Sad news for David Letterman and longtime fans of The Late Show came out of Indiana last night, as Letterman’s mother, Dorothy Mengering,
passed away on Tuesday. She was 95 years old.
Mengering was a semi-regular presence on Letterman’s show, which helped to humanize the cranky late-night host and show he wasn’t just a guy cracking jokes and interviewing celebrities from behind a desk. She occasionally read Letterman’s famous top 10 lists and appeared for recurring bits such as asking her son to guess what kinds of pies she was baking for Thanksgiving.
But for the purposes of a site dedicated to covering sports media, Letterman’s mother was perhaps best known for being an Olympics correspondent for The Late Show when CBS had the rights to the Olympics broadcasts in 1994 and 1998. Mengering provided reports from Lillehammer and Nagano, making her a household name (well, if “Dave’s Mom” can be a proper household name) and cultural phenomenon.
