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 Records Falls: $77K for Craig Nearly a half-century later, a different Roger Craig---a 33-year-old University of Delaware graduate student---has toppled one of TV game shows' near-unsinkable records. Tuesday, Craig won $77,000 to become the all-time single-day standard-bearer on Jeopardy! The victory clipped J! legend Ken Jennings' $75,000 mark during his legendary 75-day run on the show in 2004. “Breaking Ken Jennings record is simply amazing,” Craig said. “I knew that I had a chance to set the new record going into Final ‘Jeopardy!’ so I thought what the heck. . . I’ll go for it.” Craig, who first appeared on Monday's season premiere, added to his $37,000 first-day winnings to reach $114,000, the top total ever for a champion's first two days. When asked about his strategy for playing, he said, “I made a lot of big wagers on Daily Doubles. I was really confident in certain categories and took advantage of those opportunities to earn as much money as I could.” He added, “I lucked out on my first game with a chemistry daily double. My undergrad degree is in bio chem.” A native of Newark, Del., Craig was only seven years old when the series returned in syndication for its third version in 1984. He said he has dreamed of being on the show ever since the late 1980s when he began watching the show after school. He first tried out for the Teen Tournament as a junior in high school but was not selected to compete. Since 2006, he tried out three times before being selected. This fall, Craig will earn his Ph.D. in computer science and hopes to get a job in the pharmaceutical industry. When not studying, he enjoys music, playing poker and watching movies. Jennings' total was affirmed by the series' purists after he more than doubled the $34,000 single-day total of former champion Jerome Vered. In 1991, Vered's total was achieved before the game's dollar values were doubled in 2001. In his 2004 run, Jennings won more than $2.5 million, added another $500,000 as runner-up to Brad Rutter in the 2005 Ultimate Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions and $100,000 as grand champion of GSN's all-star Grand Slam in 2007.  1919-2010 Edwin Newman, the linguist and Peabody Award-winning journalist, died Aug. 13 of pneumonia in Oxford, England. Published reports today indicated his family delayed the announcement of Newman's death for more than a month to spend time in private grieving. Newman's 32-year career at NBC began in 1952. His reports ran the gamut from international affairs to the civil rights movement to the Kennedy assassination. He was the first to announce the death of President Kennedy on NBC Radio in 1963 and anchored some of the early coverage in 1981 when President Reagan was shot. Newman was part of a dying breed of journalists who turned network documentaries into an art form. His "Politics: The Outer Fringe" in 1966 explored outside-the-box issues in the American politics. Throughout the sixties and early '70s, Newman hosted a show for WNBC-TV that turned up on some PBS affiliates, "Speaking Freely." The hour, which spawned a book on credible use of the English language, allowed Newman to have uninterrupted, unsponsored conversations with people from the arts to politics to medicine. "NBC, and I mean this to its credit, never tried to sell a minute of commercials and never interfered with the choice of people. The producer and I chose them," Newman said 22 years ago. People closest to Newman recognized his dry wit. Carson was not one of them. Throughout the seventies, Newman was NBC's go-to correspondent to anchor late night half-hour specials on breaking news issues. Carson, ultimately angered at the delay of The Tonight Show until 12 midnight to make room for the specials, tore into NBC in one of his monologues in 1973. "I can understand if the nation was about to go to war," Carson said. "But I don't think most people are sitting here waiting to see another half-hour about the tensions between Tunisia and Libya with 'Chuckles' Newman." NBC shortly thereafter sharply cut back on the Newman-anchored news specials. Throughout his mid-career at the network, Newman was best known to viewers as anchorman of one of several five-minute afternoon or morning newsbreaks. In 1980, when David Letterman was given a 90-minute morning show on NBC, Newman appeared in a daily newsbreak. Letterman did the tosses to Newman, who seemed to enjoy the host's acerbic wit. The first day, the audience clapped at the end of Newman's newscast. He told Letterman, "And I didn't even give the weather." In 1984, Newman retired from NBC News. Only two weeks after his departure, he agreed to host a memorable edition of Saturday Night Live. After a brief monologue, Newman broke into the '30s favorite, "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone," to the roar of the SNL audience. The weekend appearance opened a new career for Newman, who appeared as himself on more than 15 television series. He tried his hand at two game shows. Newman made 20 guest shots on John Davidson's The New Hollywood Squares between 1986 and 1989. In May 1987, he played Super Password for a week. He joked host Bert Convy that the words "do not challenge people's vocabulary enough." Newman and his wife Rigel had one daughter, Nancy. TheGameShowFix.com is a non-incorporated news website. The material used is the creation of the webmaster, unless otherwise noted. Use of stillframes from broadcasts is part of fair use news arrangements. 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