Hom Hong Wei (1915-2011) at his WNYC engineering shop workbench in the early 1940s.

Hom (a.k.a. Henry) joined the engineering staff in 1939 to help with our coverage of the New York World's Fair.  He is one of the earliest, if not the first, Asian-Americans to earn an FCC First Class Radiotelephone Operators license in 1937 and became the first Chinese-American broadcast technician in the New York metro area a year later at WWRL in Woodside, Queens.

Hom rose through the ranks at WNYC to become the Chief Engineering Supervisor in charge of the station's day-to-day technical operations, a position he held for many years.  He designed and installed most of the sound and broadcast systems used at WNYC, City Hall, and other city venues. Over the years he also brought at least 150 young people into broadcasting by providing them with on-the-job training not available at technical schools. This expertise was later made into a program in conjunction with the Westinghouse High School in Brooklyn.

In 1970 Hom won the city's top civil service award by Mayor Lindsay for his "outstanding contributions which have improved the quality of the services provided to the people of New York and...consistant dedication toward improving the efficiency and high technical quality of the city's broadcasting." [1] Hom retired from WNYC after 42 years in 1981. He visited us at the Municipal Building, was a good friend of the archives, and was always available to answer questions. Hom passed away last Sunday, February 20^th. He will be missed. 

[1] Henry, Diana Mara, "City's Radio Chief for 30 Years Awards Top Civil Service Prize," Staten Island Advance, October 7, 1970.

Thanks to Hom and Damon Wei for this photo and the badges below. The first one is Hom's station badge and second is his 1939 New York World's Fair badge. (WNYC Archives Collection). 

Below is Hom's ID Card from the 1939 New York World's Fair. He was also known as "Henry Tom" a psuedonym of convenience.

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Broadcast on WNYC Today in:

1945: In Fiorello H. La Guardia's weekly Talk to the People, he addresses a comment to Winston Churchill on the meaning of the Atlantic Charter. He also speaks about conserving heating fuel, the meat shortage and New York Times reporting. The Mayor warns housewives about food prices, frozen fish, and substitutes for potatoes. Donations to the Red Cross and their care of prisoners of war is also addressed as is an order to police to keep speakeasys from developing, and honest vs. crooked judges in regards to illegal sale of alcohol.

1957: Dr. William Watson talks about smoking and lung cancer as part of the cancer alert series on For Doctors Only.

1995:The Poet's Voice features Anne Sexton. "Immensely talented and enormously troubled, Sexton took up Lowell's 'confessional poetry.' She wrote about forbidden subjects --a woman's body, fears, and fantasies -- to commercial and critical acclaim. We hear her arresting readings, including To MyLover Returning to His Wife." 

2001: In this edition of Selected Shorts, Joe Spano reads, The Blind Neighbor, by Mary Gordon and Ted Marcoux reads Scaring the Baddest Animal, by Chris Spain.

Howard Hughes wades through a scrum of reporters at Floyd Bennett Field, July 14, 1938. Hughes and his four-man crewhad just returned to New York after circumnavigating the globe and covering 14,672 miles in a record-setting three days, 19 hours, 14 minutes and 10 seconds.

WNYC was there as they made their way from the plane to the ticker-tape parade, and a special City Hall reception the following day. The parade from the Battery to City Hall broke all previous records, with an estimated 1.5 million well-wishers on the street and another half million watching from office windows and rooftops. At City Hall, Hughes was modest before the thousands of well-wishers and those listening at home.

"I am not very good at making speeches, and I have consented to make this one only because there is one thing about this flight that I would like everyone to know. It was in no way a stunt. I was the carrying out of a careful plan and it functioned because it was carefully planned. We who did it are entitled to no particular credit. We are no supermen or anything of that sort. Any one of the airline pilots of this nation, with any of the trained army or navy navigators and competent radio engineers in any one of our modern passenger transports, could have done this same thing...If any credit is due anyone, it is the men who designed and perfected, to its remarkable state of efficiency, the modern American flying machine and equipment. If we made a fast flight, it is because many young men in this country went to engineering schools, worked hard at drafting tables and designed a fast airplane and navigation and radio equipment which would keep this plane upon its course. All we did was operate this equipment and the plane according to the instruction book..."

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Broadcast on WNYC Today in:

1927: Ida M. Mellen delivers a talk on alligators. Note: Mellen (1877-1970) was an aquarist at the New York Aquarium, 1916-1929. She wrote books and articles on marine biology and cats. Mellen is also known for exposing the urban legend of 'refrigerator cats.'

1939: As part of the ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the first session of Congress, President Roosevelt addresses a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Note: The event is noted as being radio's most extensive coverage to date, with more than 400 stations carrying the ceremony and speeches.

1946: Edward Corsi, Ray Milland, Iris Barry, Robert Mochrie, and others appear at the Foreign Language Press Film Awards. Topping the awards is the Leo McCarey production of The Bells of St. Mary's, named best film of 1945 by foreign language press critics. Ingrid Bergman is judged best actress on the basis of her work in that film, as well as in Spellboun and Saratoga Trunk. Ray Milland receives honors as the year's best actor for his performance in The Lost Weekend. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett win for best screen play for that film, and the award for best director goes to Alfred Hitchcock for Spellbound.

1954: WNYC Director Seymour N. Siegel delivers the opening remarks at WNYC's 2nd Annual Book Festival, and later M. Wilson presents a talk on university presses. Note: The annual event ran for five years from 1953 to 1957.

1964: German author and playwright Rolf Hochhuth and producer Herman Schumlein talk about Hochhuth's controversial play The Deputy at the Overseas Press Club. The play sparked controversy because of its criticism of Pope Pius XII's role in World War II.

1979: WNYC Program Director Richard Pyatt interviews radio host Bob Grant for this edition of Visitors From the Other Side. "The other side in our frame of reference is neither the Jordan nor the Rubicon, but commercial radio and television..."

1983: Tim Page speaks with composer Ned Rorem on New, Old and Unexpected.

1996: In this edition of New York and Company with Leonard Lopate, David Foster Wallace discusses his three-pound-three-ounce novel, Infinite Jest.

2002: The documentary series Six Months: Rebuilding Our City, Rebuilding Ourselves presents This Was My City Too. Immigration and identity are the focus of Arab-American radio producer Jad Abumrad and Pakistani-born journalist Nafisa Hoodbhoy as they examine the impact of September 11th on Arabs and Pakistanis in New York.

Moscow's Park of Culture and Rest was one of the topics in a controversial series of travelogues aired by WNYC in late 1937 and early 1938. Critics of the station charged the broadcasts were Soviet propaganda meant to gloss over the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin.

The program was one of a series presented by the National Travel Club cheerily describing places, customs and traditions in the Soviet Union. At a heated City Council meeting, Councilman Charles E. Keegan of the Bronx denounced the rosy depictions and the lack of any mention of Stalin's murderous regime. This was followed by a legal struggle over whether the council had the authority to order such an inquiry without mayoral approval. 

After 18 months of delay, an official investigation into the travelogues proceeded. Six people testified but the investigating committee was hard-pressed to prove anyone associated with the program or the station was a communist sympathizer. In fact, an earlier part of the series featured an interview with the director of the Russian Travel Division of the American Express Company.

"Thus, a pattern, not of communist conspiracy but of apparent manipulation of the municipal radio station for money-making purposes in the interest of American Express began to emerge."(1)

In his final testimony before the committee, station director Morris Novik said, "I say to you sincerely, that in anything which has to do with propaganda about Russia, very few people can smell the rat as fast as myself, to put it mildly, and I have watched everything on the station. And no one, I don't think, has been allowed to put out propaganda since I have taken over."

