Editing Roone Arledge (section)

==Early life==
Arledge was born in [[Forest Hills, Queens]], New York City, the son of Gertrude (Stritmater) and Roone Pinckney Arledge, an attorney.<ref>[http://www.filmreference.com/film/91/Roone-Arledge.html Roone Arledge Biography (1931–)]. Filmreference.com. Retrieved on July 20, 2020.</ref> Arledge grew up in [[Merrick, New York|Merrick]]<ref name="TimesObit">{{cite news |last1=Carter |first1=Bill |title=Roone Arledge, a Force in TV Sports and News, Dies at 71|url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/obituaries/06ARLE.html |access-date=August 24, 2024|newspaper=The New York Times |date=December 6, 2002}}</ref> and attended [[Wellington C. Mepham High School]] on [[Long Island]] where he wrestled and played baseball. Although Arledge was not a stand out wrestler, Mepham was the most premier wrestling school in the country at the time.

Upon graduation, he decided that sportswriting was what he wanted to do in life, and applied to [[Columbia University]]. There, he discovered that Columbia's journalism program was a graduate program, not an undergraduate one.  Even so, Arledge liked what he saw and enrolled in a liberal-arts program. He also served as President of the Omega chapter of the fraternity of [[Phi Gamma Delta]].  His classmates included [[Max Frankel]], who would eventually win a [[Pulitzer Prize]] in 1973 for his work as editorial page editor of the [[New York Times]]; [[Lawrence K. Grossman|Larry Grossman]], who became president of the [[Public Broadcasting Service]] in 1976 and later went on to head [[NBC]] News; and [[Richard Wald]], another president of NBC News that Arledge would later persuade to come over to ABC News as a senior vice-president. He was the only one of the four who did not work at the ''[[Columbia Daily Spectator]]'', the daily student newspaper of Columbia University.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1952, Arledge enrolled in graduate studies at Columbia's [[School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University|School of International and Public Affairs]].  Restless with graduate studies, he went looking for a job where he could use his college degree and obtained an entry-level job at the [[DuMont Television Network]].  Military service intervened, and after Arledge's discharge, he learned the network had folded and he had no job to return to.