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Charles Osgood, who spent 22 years anchoring the CBS-TV staple “Sunday Morning” and decades as a radio commentator, and who carved a distinct place for himself in broadcasting by occasionally presenting the news in wry doggerel, died Jan. 23 at his home in Upper Saddle River, N.J. He was 91.

The cause was complications from dementia, according to his daughter Anne-E. Wood.

In a varied career spanning more than a half-century, Mr. Osgood served as manager of a classical music radio station and the country’s first pay-TV outlet. He wrote lyrics to the Nancy Wilson song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuIYqgOWJs4">Black Is Beautiful</a>” and helped compose the Grammy-winning spoken-word record “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAt1VJfEq2k">Gallant Men</a>” (1967), a patriotic ode to America’s fighting forces that became a surprise Top 40 hit during the Vietnam War.

The bow-tie-sporting Mr. Osgood started his CBS tenure that same year, initially as a radio anchor and reporter, and became a network stalwart as a radio and television correspondent. He transitioned with ease between hard news and celebrity profiles and also hosted specials and documentaries. He spent much of the 1980s as Sunday night anchor for CBS News.

Despite his versatility, Mr. Osgood faced a daunting challenge when he took over “Sunday Morning” in 1994 from the retiring Charles Kuralt, one of the network’s most beloved newsmen. Kuralt had started the 90-minute Sunday program in 1979 and molded the show in his own idiosyncratic style.

“Sunday Morning” mirrored Kuralt’s singular “On the Road” dispatches for the “CBS Evening News” under anchor Walter Cronkite. Kuralt chronicled offbeat, poignant, gently humorous and undercover stories as he wandered the country’s highways and byways. The same leisurely, almost contemplative pace infused “Sunday Morning.”

On Mr. Osgood’s watch, “Sunday Morning” continued in the Kuraltian tradition of down-home folklore blended with culture, sports and nature. There were stories about elephants painting on canvas, tractor ballets, centenarian bricklayers — interesting yarns that would never lead the evening news. He also interviewed towering figures in the arts, such as painter Andrew Wyeth, playwright Edward Albee and opera singer Plácido Domingo.

Mr. Osgood said he wanted “Sunday Morning” to be the television equivalent of the Sunday newspaper, part of a leisurely weekend routine, unhurried and free from the frenzied weekday news cycle.

In fact, he said he was unhappy when breaking news forced changes in his carefully planned show, such as on the Sunday morning in December 2003 when it was announced that Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator, had been captured by U.S. soldiers in a dirt hole outside his hometown of Tikrit.

Richard Shotwell

“Sunday Morning” won three daytime Emmy Awards for outstanding morning program during Mr. Osgood’s tenure with the show, which ended in September 2016; he was replaced by Jane Pauley.

In 2004, then-San Francisco Chronicle television critic Tim Goodman praised Mr. Osgood for having “the folksy, narrative instincts of Kuralt,” observing that “that kind of endearing figurehead was necessary to retain the special atmosphere created in those precious 90 minutes.”

Mr. Osgood’s signature TV sign-off, “See you on the radio,” promoted his “Newsbreak” — later called “The Osgood File” — segments for CBS radio. They were brief daily commentaries whose contents, he once told the New York Times, fell “somewhere between a presidential speech and the latest basketball scores.”

He talked about such commonplace vexations as the vanishing of a single sock into the washing machine’s maw and the mind-boggling irony of a thief who successfully sued his victims for harming him in the course of his robbery.

People once used to say that crime does not pay

And at one time that was how it was

But if crime didn’t pay in an earlier day

These days in the courtroom it does.

When former secretary of state <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbBgaccISi8">Henry Kissinger delivered the morning weather report</a> on CBS’s “This Morning” show, Mr. Osgood marked the event in song: “I wonder who’s Kissinger now,” he sang to the tune of the venerable pop song “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” (One of his lines had Mother Teresa reading the sports scores.)

Whether on radio or TV, Mr. Osgood often accompanied himself on the piano. His celebrity and his skill on the keyboard once earned him a spot playing a Gershwin medley with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall.

“Someone suggested that I’m a fourth-rate piano player,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1991. “I insist I’m third-rate.”

Katy Winn

Charles Osgood Wood III, son of a textile salesman, was born in the Bronx on Jan. 8, 1933. He adopted his middle name as a surname when he began his broadcasting career at ABC, to avoid confusion with a network announcer named Charles Woods.

Mr. Osgood grew up mostly in Baltimore, which became the locus of his 2004 book, “Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack: A Boyhood Year During World War II.” The year in question was 1942, when 9-year-old Charles, glued to radio broadcasts of war news, plotted the advances and retreats of military forces with pins stuck in maps.

His family moved again, and he completed high school in Englewood, N.J. In 1954, he graduated with an economics degree from Fordham University in New York. “In school, I didn’t have a chance to rhyme,” he once said, “because nothing rhymes with ‘gross national product.’”

He worked on the college radio station with colleagues including future TV star Alan Alda (“M.A.S.H.”). He then spent three years as master of ceremonies for the U.S. Army Band at Fort Myer, Va., during which time he co-wrote several songs with his roommate, John Cacavas, who became a prolific composer for television.

Their “Gallant Men,” with Sen. Everett M. Dirksen (R-Ill.) reciting the verse, won a Grammy. Mr. Osgood proudly noted that the piece shows up in a parade scene in the countercultural biker-film classic “Easy Rider” (1969) and that whenever the movie was shown on TV, he received a royalty payment of 4 cents.

After his Army stint, Mr. Osgood hoped to be on the executive track in broadcasting. He worked in managerial positions at the Washington-area classical music station WGMS and the pay-TV station WHCT, based in Hartford, Conn.

He was fired in 1964, less than a year into his job with the TV station, when the business began to hemorrhage money. “I thought I was the world’s greatest expert on pay TV,” he later told Time magazine, “but since there was only one pay-TV station — mine — my services were not exactly in demand. I went from being the youngest manager of a TV station in the U.S. to being the oldest radio cub reporter.”

He took an entry-level position with ABC Radio and, in 1967, moved to a CBS radio affiliate in New York as an anchor and reporter. His “Newsbreak” segments, poetry included, were discouraged by management until listeners began to write in approvingly about his whimsical twist on the news.

In 1973, when House Speaker Carl Albert turned down Vice President Spiro Agnew’s request for a House probe into bribery charges against him, Mr. Osgood presented a criticism of Albert in verse:

You accuse me of just doing nothing

It’s not true, as a matter of fact

I am far, far beyond doing nothing

Mr. Osgood was inducted into several broadcasting halls of fame, and he won prestigious journalism honors, including Peabody Awards. From 1988 to 1993, he wrote a newspaper column syndicated by what was then Tribune Media Services.

His first marriage, to Theresa Audette, ended in divorce. In 1973, Mr. Osgood married Jean Crafton. In addition to his wife, survivors include five children from his second marriage, Kathleen Wood Griffis, Kenneth Winston Wood, Anne-E. Wood, Emily J. Wood and Jamie Wood; a sister; a brother; and six grandchildren.

Many of “The Osgood File” anecdotes and poems were reprinted in his books. One volume was called “There’s Nothing That I Wouldn’t Do If You Would Be My POSSLQ” (1981); the initials represented the U.S. Census Bureau’s category for Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters.

In one passage of doggerel, Mr. Osgood wrote:

There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do

I’ll be your friend and so much more;

Marty Lederhandler

Bart Barnes

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