Listen to the 2001 "Red Radio" program featuring Oscar Brand

(1) Irving Foulds Luscombe, writing in WNYC:1922-1940--The Early History of a Twentieh-Century Urban Service, NYU Ph.D. Thesis, 1968, pg. 317. (Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection).

Archive audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives.

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Broadcast on WNYC Today in:

1925: New York City Commissioner of Plant and Structures (and the head of WNYC) William Wirt Mills announces a new steamship service between New York and Palestine. Mills tells WNYC listeners that the launching of the American Palestine Line linking New York and Haifa will "appeal to the deepest of all sentiments — to the religious feeling of multitudes. To Jew and to gentile, Palestine is the Holy Land. To Protestant as well as to Roman Catholic, the land is hallowed. There is, therefore, something that appeals to practically all the people of America in this reaching out from America to the furthest end of the Mediterranean Sea, and in making Jerusalem's seaport the destination of the steamship that bears the name of an American President and that flies the Stars and Stripes and the flag of the Zionists..." Note: The SS President Arthur was the line's only ship. The line was the first steamship company owned and operated by Jews. It lasted only a year. For more information see: American Palestine Line.

1938: C.W. Coates talks about tropical fish. Note: Coates, an aquarist and ichthyologist, was a regular contributor to WNYC from 1937 through 1939. He was the director of the New York Aquarium and a pioneering eel researcher. In 1935, Coates co-authored the ground-breaking work "Sex Recognition in the Guppy," published in the journal Zoologica.

1944: Victory Concert at the New York Public Library, featuring Annette Burford, soprano, and Oscar Wagner, piano. Note: Annette Burford hailed from Oklahoma City and was the 1940 winner of the Chicago Civic Opera auditions, appearing regularly in their productions. Dr. Oscar Wagner was the Dean of the Juilliard School of Music.

1958: The work of the Universal Postal Union is profiled in The Stamp of Approval, part of The United Nations Story series.

1962: Edward Tatnell Canby considers the work of Carlo Gesualdo, known as Gesualdo da Venosa (1566-1613) on Recordings, E.T.C. According to Wikipedia, Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, was "an Italian composer, lutist and nobleman of the late Renaissance. He is famous for his expressive madrigals, which use a chromatic language not heard again until the late 19th century."

1970: Host Ruth Bowman interviews Dan Flavin about his use of fluorescent sculpture, as well as light and lines of light, in this edition of Views on Art.  Flavin voices his opinion of art critics and comments on the relationship between artists and galleries. 

1988: New Sounds with John Schaefer presents a program of Bach's music, interpreted by various new-music artists — including works played on marimba and violin (by Marimolin), on guitar and fiddle (Darol Anger & Mike Marshall), synthesizer (Wendy Carlos), jazz trio (Jacques Loussuer) and many others.  The program begins with dulcimer master John McCutcheon performing a version of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring and concludes with Paul Winter's Air, an arrangement of Bach's Air on the G String for solo sax.

1996: Camerata Latinoamericana performs for Around New York. The group includes: Pablo Zinger, piano; Paquito D'Rivera, clarinet; Marco Granados, flute; Brenda Feliciano, soprano; and Gustavo Tavares, cello.

2004: Leonard Lopate talks with David Schwartz, Chief Curator of Film at the American Museum of the Moving Image, on presidential ads and living room candidates. Also on the show, jazz pianist George Shearing on his autobiography, Lullaby at Birdland.

From May, 1934 to April, 1948 Gladys M. Petch was heard regularly over WNYC talking about Norway. The programs Sunlit Norway Calls, Spirit of the Vikings, and News of Norway were underwritten by the Royal Norwegian Information Service. While most of these broadcasts were aired via transcription disc, it appears that during WWII, Petch was in the WNYC studios, as evidenced by these two 1944 News ofNorway broadcasts we found at the National Library of Norway site.

In this WNYC broadcast Petch talks about sabotage against the German labor service office in Oslo, the execution of Norwegian patriots, and factories controlled by the Nazis. In a second WNYC broadcast Petch announces the agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom with the Norwegian government in exile. She also comments on the 'arch traitor' Vidkun Quisling and his visit with Hitler and delivers an obituary for the painter Edvard Munch, who died that week. The Norwegian collection includes at least a dozen of these WNYC broadcasts.

Petch, a native of Norway, came to the United States in 1928 after broadcasting in Europe, including a stint teaching English over the air in Oslo. She reportedly was also the first English language speaker to broadcast from Rome and Prague.  Described as a "radio consultant" to the Royal Norwegian Information Services, Petch had signed up with the Chicago-based Redpath Bureau, an agency for speakers and lecturers. In their promotional literature in the 1940s they described her as "the woman with the perfect radio voice." They went on to say:

"Though naturally and decidedly feminine, Mrs. Petch's voice is possessed of a clearness rarely associated with female radio artists. Her delightful speaking accents are transmitted without distortion, leaving with the listener an impression of extraordinary vocal quality. Her descriptions of the land of the Vikings are vivid and life-like. Her views and depictions of the works of Sigrid Undset and Ibsen, of the triumphs of Amundsen, are exceedingly entertaining and educational..."

Writing in the January-February, 1946 WNYC Masterwork Bulletin, outgoing Station Director Morris Novik commented: "Mrs. Petch brings you many interesting human interest stories of the people of Norway including some she just picked up on her recent trip to Oslo where she had an audience with King Haakon who commended her on the fine work she did during the war for the Norwegian people."

For a look at Petch's Redpath Bureau brochures check out the University of Iowa library collections. Many thanks to retired broadcaster and public relations man, Walt Santner for bringing Gladys M. Petch to our attention and providing a load of links to her broadcasts and brochures.

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Broadcast by WNYC Today in:  

1925: New York State Senator William Lathrop Love discusses the public reaction to his 'Clean Books bill.'  Note: Dr. W.L. Love represented the 8th District of Brooklyn. He was seeking to amend the law pertaining to the sale of obscene literature by making the presence of any obscene, lewd or lascivious work, apart from its context or intent, sufficient ground for suppression of the whole book. The bill was defeated (9 to 2) by the Senate Codes Committee that day.

1938: New York Congressman Hamilton Fish talks about 'the international situation.'  Note: Fish was in Congress (1920-1945) representing Putnam County and was a staunch opponent of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies.

1944: Broadcast of Father Knickerbocker, a dramatization of war problems in New York City. In it there's talk about retailers overcharging 'Mrs. Consumer' while the Office of Price Administration works hard in the fight against inflation and overcharges. Also a reminder from Father Nick that 'loose lips sink ships.'  

1956: Gilbert Seldes talks about censorship in films for this edition of The Lively Arts.

1965: The National Conference of Christians and Jews Brotherhood Conference presents a panel discussion: "Police power -- too little, too much?" The panel is moderated by Muriel Fox Aronson, with panelists Deputy Chief Inspector Patrick V. Murphy, Associate Dean Robert B. McKay, of the NYU Law School, and Dr. Frederick D. Patterson, President of the United Negro College Fund.

1984: Pianist Augustin Anievas and cellist Frederick Zlotkin perform at the Frick Collection.

1990: Richard Oldenburg hosts this edition of Arts Alive from the Algonquin. The topic is "values of works of art." His guests are Kirk Varnedoe, Adam Gopnik, and Linda Shearer.

2002: The Brian Lehrer Show presents: From Bronxistan To Iran: Eustace Tilley's New View Of New York. Brian talks with The New Yorker magazine's Rick Meyerowitz, Maira Kalman, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Malcolm Gladwell.

