once stumped Sen. Edward Kennedy by simply asking why he wanted to be president, has died. He was 93. During more than 30 years on network television, starting with CBS in 1961, Mudd covered Congress, elections and political conventions and was a frequent anchor and contributor to various specials. Besides work at CBS and NBC, he did stints on PBS’s “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and the History Channel. When he joined Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s show in 1987, Mudd told The Associated Press: “I think they regard news and information and fact and opinion with a reverence and respect that really is admirable.”

Mudd spent a fair amount of time in the “CBS Evening News” anchor chair, substituting for Walter Cronkite when he was off and anchoring the Saturday evening news broadcasts from 1966 to 1973. But he lost out to Dan Rather in the competition to succeed Cronkite as the news anchor at CBS when the latter retired in 1981. Cronkite, for one, had backed Rather because he didn’t think Mudd had enough foreign experience. It was then that Mudd jumped to NBC as its chief Washington correspondent. In 1977, Mudd received an honorary doctorate from Washington and Lee University, his alma mater. He donated his 1,500 volume collection of 20th-century Southern writers to the university in 2006. He earned a master’s degree in American History from the University of North Carolina in 1951. Mudd, who was born in Washington, was a distant relative of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who was arrested for treating an injured John Wilkes Booth shortly after Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. The doctor, who was eventually pardoned, said he hadn’t been aware of the killing when he aided Booth. * Norton Juster, the celebrated children’s author who fashioned a world of adventure and punning punditry in the million-selling classic “The Phantom Tollbooth” and remained true to his wide-eyed self in such favorites as “The Dot and the Line” and “Stark Naked,” has died at 91. “The Phantom Tollbooth,” published in 1961, followed the adventures of young Milo through the Kingdom of Wisdom, a land extending from The Foothills of Confusion to The Valley of Sound, populated by the imperiled princesses Rhyme and Reason and the fearsome Gorgons of Hate and Malice. Drawings were provided by his roommate at the time, Jules Feiffer, who would later collaborate with Juster on “The Odious Ogre,” published in 2010. Eric Carle of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” fame illustrated Juster’s “Otter Nonsense,” which came out in 1982. * Lou Ottens, the Dutch inventor of the cassette tape, the medium of choice for millions of bedroom mix tapes, has died at age 94, said Philips, the company where he also helped develop the compact disc. A structural engineer who trained at the prestigious Technical University in Delft, he joined Philips in 1952 and was head of the Dutch company’s product development department when he began work on an alternative for existing tape recorders with their cumbersome large spools of tape. His goal was simple. Make tapes and their players far more portable and easier to use. “During the development of the cassette tape, in the early 1960s, he had a wooden block made that fit exactly in his coat pocket,” said Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in the southern city of Eindhoven. “This was how big the first Compact Cassette was to be, making it a lot handier than the bulky tape recorders in use at the time.” The final product created in 1962 later turned into a worldwide hit, with more than 100 billion cassettes sold, many to music fans who would record their own compilations direct from the radio. * Carla Wallenda, a member of “The Flying Wallendas” high-wire act and the last surviving child of the famed troupe’s founder, has died at the age of 85. Her son, Rick Wallenda, said on social media she died Saturday in Sarasota, Florida, of natural causes. She was the daughter of Karl Wallenda, who had founded the troupe in Germany before moving to the United States in 1928 to great acclaim. She was the aunt of aerialist Nik Wallenda. Carla Wallenda was born on Feb. 13, 1936, and appeared in a newsreel in 1939 as she learned how to walk the wire, with her father and mother, Mati, looking on. But she said her first time on the wire was much earlier. “Actually, they carried me across the wire when I was 6 weeks old,” she said in a 2017 interview with a Sarasota TV station. “My father rode the bicycle and my mother sat on his shoulders, holding me and introducing me to the public.” * Murray Walker, the voice of Formula One as a commentator on British television with a high-octane style, has died. He was 97. Walker’s broadcasting career spanned more than 50 years, working for the BBC and ITV before he retired from commentating in 2001. * Kenneth C. Kelly, a Black electronics engineer whose antenna designs contributed to the race to the moon, made satellite TV and radio possible and helped NASA communicate with Mars rovers and search for extraterrestrials, has died. The 92-year-old also worked to erase race barriers in the Navy, in California housing and on the newspaper comics pages. Kelly was awarded more than a dozen patents for innovations in radar and antenna technology, work that appears in peer-reviewed journals from 1955-1999. His early work at Hughes Aircraft helped create guided missile systems and the ground satellites that tracked the Apollo space missions, he said in an oral history recorded by his family. * Marvin Hagler, the middleweight boxing great whose title reign and career ended with a split-decision loss to “Sugar” Ray Leonard in 1987, died Saturday. He was 66. Hagler was 62-3-2 with 52 knockouts from 1973 to 1987. He was the undisputed middleweight champion from 1980 to his loss to Leonard at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on April 6, 1987. * King Goodwill Zwelithini, the traditional leader of South Africa’s Zulu nation, has died at age 72 after being hospitalized for more than a month, his family announced Friday. Zwelithini had health problems related to diabetes, according to local news reports. Zwelithini, the eighth Zulu king, reigned for more than 50 years, making him the longest-serving Zulu monarch. * Luis Palau, an evangelical pastor who was born in Argentina and went on to work with Billy Graham before establishing his own powerhouse international ministry, died at his home in Portland, Oregon at age 86. “Luis Palau was the Apostle Paul to the Spanish-speaking world. He was a leader whom God used him to usher in the great revival that swept South and Central America, and that was just the beginning,” said the Rev. Johnnie Moore, president of The Congress of Christian Leaders. “Today, we lost a giant in Christian history.” * Joe Tait, a longtime Cleveland sports broadcaster and voice of the Cavaliers for more than four decades, has died at 83. Tait was born in Evanston. He began his radio career at Monmouth College before graduating in 1959. He had planned to be a writer, but changed his career course after a professor sent him to record a basketball game and heard his call. He was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame media wing in 2010. * Blake Cullen, an executive for the Chicago Cubs and the National League who went on to own minor league hockey, baseball and soccer teams, has died. He was 85. Cullen died Monday at Sentara Virginia Beach General Hospital, Chicago Blackhawks senior vice president of hockey operations Al MacIsaac, a former player and assistant coach of Cullen’s Hampton Admirals hockey team, said Wednesday. A graduate of Cornell with a degree in hotel management, Cullen worked for a Chicago hotel after college and was the Cubs’ traveling secretary from 1965-75. * Sally Atwater, wife of the late GOP strategist and former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater, died Tuesday, according to her family and party officials across South Carolina. She was 69. * Roger Vonlanthen, the last surviving member of the Switzerland team that in 1954 played in the highest-scoring World Cup match, has died. He was 89. * Rheal Cormier, the durable left-hander who spent 16 seasons in the majors and remarkably pitched in the Olympics before and after his time in the big leagues, has died at 53.