Dorothy Mengering

Personal

Vocation

Family

American noted family member, as the mother of late-night talk show host David Letterman. As a frequent telephone and live guest on his show, she was better known to Late Night and Late Show viewers as 'Dave's Mom.' She appeared on camera (identified as Dorothy Mengering) on Late Night with David Letterman on the "Parents' Night" broadcast of 25 February 1986, in which the parents of many Late Night staffers were also seen. Following several years of appearing via telephone, Mengering (usually billed as "Dave's Mom" or "Dave's Mom Dorothy", with no mention of her surname) became a recurring on-camera guest on Letterman's subsequent Late Show, initially by covering the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. Mengering spent a year at Indiana University before marrying Harry Joseph (Joe) Letterman in 1942, with whom she had three children: Jan, David, and Gretchen. While raising her children, she assisted her husband, a florist, and worked as a secretary at her church, Second Presbyterian; she was widowed in 1973. In 1983, she married again, this time to Hans Mengering, a retired engineer and decorated World War II veteran who died on 12 March 2013. In 2015, Dorothy Mengering suffered a stroke, but recovered months later. Mengering died on 11 April 2017 of natural causes at her home in Carmel, Indiana, at the age of 95. She died one day shy of her son, David Letterman's 70th birthday. Link to Wikipedia biography