WNYC's Chief Engineer Isaac Brimberg, from a 1930s photo. Brimberg was a pioneer in radio broadcasting. He joined WNYC at its opening in 1924 and was named Chief Engineer in 1929.  He oversaw the WPA construction of our new studios and our state-of-the-art transmission facilities at Greenpoint, Brooklyn--both opening in October 1937.  Brimberg was also responsible for setting up our shortwave facility W2XVP in 1941 and our experimental FM station W39NY, now WNYC-FM.  Major Isaac Brimberg was in the Army Signal Corps in 1943 when he died tragically on leave in a car accident at the age of 40. 

'Brimmy' as he was affectionately known, was very much an engineer of the 'Yankee' ingenuity school who, when faced with a problem, was great at thinking outside the box. The following is from an account by former WNYC Director Seymour N. Siegel on how Brimberg overcame remote transmission problems when sending a signal from Music Mountain in the Berkshire foothills back to WNYC.[1]

"…Bearing in mind Mayor La Guardia's admonition to substitute ingenuity and brains for dollars, Ike (Brimmy) Brimberg, the station's Chief Engineer, suggested the use of our portable short wave equipment.  He produced from some arcane source, two white balloons which would provide an instant antenna without any attachment to any existing structure…It was on July 3, 1938 [2] when Brimmy and I arrived at Music Mountain to carry out Novik's [WNYC Director Morris S. Novik] pioneering idea to bring some of the world's great musical performances live to the audiences of New York City's own station, WNYC…Novik had arranged for this special coverage of the Gordon String Quartette…Brimmy came upon the then summer resident, McNeil Mitchell, an assistant Corporation Counsel of the City.  He was pleased to allow us to use his living room as a command post to hook together short wave reception from the white balloons…" 

This was just one of Brimmy's many inventions. On October 10, 1929, he filed for a patent on "a novel apparatus for reproducing and simulating musical notes and instruments."  This pioneering electronic synthesizer was composed of seven rotating discs on a shaft.  All the discs but one "has embedded in it a wire on which is magnetically recorded fundamentals and overtones of a note or some sound effect."  Passing the disc by a magnet and sending the variation in the current  through a transformer, variable resistance and amplifier, numerous effects are obtained. Brimberg described the operation of his invention this way:

"By means of the controlling member, the pitch and tremolo effects can be varied at the will of the operator. Varying the rheostat varies the current which is employed, so that the rise and fall of the current produces a tremolo effect. By means of switches, the operator can reproduce selectively different notes or sound effects, and these will be reproduced and pass to the amplifier at the output end of the device. The variable resistance is controllable at the will of the operator to vary the overall volume of the combination of notes and sound effects which is reproduced.  In accordance with the invention, any notes and sound effects which have been recorded can be readily reproduced."

A patent for the invention was granted February 19, 1935.  Although Brimberg indicated his device could be made inexpensively, we have yet to discover whether he ever made one that was used at WNYC.  According to his son, Dr. Arthur Brimberg, his father was also involved with electronic improvements to the Hammond organ and invented an instrument similar to the Theremin. To see Brimberg's patent drawings go to: PATENT #1991727.

[1] Thanks to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming - Seymour N.  Siegel papers.

[2] It appears that Siegel misremembered his arriving at Music Mountain with Brimberg as being in July when he meant June. The New York Times reported the station's first use of a shortwave transmitter to cover the Gordon recital as June 12, 1938. See: "WNYC Uses Portable Set," The New York Times, June 13, 1938, pg. 35.  

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Broadcast on WNYC Today in:

1945: In his weekly Talk to the People, Mayor F.H. La Guardia talks about the reasons why the Office of Price Administration should use sense in their actions, basketball betting, student college scholarships, city finances, the referendum on increasing the five cent subway fare to ten cents, and an invitation from General Charles DeGaulle to visit Paris, France

1955: Don Gillis and NBC Symphony Orchestra members have a birthday tribute to their maestro, Arturo Toscanini. They include: David Walters, bass; Philip Sklar, bass; Leon Frankelt, violist; Abe Rinius, contrabassonist; Paul Rensy, Jr., flute; Sam Leveton, bass; Theodore Katz, violin; Michael Kresnapolsky and William Carboni, viola.

1961: ILGWU leader David Dubinsky and Eleanor Roosevelt speak at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire 50^th anniversary memorial. The former First Lady tells the assembled and WNYC listeners to rededicate themselves to see that the fire laws are complied with. She says that she has never forgotten what happened that day.

1998: Neil Rauch reports on the new Black Panther Party.

2001: Social critic Bell Hooks tells Leonard Lopate what's in her Survival Kit. Hooks is the author of a number of influential works, among them Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Killing Rage: Ending Racism. She has also written books for children and essays on art and love.

From the mid-1930s to early 1940s, the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) distributed thousands of transcription discs to hundreds of radio stations around the United States, including WNYC.

The WPA sponsored many New York City-based music groups who performed regularly on WNYC during the Depression, including the WNYC Concert Orchestra, the Amsterdam String Ensemble, The Manhattan Chorus, The Municipal Dance Orchestra, the Morningside String Trio, the Waverly Brass Band, the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, Juanita Hall's Negro Melody Singers and the New York Civic Orchestra (whose 1939 recording of Tchaikovsky's elegy from his Serenade for Strings can be seen at left). 

In fact, in 1936, about half of WNYC's broadcast hours were underwritten by the Federal Music Project (FMP), with an average month accounting for 135 broadcasts. By the end of 1940, the New York City WPA Music Program reported it had provided nearly 1,100 hours of WNYC broadcasts that year. WNYC's Assistant Director Seymour N. Siegel wrote: "If the Federal Music Project has helped the City Station by supplying a substantial  sustaining musical basis, WNYC in turn has unquestionably brought infinitely larger audiences than could ever be crowded into a concert hall.  In the program of educating the listening public to the appreciation of the higher type of music, WNYC has done its part."

The WPA FMP and subsequent WPA Music Program were also platforms for discussions about music, music education and the premieres of new works. In 1939, composer Roy Harris presented 30 illustrated lectures entitled Let's Make Music, under the auspices of the WPA Composers' Forum Laboratory. The series, which dealt with the fundamentals of composition, were broadcast by WNYC and attracted wide attention with an added enrollment of more than 1,300 active participants who received mimeographed copies of the lessons so that their study could be continued at home.

That same year WNYC's World's Fair studio played host to a Composers' Forum concert and a composers roundtable. During WNYC's second annual American Music Festival in 1941, the WPA program assisted with an orchestra of 100 musicians drawn from the WNYC Concert and New York Civic Orchestras.  Among the composer-led works was Philip James' satirical suite Station WGZBX, and the world premiere of Morton Gould's Spiritual for String, Choir and Orchestra. Deems Taylor conducted his composition The Highwayman, with Richard Hale singing baritone. With the United States' entry into World War II, WPA funds were cut significantly and came to an end by June, 1943.

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Broadcast on WNYC today in:

1925: Dr. Gladwyn Kingsley Noble discusses "voices of the night." Noble was the head of the herpetology department at the American Museum of Natural History.  He was the author of many books, among them, The Pectoral Girdle of the Brachycephalic Frogs.

1939: Municipal court judge Dorothy Kenyon talks about "women in the law." Kenyon, a feminist and political activist, began her career doing legal research for the Versailles treaty, supported the labor movement, battled prostitution, served on UN commissions, championed women's rights, fought Senator Joseph McCarthy, and pressed for civil rights.

1943: In this episode of the Great Americans series we hear The Story of Marian Anderson.

1953: New York Governor Thomas Dewey accuses New York City Mayor Impellitteri of proposing unsound fiscal programs.

1964: Josephine Baker talks about her adopted children at the Overseas Press Club.

