Longtime Washington, D.C., radio anchor and reporter Tom Foty died at 77.

Foty was a mainstay for CBS News starting in 1998, states WTOP, “covering everything from government affairs to international news, according to his colleague Peter King.

“He managed UPI’s Washington bureau, then he became its executive editor,” King said of Foty’s career trajectory. “But he also parachuted into breaking stories like The Peoples Temple mass suicide in Guyana, and the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster.”

Foty was an employee at WTOP from 1997 through 2005, as a radio reporter and editor, and was one of the early editors of wtop.com, which launched in 1996.

“Tom was the first person who trained me when I came to WTOP in 1997,” reporter Neal Augenstein said. “Like Tom, I’d come from UPI. He’s remained the self-appointed historian of UPI.”

Foty was born in Budapest, Hungary, and came to the United States at the age of 10 as a refugee following the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Before joining UPI, Foty worked as a news writer at all-news station WINS-AM in New York and as a contributing producer for National Public Radio. He told a colleague that he learned English in part by watching The Three Stooges on Channel 11 in NYC where he was raised and educated.

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Photo: CBS