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Longtime CBS radio correspondent Bob Fuss dies at age 64

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Bob Fuss, the CBS News Radio congressional correspondent from 1998 to 2014 who covered every presidential election from 1980 to 2012, died Sunday at his home in Falls Church, Va. He was 64.

The cause was leukemia, said a friend, Peter Maer.

Fuss began his professional radio career as a freelance reporter for UPI covering the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping case in California.

He became the Los Angeles bureau chief of UPI Radio and covered Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign. Fuss later moved to Washington and reported on Congress for Mutual and NBC Radio. He joined CBS News Radio in 1998.

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Following the disputed 2000 presidential election, he played a major role in CBS News Radio’s award-winning coverage of the Florida recount and Supreme Court ruling. In addition to politics, Fuss covered entertainment, including 15 consecutive Academy Awards programs.

He also reported on the overthrow of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, the Mexico City and San Francisco earthquakes, and the U.S. space program. He retired in 2014.

Robert Jonathan Fuss was born March 15, 1954, in Bay Shore, N.Y., and grew up in Woodland Hills. He walked with the aid of crutches as a result of birth defects and wrote in a self-published autobiography that he was born “with a whole range of birth defects similar to spina bifida.”

He was a 1974 graduate of Stanford University, where he began working for the campus radio station, KZSU.

“In my approach to life, I’ve never thought of myself as a disabled person,” Fuss said in a 2015 CBS News Radio interview. He traveled around the world from Africa to Antarctica for skiing, snorkeling, white-water rafting and hiking.

The title of Fuss’s autobiography, “Kidnapped by Nuns and Other Stories of a Life on the Radio,” derived from an experience while covering Pope John Paul II’s visit to Mexico in 1979.

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While waiting for his UPI colleagues to arrive, Fuss was spotted by nuns who mistakenly escorted him to a spot for disabled people awaiting a papal blessing.

In 2015, Fuss received a career achievement award from the Radio-TV Correspondents Assn.

Survivors include his mother, Carolyn Fuss of Palm Desert, and a sister.


UPDATES:

8:05 p.m.: This article was updated throughout with additional information.

This article was originally published at 11:45 a.m.

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