2005:The Grammy-winning South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo performs live for The Leonard Lopate Show. Then, Grover Crisp tells us about restoring Sam Peckinpah’s first large-scale Western, Major Dundee. Stephen Chow mixes comedy and martial arts in his latest film, Kung Fu Hustle.

In 1937, WNYC opened a new transmitter site in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Flanked by two 304-foot towers, the site featured massive, illuminated WNYC call letters and a north symbol so that planes flying overhead on a clear night could easily get their bearings. WNYC-AM left the site in 1990, and the towers came down about 10 years later. The 10 Kent Street site is now a project of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is in the process of creating WNYC Transmitter Park.

On the year the transmitter opened, architect Allan Gordon Lorimer painted the two renditions featured here. The 42" x 52" painting on plywood shown at left hangs in WNYC's Alexander Kaplen Green Room, where our guests wait before going on the air. If you click on the image to enlarge it you will see that each of the five airplanes is flying to a different area airport: Mitchell Field (closed in 1961), Roosevelt Field (closed in May, 1951), North Beach Airport (now La Guardia Airport), Miller Field (acquired by the National Park Service in 1974) and Floyd Bennet Field (now part of the Gateway National Recreational Area). The frontal view depicted below hangs in the 9th floor green conference room of our 160 Varick Street offices.

In the 1930s, Lorimer was working in private practice and as a New Deal-era Civil Works Administration (CWA) architect. He produced designs for Parks Department amenities under Robert Moses in 1934, and was active in the planning of the city's exhibits at the New York World's Fair.

By the 1940s, he was the Chief of the Bureau of Architecture at the New York City Department of Public Works, where he supervised the design of the city's postwar building program. He was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1960. While we have yet to discover specifically how Lorimer came to produce these paintings, it was probably because the CWA gave way to the WPA (Works Progress Administration), and the WNYC Transmitter site was a WPA project.

WNYC's Greenpoint, Brooklyn transmitter site portrayed by Allan Gordon Lorimer in 1937. Gouache on paper. Dimensions: 31.5" x 22.5"  (WNYC Archive Collections).

Lorimer’s daughter, Lindsay L. Rettie, says her father was close to both Robert Moses (at Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority and New York City Department of Parks) and Mayor La Guardia in the 1930's and '40s.  She writes:

 “What we know is that my father was retained by architect Bertram Goodhue, and later by John Russell Pope in the early 1930's.  A friend of his at Goodhue, Herbert Magoon, was hired by Robert Moses when he established the L.I. State Park Commission. When Moses needed some presentation material in a hurry for presentation in Albany, Magoon suggested my father for the task.  On a free-lance basis, my father prepared renderings that passed muster and served as his introduction to Moses.  Later, when his work with Pope ended, he joined Robert Moses when Moses was appointed City Commissioner of Parks. 

“Robert Moses wore many hats and was "lending" talent between and among agencies. This is probably where his involvement with the Federal agencies began.  My father mentions only a few times in his papers the CWA or WPA, for example, regarding the Central Park Zoo and work in Prospect Park, but the connection is there.  Linkage to these agencies was likely through Mayor La Guardia’s office.  So far, we have not found a specific reference to WNYC in his papers but we do know that throughout his life he loved ‘the City station.’ ”

Architect and artist Allan Gordon Lorimer in a portrait taken some time in the 1960s. (Photo courtesy of Lindsay L. Rettie, WNYC Archive Collections)

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Broadcast on WNYC Today in:

1925: H.E. Anthony, Associate Curator of Mammals of the Western Hemisphere for the American Museum of Natural History, delivers a talk titled "Hunting the Head Hunters." Anthony was the leader of an expedition to Ecuador (June 1920-March 1921) that encountered the head hunting Jivaro Indians.

1957: David Randolph traces the history of keyboard instruments for this edition of Music for the Connoisseur.

1968: Dr. Gaye Wilson Allen delivers an address at Cooper Union on the "Philosophy of the Free Man's World"  as part of the series Peace, Love, Creativity: Hope of Mankind.

2003: Dramatically set in Morocco, in the largest extant medieval city in the world, the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music is one of the world's most unique and enterprising musical events. On this edition of New Sounds, we hear live performances by three talented women representing the three Abrahamic religions: Houria Aichi sings north African Sufi songs; Angelique Ionatos performs songs by Mikis Theodorakis, and Christiane Zaidline sings Hassidic music. 

It’s often a challenge when dealing with archive materials for web presentations.

You have audio and no photo or vice versa.  Additionally, materials we now recognize as being innovative and landmark productions may have been overlooked in their day, leaving little public record of their activities.  

The WPA Theatre Project Radio Division under the direction of Evan Roberts is to a large extent such an endeavor.  We have access to nearly all of the scripts, but it appears that very few of these productions were recorded. Or, if they were, the discs have been lost.  It’s a loss that’s hard to bear, for we share Roberts' thoughts on the promise of radio voiced over WQXR in 1937:

"We know that radio audiences are eager for the experimental and hail new techniques and significant ideas with the fervor of converts to a new cause. We know that the world of machines [has] starved the creative imagination of our people who, now more than ever, feel the need to lift themselves up and above the sordid and the commonplace. We know that radio can reach out to the millions, and fill them with the best ideas and ideals that animate the best minds of the age."

Nevertheless, I toil on with some hope that these broadcasts will turn up some day and again provide us all with some aural inspiration.

Nikola Tesla, the father of alternating current and one of the greatest inventors of all time, died on January 7, 1943 at the New Yorker Hotel. Three days later, WNYC broadcast this memorial to him.  The Croatian-born violinist Zlatko Baloković performed Ave Maria live in the studio, as well as a piece known to be a favorite of Tesla's, identified as Therefore Beyond the Hills is MyVillage, My Native Land.  Mayor F. H. La Guardia read a moving tribute to Tesla written by Slovenian-American author Louis Adamic. Announcer Joe Fishler concluded the program this way:

Fishler: "Nikola Tesla was a man of the future. Always thinking ahead of his time. He predicted interplanetary communication and death rays that would make America impregnable from land, sea and air and war impossible. Not many years ago he announced that he was working on a new tube that would produce radium for as little as one dollar a pound."

Other voice: "That's fantastic!"

Fishler: "Fantastic, unbelievable, impossible! That's what they said when Nikola Tesla predicted the advent of the radio many years before Marconi actually devised a workable radio. Tesla prophesized:

[Other voice] 'Someday we shall be as familair with transmission of intelligence without wires and someday we shall transmit power without using wires'."

Tesla's inventions numbered more than 700 and included a telephone repeater, a polyphase alternating-current system, the induction motor, the Tesla coil transformer and fluorescent lights. The prolific inventor wrote in 1919, "The greatest good will come from the technical improvements tending to unification and harmony, and my wireless transmitter is preeminently such. By its means the human voice and likeness will be reproduced everywhere and factories driven thousands of miles from waterfalls furnishing the power; aerial machines will be propelled around the earth without a stop and the sun's energy controlled to create lakes and rivers for motive purposes and transformation of arid deserts into fertile land...'' For the complete quote and more about Tesla's life, we recommend Professor Bogdan R. Kosanovic's Tesla site.

With special thanks to NYPR Senior Archivist Marcos Sueiro, the above audio is courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives and its transfer was part of an NEH-funded preservation project with NYPR archivists Haley Richardson and Emily Vinson. Check out their project blog, Annotations.

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1925:  Lt. Commander George E. Brandt outlines the Navy's plans for oceanographic research in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Speaking at an American Institute of Engineering Society exposition of inventions, Brandt said he expects future ocean-going expeditions will provide valuable data for weather forecasting, a key to solving world food shortages as global population grows, and cheaper methods for generating light.

