GRANITE CITY HIGH SCHOOL
CLASS OF 1966

Peter Maer is a native of Granite City, Illinois. He is the son of Dorothy Maer and the late Dr. Stanley F. Maer. His maternal grandparents were the late Mr. & Mrs. Herman Steinberg, also of Granite City. Mr. Maer is a proud product of the Granite City school system.

He attended Niedringhaus Elementary School and Coolidge Junior High School. He is a 1966 graduate of Granite City Senior High School where he was a reporter and Editor of the High World newspaper. He was also active in Scouting, earning the rank of Eagle Scout. Mr. Maer’s radio career started during his high school days when he hosted a weekly high school news and music program on WGNU, Granite City.

He is a 1970 graduate of Southern Illinois University/Edwardsville where he was a member of the first class of Mass Communications majors. He was honored to return to the university as the 1995 summer commencement speaker.

During his college years, Mr. Maer worked at radio stations in St. Louis and Belleville. He went on to assignments in Nashville, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia, before moving to Washington, DC. He had Congressional and White House assignments during a more than 20-year career at Mutual/NBC Radio. Mr. Maer was named as a CBS News White House Correspondent in 1998.

He has covered every President since Jimmy Carter. Maer has also covered each political convention, election night and Presidential inauguration since 1980. His fascination with the Presidency began when candidate John F. Kennedy visited Granite City in 1960. Mr. Maer also recalls attending many political events with his father, who was keenly interested in Madison County and Illinois politics.

A frequent flyer on Air Force One, Mr. Maer’s Presidential and political assignments have taken him to 49 states and more than 30 foreign countries. He covered the crucial U.S.-Soviet summits in the years before the end of the Cold War. He accompanied President George H. W. Bush to Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf and an outpost near the Kuwait border before the outbreak of the first Gulf War. He reported on President Clinton’s historic trips to China, African nations, the Middle East and other world regions. He has also described major disaster stories including the 1978 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and several hurricanes.

Mr. Maer is a four-time recipient of the Merriman Smith Award for Presidential Coverage Under Deadline Pressure. He was honored for his description of the evacuation of the White House on September 11, 2001. The other Smith Awards recognized his coverage of President Clinton’s trip to the funeral of Israeli Prime Yitzak Minister Rabin, Mr. Clinton’s observance of the 30th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock Central High School and for reporting on the sudden illness of President George H. W. Bush in Tokyo in 1992.

Mr. Maer’s other major honors include the Overseas Press Awards for coverage of the Mexico earthquake and the historic 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow. He is the recipient of an Associated Press Award for an interview with Reverend Martin Luther King Senior following the murder of the minister’s wife in Atlanta.

He was a member of the CBS News team honored with the Society of Professional Journalists Award and an Edward R. Murrow citation for coverage of the 2000 election.

Mr. Maer’s hometown roots serve as a constant anchor in his journalistic endeavors. Through all of his travels and challenging assignments, he asks himself, “What would the people in Granite City want to know?”

Peter Maer and his wife, Elizabeth Doyne Maer, are the parents of two grown children.