At WRNL radio, Mudd presented 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, mispronouncing his name as "Pipe Poeus". 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 one semester.