Brandt, who was expected to command the first of a series of Navy undersea explorations, told the listening audience, "Since no sunlight penetrates the profound depths of the sea, many of these inhabitants [sea creatures] carry their own illumination. In some types the entire body glimmers from a coating which exudes from the pores and emits a soft, silvery glow. In other types luminous organs run along the sides of the body or flashing light spots are provided on the head or face. These  lighting plants are a thousand times as economical as any that our engineers have been able to design. The expense of the materials which furnish the light is almost negligible because the lantern is capable of self-regeneration by a reverse action in the substances which act upon each other to produce the light. In other words, imagine a kerosene lamp capable of regenerating the oil it consumes. It is one of the fascinating hopes of science and industry that some day the master engineer will arrive and lead the way to imitation of the economical methods known to the tiny fish that carries his light at the end of a stick." 

1939: Governor Lehman, Mayor La Guardia and others host the opening ceremonies for the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge.

1953: Sociologist William H. White and actors Quentin Reynolds and Tyrone Power speak at the New York Herald Tribune Books and Authors luncheon.

1962: Campus Press Conference interviews Milton Halpern, NYC Chief Medical Examiner on the function of his department. Helpern is known as a pioneer of modern forensic medicine. He was professor and chairman of the Department of Forensic Medicine at New York University's School of Medicine from 1954-1974 and was on the faculty of Cornell University Medical College.

2001: Portrait painter Chuck Close tells Leonard Lopate what he would take on a sojourn to a remote cabin in the woods or a desert island in this episode of Survival Kit.

The Flanagan Brothers were the most popular group of Irish entertainers in New York City between the early 1920's and the late 1930's. Joe, Mike and Louis (who is not pictured here and played harp guitar) were born in Waterford City, Ireland in the 1890's and emigrated to the United States with their parents at the turn of the century. They settled in Albany, New York. The brothers, all self-taught, played at concerts, dances, bars, clubs, and on WNYC. They recorded 160 songs for several labels and their discs sold well across the U.S, Britain and Ireland. Many have since been reissued in anthology collections. Here is an original version of the Kerry Mills Barndance courtesy of the Irish Traditional Music Archive.

In the liner notes to An Irish Delight: Classic Recordings of Irish Traditional Music in America on Topic Records, Mick Moloney writes:

"The Flanagans had a keen eye and ear for the musical tastes of the public and this heavily influenced the repertoire they chose to perform. They had arrived in New York at the end of an era which had seen the demise of the vaudeville and music hall circuit, but they found that audiences still expected the slickness in presentation which were so characteristic of both these domains. As Irish entertainers, they faced the additional audience expectation that they perform Stage Irish material. So they dressed up in green, white and gold costumes and did just that. They wrote lots of Stage Irish skits in the "Mike and Pat" mold (several of which they recorded) and sang sentimental Irish American songs, like Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra and I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, and humourous burlesque songs, such as Cod Liver Oil and The Widow McCarthy, They also played and recorded driving, rhythmic selections of jigs, reels, hornpipes and barn dances on accordeon and banjo. It is perhaps for these instrumental selections that they are best remembered today, but in fact all their recorded material provides a fascinating insight into the musical and theatrical skills of this remarkable trio." For the complete review, see: FLANAGAN.

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1926: Department of Plant and Structures benefit for St. Vincent's Hospital. Mayor James J. Walker and Commissioner Albert Goldman speak. Those performing include: impersonator Evan Davies, The Three Reillys, The Paulist Choristers, and the Vincent Lopez Orchestra. Note: Lopez's group performed on WNYC's opening broadcast night, July 8, 1924.

1931: H. Ida Curry, Superintendant of County Agencies for Dependent Children, State Charities Aid Association, New York City, speaks on the New York State program for crippled children.

1943: The Story of Harlem renaissance sculptor James Richmond Barthe on Great Americans, a series dramatizing the lives of influencial African Americans. Note: Others profiled on the program in April and May, 1943, include contralto Marian Anderson, sea captain Hugh Mulzac, and the fighter Joe Louis.

1951: "How to Correct World Misconceptions About America" on the University of Chicago Roundtable.

1960: Footloose in Greenwich Village, a documentary. An unidentified WNYC interviewer sets out in 1960 to comb Greenwich Village for Beats, though he found almost no one who would admit to being one.  What he does manage to capture are the ramblings of various residents and several anguished poetry recitations.   The program narrator also tries to understand the Beats: their protest and quest for meaning, and interest in eastern religions.  The second half of the work gets into the history of Greenwich Village and it's bohemian tradition.

1989: Steve Zahar interviews Gervaise de Peyer, English clarinetist and conductor, on this edition of the Chamber Music Society of LincolnCenter.

1998: Historian Howard Zinn reviews The Zinn Reader and Poet Hal Sirowitz tells what My Therapist Said on New York and Company with Leonard Lopate. 

2005: On The Media: "A year ago last week, the world was confronted for the first time with images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Ever since, the American Civil Liberties Union has worked to keep the spotlight on allegations of torture at American military facilities. Unfortunately for the group, additional photos were never released by the Pentagon. Brooke talks to ACLU media relations director Emily Whitfield about what it takes to keep a story alive."

In a letter to the editor of the New York Times a few days later, reader Frank Norris wrote, "If Mme. Hempel will start the custom of great musical artists giving great music, she will earn the praise of a very large body of listeners, who have long waited for this event. It has been a painful fact that, while many of the greatest singers and instrumental players have appeared over the radio, their programs frequently have been deplorable...If Mme. Hempel will give us only the best music and create a standard, other great artists who follow her will scarcely dare to give the miserable stuff they have in the past."[2]

Hempel's appearance on WNYC in 1934 was far from her last. In fact she had a series of fifteen minute programs (later extended to thirty minutes) known as Municipal Concert Hall that aired March through May of 1943 on Sunday evenings.  Her piano accompanist was Celius Dougherty, who was sometimes replaced by WNYC Music Supervisor Herman Neuman and Paul Meyer. The above recording is from the April 18th edition of that 1943 series.

(Photo by Eugene de Salignac, NYC Municipal Archives) 

[1] New York Times, June 29, 1934, pg. 16

[2] New York Times, July 4, 1934, pg. 14

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1927: The poet Joseph Auslander reads his work. Note: Ten years later Auslander was appointed the first "Consultant in Poetry" to the Library of Congress (i.e., the first U.S. Poet Laureate) and served in that role for four years. The LOC website indicates, "He was noted for his war poems, and his best-known work is The Unconquerables (1943), a collection of poems addressed to the German-occupied countries of Europe."

1934: Carmen Haider talks on "Fascist Tendencies in the United States." Note: Haider had a Ph.D. from Columbia University and spent time at the Brookings Institution. Her book Do We Want Fascism? had just been published by John Day in New York. A New York Times book review noted her extensive studies in Europe, particularly Germany, in which she described fascism's "anti-intellectualism" and "acceptance of violence as a means of gaining a desired end." As for fascism in the United States, the reviewer wrote: "She thinks that the only group that would gain under Fascist rule would be the industrial and banking capitalists." The unnamed reviewer concluded that Haider's research is "marked by much finely spun theorizing and acceptance of hypotheses as realities."

1945: Mayor F. H. La Guardia delivers another regular Sunday Talk to the People. This week His Honor opens with the following: "Well, we certainly pasted Tokyo in the last few days, didn't we? And did you notice, we bombed the Imperial Palace. So the Chief Monkey has learned that we are not afraid of the 'Son of the Sun.' If I were not on the air, I would tell you what kind of son he is. This news is exceedingly grateful [sic] to me because when I was on shortwave, I was always forbidden from saying anything disrespectful about the Emperor. Well, he got it good this time. Good work, boys, keep it up. Keep up this pace and Japan will soon know that they have something to learn from the Germans, that is, to quit in time."

1952: Radio France North American Service interviews writer James T. Farrell, author of the famous Depression-era trilogy StudsLonigan.  Farrell had been in France as an American delegate to the festival of arts known as "Masterpieces of the 20th Century."  In this broadcast he talks about his address to the festival, where he emphasized ideals of reason and enlightenment and the creative capacity in all people. Farrell says the writer is not separate from his audience but gives expression to their thoughts and feelings. He refers to Sherwood Anderson's book about growing up in a country town in Ohio and says if the feelings of a boy in a small Ohio town are important, then "perhaps my own emotions are important and I use this to emphasize that culture makes life meaningful." This, he says, is why we write.  "The best conditions for writing are conditions of freedom.  And thinking of this, we must think not only of the writer, we must think of the audience.  I mention in passing that with that we have in America a commercial culture in which we have many moving pictures, many television programs and so on, which are false, which are banal, which present false images of human beings.  And that we must recognize and criticize it, but we must not be afraid of it.  We must not be afraid of new means of communication.  We must not be afraid of the new arts.  We must master it." [sic]

1964: Overseas Press Club hosts former newspaper reporter Bill Haddad, then running for a congressional seat in Manhattan. He discusses the influence of the press in revealing the failings of government and discusses "open secrets" about New York City government, including judgeships that are bought and sold and surrogate posts as payoffs for political favors.

1987: Pegeen Fitzgerald, Leonard Lopate, and Kate Borger look into the hidden differences between the Japanese and Americans on New York and Company.

On July 2, 1946, David Randolph began a series of weekly broadcasts on WNYC called Music for the Connoisseur, later known as The David Randolph Concert.* 

On his fourth broadcast, he surveyed the subject of humor in music. With that, David pioneered the thematic radio broadcast devoted to a single musical subject with commentary. Above, you can listen to the full broadcast of "Composers' Senses of Humor," David's 375th show that aired in June, 1954. 

The programs were later syndicated nationally on the 72-station network of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB). The broadcasts garnered four Ohio State University Awards as "the best programs of music and commentary in the nation," and aired for 33 years. They also resulted in invitations from 23 publishers to write a book, and This IsMusic: A Guide to the Pleasures of Listening was published by McGraw-Hill in 1964. It was described by the New York Times as "one of the best of the year."

David actually made his first WNYC appearance in 1939 on the music quiz program Symphonic Varieties, hosted by Sigmund Spaeth. It should be no surprise that not only was he the winner, but one of the few to ever get a perfect score. Spaeth encouraged David to stick with radio, and by 1950, he had four programs on the air each week and had established himself as one of America's outstanding commentators on music. Two of these programs were on WNYC. In the late fifties David was the intermission commentator for WNYC's broadcast of the Lewisohn Stadium concerts. Later on, he was a regular guest critic for WQXR's First Hearing and the host of WQXR's Lincoln Center Spotlight.

In August 1948, David announced during his program that the FCC might end WNYC's evening broadcasts — effectively cancelling his show. Listeners responded and sent in 6,134 letters of support. In view of the protest, the FCC renewed the AM station's night broadcasting license despite objections from WCCO in Minneapolis, our broadcast nemesis. Fan mail in David's file also includes kind words from photographer Margaret Bourke-White, composer and pianist Sir Alec Templeton, poet and editor Louis Untermeyer and the writer Joseph Wood Krutch.

Outside of the radio, David Randolph was the conductor of the original Masterwork Chorus & Orchestra from its founding in 1955 until his resignation on January 1, 1993. He was also the director of the St. Cecilia Chorus, which he led from 1965 until a week before his passing last year. David also taught music for many years at Montclair State University and The New School. Finally, Maestro Randolph has the distinction of making it into the Guinness Book of World Records for having conducted the most complete performances of Handel's Messiah.

*In an oral history interview with the NYPR archives several years ago, David voiced his frustration with some civil service announcers who introduced the program as Music for the Con-ne-sewer. He felt the best remedy was to change the name. 

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1926: National Democratic Club dinner. Speakers: Thomas E. Rush, Franklin D. Roosevelt, James W. Gerard, Henry Morganthau, James M. Cox, Frank L. Polik and others.

1938: Women's League for Peace and Freedom program.  

1956: Gilbert Seldes discusses movies and why people will go to see a bad movie faster than a good one on The Lively Arts.

Robert Sonkin and Charles Todd were working at the City College Department of Public Speaking when they decided to spend their summer vacations in 1940 and '41 at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of central California. With the help of Alan Lomax, their project was underwritten by the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Carrying a "portable" 50-pound Presto disc cutter, they recorded cowboy songs, traditional ballads, square dance calls, camp council meetings, storytelling sessions and the personal experiences of the Dust Bowl refugees who lived in the camps.  Drawing from more than 200  field recordings, the folklorists produced the above documentary for WNYC in 1942, one of three in a broadcast series called Songs of the Okies. 

Sonkin and Todd described their folksong expedition for the New York TimesMagazine in November, 1940:

"It is a somewhat bewildering experience to travel a few miles inland from the modern, sophisticated cities of the California coast to the hot valley of the San Joaquin, where many of the Okies have made their homes in government camps, private camps or in roadside tents and shelters. Geographically, it is still California, but for the collector of songs it is another and far more fascinating world. Strolling in the evenings through one of the big Farm Security Administration camps, past long rows of tents and metal 'units,' one hears fragments of tunes that a more prosperous America has forgotten in the process of growing up and getting rich." [1]

In addition to the ethnographic research Todd did with Sonkin in California, he also documented folk music in upstate New York and parts of New Jersey. In 1942, he returned to California and worked as associate manager of the Tulare Migrant Camp in Visalia. He was later drafted into the Army and went to work as a public relations officer. After the war Todd continued to work in public relations and later headed up the Speech and Communications Department at his alma mater, Hamilton College.

Sonkin had degrees from both City College and Columbia University and founded the speech clinic at City College. In addition to the research he did with Todd in California, Sonkin also documented the African-American community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, where other FSA work was being carried out. After the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, he participated in an Archive of American Folk Song-sponsored project to document the man-in-the-street's opinion of the war effort. Like Todd, Sonkin was drafted into the military during World War II, where he served in the Army Signal Corps.

At the end of the war, Sonkin became a speech professor at City College, where he retired in 1976. Todd and Sonkin remained in touch and undertook a collaborative project which resulted in a book on Alexander Bryan Johnson, an American philosopher and banker, published in 1977. Robert Sonkin died in 1980 at the age of 69. Charles Todd lives Vero Beach, Florida.

For more about Sonkin and Todd's recordings and work, go to the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Voices from the Dust Bowl.

[1] Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin, writing in "Ballads of the Okies," The New York Times Magazine, November 17, 1940, pg. 117.

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WNYC music critic, reviewer, audiophile and host Edward Tatnall Canby (1912-1998) began his nearly 25-year stint at WNYC in 1947. His show, The New Recordings, was described that first year as "a program of wide-ranging comment on music in general and the new records in particular." It was based on his weekly column in The Saturday Review. The name of the program was changed and is probably best recalled as Recordings,  E.T.C.

The Saturday Review column was also the basis of a 1952 book: The Saturday Review Home Book of Recorded Music and SoundReproduction. It was written by Canby with C.G. Burke and Irving Kolodin. In it Canby writes:

"There are ways of listening to recorded music that involve quite different values from "live" listening. Never, then, confuse recorded performance with "live." Open your mental ears to a recording's own values, without prejudice. Search, not for a "concert hall" sound, not to convert your living room into a spacious auditorium such as it obviously can never be; but knowing that the recording is basically an ingenious trompe-l'oreille, a fooling-of-the-ear, give it aid in its own terms."

Canby was an early exponent of electronic music who brought many WNYC listeners their first earfuls of Stockhausen, Dockstader, and Moog. The above program is one such example from November 25th, 1962, where he features Dockstader's Luna Park. The recording critic also wrote reviews for Harper's Magazine (1952-1959) and album notes for Nonesuch. Absorbed by the relationship between music and audio equipment, he contributed a regular column to Audio magazine from 1948-1996. An audiophile, he engineered and produced all his WNYC programs favoring acetate based tape over polyester. Canby was also a well-known choral director and founded the Canby Singers in 1957.  He taught at Princeton University and Finch College. After leaving WNYC's air, he continued to broadcast over WNCN in New York.

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1949: Mayor William O'Dwyer speaks at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the new St. George Ferry Terminal in Staten Island. He says, "Staten Island can't be a stepchild of New York City."

1954: For this edition of Lecture to the Laity, A. Hyatt Manor delivers the George R. Seidenberg Memorial Lecture at the New York Academy of Medicine. His talk is titled "Medicine and Art." Note: Manor was the Curator of Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1964: Representative Melvin Laird, Chair of the Republican platform committee for the 1964 Republican National Convention, speaks at an Overseas Press Club luncheon.

2005: French composer Sylvain Chauveau discusses his music with Spinning on Air host David Garland. He also plays some of his compositions on the WNYC piano and on his electric guitar, which he plucks, strums, bows, and layers. Later, Parisian writer and performer Felicia Atkinson joins Chauveau for a moody spoken-word pop song abstraction, and Chauveau sings one of his favorite songs by Bill Callahan of Smog. Note: Chauveau creates a unique kind of quasi-chamber music of gentle intensity, with roots in both modern pop and the music of such early 20th Century French composers as Erik Satie. His subtle, understated album "Nocturne Impalpable" always generates a lot of inquiries when it's played on WNYC.

Woody Guthrie left California and arrived in New York City early in 1940. By summer he was making his first appearance on WNYC, on Henrietta Yurchenco and Paul Kresh's second Adventures in Music program on July 13. The show's theme was folk music of the mountains and the plains, featuring Jim Garland, Sarah Ann Ogan and Guthrie, who was introduced as "a modern troubadour who sings as he pleases and makes up his own tunes as he goes." Guthrie performed "Hobo Blues," "Dusty Old Dust," and "Tom Joad." 

Woody Guthrie appeared on WNYC many times between 1940 and the early 1950s. In the above recording from December 12, 1940 he was a guest on Leadbelly's weekly show, Folksongs of America, also produced by the late Henrietta Yurchenco. In this show, Guthrie sings "Jesse James," "John Hardy" and "Tom Joad." Joad of course is a lead character in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," played by Henry Fonda in the feature film directed by John Ford and released nine months earlier. "I didn't read the book but then I seen the picture three times," Guthrie said. Leadbelly, (a.k.a. Huddie Ledbetter) sings "Good Night Irene," "You Can't Lose Me, Cholly," "Frankie and Johnny" and "The Boll Weevil Song."

Guthrie actually proposed a daily 30-minute program to Station Director Morris Novik on March 8, 1945. His letter, two legal-size typed pages single-spaced, described the importance of WNYC's American Music Festival, on which Guthrie had just performed the previous month. The modest folk singer wrote, "My appearance on your Music Festival series was a little thing because there are eight or ten million folks out there that can sing as good if not better than me..."

In a poetic stream of consciousness ramble he went on at length about the difficulties of getting folk music on the larger commercial stations, writing that he was often misunderstood, misinterpreted, discriminated against and censored. But it was WNYC, the folksinger wrote, "One little station out of a whole big mess of them," that was bringing hope to the "long hairs.” In short, Woody said, "If there is the littlest faintest spark of hope for the nervous salvation of our other New York stations then I see a whole big blaze of hope for WNYC." Before closing his pitch Woody added, "I have been told by commercial agents that a regular program over your facilities would let all the sap drip out of my prestige. I told them that it was a pretty considerably increased feeling of prestige that I always got out of standing in front of your microphones." 

Novik replied to Woody, "To say thanks for your recent letter is a great understatement. I appreciate your spirit, and I am in complete agreement with your analysis of the commercial radio stations. Your suggestion for a series is accepted 'hands down.' " Novik indicated, however, there was no money to pay for the show. Woody replied in a second letter that he would do the show for free and that he would call. There were notes indicating calls were to be made. Unfortunately, beyond that, it appears no regular show was programmed. However, Guthrie did perform on other WNYC American Music Festival concerts and on Oscar Brand's "Folksong Festival" in the years to come.

You can visit the Woody Guthrie Archives online, and you'll be hearing a whole lot more about Woody Guthrie as July 14, 2012, the centennial of his birth, gets closer.

Thanks to the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives of CUNY for access to the Guthrie/Novik correspondence.

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1925: Senator Royal S. Copland, H.S. Summing and Dr. W.H. Park speak at a conference of the American Institute of Homeopathy from the Hotel Roosevelt. Note: Senator Copland was a homeopathic physician and a politician. He was a U.S. senator representing New York from 1923 to 1938.

1952: Dimitri Mitropoulos conducts the Stadium Symphony Orchestra at a Lewisohn Stadium concert. The performance includes the "Overture to Tannhauser" by Wagner, "Toccata for Piano and Orchestra" by Respighi and the Suite from "Der Rosenkavalier" by Richard Strauss. Violinist Mischa Elman is interviewed, and Marian Anderson sings Negro spirituals, including "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."

1984: Jenny Dixon's Artists in the City hosts Timothy Rubb to discuss the Manhattan Skyline Exhibition.

2002: Beth Fertig reports on how the debate over welfare reform moves to the senate as lawmakers consider changes to the 1996 welfare law. President Bush wants to make welfare recipients work more hours; but some New Yorkers, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, worry that it's going to be too hard to do in New York City. Washington's proposals seem to conflict with Bloomberg's own plans for the next phase of welfare reform.

The Municipal Broadcasting System was created as an agency reporting directly to the mayor in January, 1938.

At that time, it was established that anyone applying to be (or intending to remain as) a WNYC announcer had to take a specific civil service exam. Prior to that, positions were filled through the station's parent agency, the Department of Plant and Structures, in a far less formal way. By the end of 1938, the test was in place, and there were four vacancies to fill. More than 1,000 applicants took the written portion of the test. Those passing were then eligible for the oral exam scheduled in February, 1939. But the written test was no simple matter: a six-hour ordeal in which the applicant was warned that "a WNYC announcer must be more than a voice." In fact, he must be "a walking encyclopedia." Some of the challenges included:

• Can any radio program be entirely devoid of propaganda?
• Silence is one of the best of all sound effects. Is this a valid statement? Why or why not?  
• Write a 50-word announcement on the purpose of the Lima Conference in introduction to the radio presentation of a talk on Pan-American relations.
• Explain briefly the following musical terms: oratorio, concerto, fugue, symphony, sonata, tone poem.
• Write a 50-word announcement on Liszt suitable in introduction to the radio presentation of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
• Write a 50-word announcement on the extent to which New York City has developed a public housing program, in introduction to a talk on housing in New York City.
• State the nature of three amendments to the New York State Constitution which were approved in the recent election.
• Every radio program should be an entity, which is complete in and of itself. Do you agree?

By 1948, little appears to have changed. Part I of the written test was to be taken during a three-hour-plus morning session; Part II (a copy of which is not owned by the Archives) was allotted to the afternoon session. That year there were reportedly 12 open positions between the AM and FM stations. The starting pay for a WNYC announcer ranged from $2,400 to $3,000 annually, with the opportunity for advancement to a higher classification at a yearly salary running between $3,000 and $4,200. The cover sheet for that 1948 test is pictured above and, should you dare to try it, the complete Part I of the multiple choice test can be viewed at: WNYC ANNOUNCEREXAM. Remember, you have only three-and-a-half hours, and use a No. 2  pencil! Answers will be posted with the next History Notes.

Still, the 1948 test must have been a little easier in light of a 1941 City Council committee investigation of the Municipal Civil Service Commission. The inquiry found that the commission had spent $10,000 over two years on the announcer's exam but produced only one qualified candidate for an $1,800-a-year job. 

In addition, Station Director Morris Novik testified that WNYC lost three extremely good candidates because that first test was just too difficult. Among those who moved on was Ted Cott, who brought radio dramas and the first music quiz show, Symphonic Varieties, to WNYC. He took the quiz show idea and went to CBS, where So You Think You Know Music became a hit. Tony Marvin left and started announcing for Major Bowes Amateur Hour and then The Arthur Godfrey Show. Novik noted there were candidates who passed the written test but flunked the oral exam because their voice quality was poor. 

Despite their difficulty, the test questions speak volumes about the standards and expectations the city had for WNYC, its principal voice from the late 1930s through the '40s. They also provide a window on which news events and laws were shaping the New York world view.

Special thanks to Cara McCormick.

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1957: Eleanor Roosevelt reads her answer to a Leningrad housewife's letter, addressed to the managing editor of the New York Times, about the paper's interview with Premiere Khrushchev.

1960: Alfredo Antonini conducts the Stadium Symphony Orchestra in an all-Puccini program at a Lewisohn Stadium concert, with performances by Lucia Albanese and Richard Tucker.

When WNYC began broadcasting 87 years ago, radio was still very much a toddler exploring the new terrain and occasionally falling down and getting bruised. There was also a certain mystique and mystery.

After all, there were disembodied voices coming from great distances through the heavens to a box in your living room, and without wires! It's no wonder that some people thought that the new medium might be a good way to communicate with the dead. Popular songs in the 1920s like I Wish There Was a Wireless to Heaven and Mr. Radio Man drew on that child-like belief.

Though there were no radio seances at WNYC's first home in the Municipal Building, there was a sense of the exotic that came into play with the new station's reception room as pictured here a day before our first broadcast. The decor, including rattan furniture, filtered lights, a bedouin-striped canopy, arches, columns and a fountain were supplied courtesy of Wanamaker's Department Store. Visiting reporters were intrigued.

• Radio Broadcast magazine: "Away up in the tower, so far up that a man in the street below could not see the light, is WNYC. If a visitor be lucky and runs the gauntlet of elevator men, guards and other functionaries, he arrives at the studio in time for a pleasant illusion. Stepping through the door of WNYC's own home means going from the marble and glass of an office building into a tented palace that seems to have been created for romance. There is a colorful awning suspended below the ceiling and brilliant cane furniture to match, with a fountain in the center where spraying streams converge over the changing hues of an electric globe." [1]

• The Brooklyn Daily Eagle: "In the studio, which is located on the 25th floor of the Municipal Building, no detail has been overlooked to make it not only artistically attractive, but also efficient from the standpoint of the work which it will be called on to perform. ... The reception room is patterned after a Spanish garden with columns, arches, stone benches and a striped canopy effect from the ceiling. A fountain has been erected upon which play colored lights. A niche forms a pleasing part of the decorative scheme..."[2]

•  The New York Times: "The corridors of the twenty-fifth-floor [of the Municipal Building] were converted into a fairyland with long festoons of electric lights, which led the guests through a Spanish pergola into the reception room. Under a colored awning this lounge opened upon a large illuminated fountain, while songbirds in cages occupied convenient niches."[3]

                                               Whatever happened to those songbirds?

[1] James C. Young, writing in "Radio-Voice of the City," Radio Broadcast, Vol. 6, No.3,  January, 1925, pg. 444.

[2] "Municipal Radio Station Will Be Given First Test Wednesday at Midnight," The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 15, 1924.

[3] "City's Radio Plant Opened by Mayor," The New York Times, July 9, 1924, pg. 7.

Answers to the 1948 WNYC announcer exam posted in last week's History Notes can be found by going to: EXAM KEY

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 Broadcast on WNYC Today in:

1924: At 8:56 p.m., announcer Thomas (Tommy) H. Cowan signs WNYC-AM on the air for the first time. This is followed by Marian Fein singing the Star Spangled Banner, accompanied by the Police Department Band. The inaugural ceremonies include representatives of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faiths, each giving their blessings to this broadcast endeavor. Performing are: Vincent Lopez and his orchestra; the Police Quartette, the Six Brown Brothers (a saxophone sextet); and singer Estelle Carey. In attendance: Mayor John F. Hylan, and other civic leaders, including the Queens and Staten Island Borough Presidents, businessman Rodman Wanamaker and former Commissioner Grover Whalen, the person largely responsible for putting WNYC on the air.

In his broadcast remarks, Mayor Hylan speaks of the effect of copyright on the broadcasting of music and mercenary use of radio with commercial advertising. His Honor also suggests the possibility of listeners being taxed to pay for programming. Hylan adds: "To insure uninterrupted programs of recreational entertainment for all the people is one of the compelling reasons for the installation of the Municipal Radio Broadcasting Station. ... The improvement of the people in every walk of life, through the educative power of radio, may also be considered one of its paramount purposes. ... Programs sufficiently diversified to meet all tastes with musical concerts, both vocal and instrumental, featured at all times, should make 'tuning-in' on the Municipal Radio pleasant as well as profitable..."  

These days the recreation of news, or what I call near-news events, is not uncommon. On The Media recently devoted a segment to such 're-enactments' on television.  But the genre has a history that goes back to the early days of radio

There were no reporters in the field with tape recorders. This even predates 'portable' fifty-pound recording devices requiring coated aluminum discs and a cutting stylus. It was 1929, and Time magazine began to send out daily releases they called 'news casts' along with transcription discs containing five-minute dramas they referred to as 'news acting.' They started to used the name March of Time. Others followed suit. Among them, WBEN Buffalo, owned by the Buffalo Evening News. Their inaugural broadcast in September, 1930, included a dramatization of items from the newspaper. There were other local stations that tried it as well, but Time magazine kept with it and six-months later launched the national broadcast of The March of Time over the CBS network. It was March 6, 1931 that the network began the weekly series sponsored by Time magazine. They would take three to five leading stories of the week and give them to dramatists to script into short recreations for actors in the studio.

By 1939 The March of Time's fifteen-minute program was regarded as the most successful and longest running of the genre. Each week its listener-winning format and formula required 1,000 'man-hours' by some 72 writers, editors, actors, engineers and production. Its actors were described as "adept at impersonation and can simulate the voices of news figures so well that it is frequently difficult for listeners to believe they are not actually hearing the voices of these news figures...Aiding in accuracy is a library of thirty-second recordings of over six hundred voices that may possibly be in the news. March of Time actors listen to the inflection and accent of these persons and are able to reproduce a startling duplication of them." [1] These touts were joined with claims of expert fact checking and journalistic objectivity, although listening to them now, it's pretty clear they towed Time Inc.'s editorial line.

Other pioneers of this genre followed with varied success. Among them was The News Parade, a series produced by The Marben Advertising Company and airing on WMCA in New York.  Their broadcasts were a mix of Hollywood gossip, crimes of passion and hard national and international news. In the above broadcast of March 26, 1933 there are three stories. Among them (the last item in the line-up) is what I believe to be the earliest extant broadcast of news about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Remember, Hitler had only become Chancellor of German on January 30th of that year.    

[1] "Best News Dramatization - The March of Time," Best Broadcasts of 1938-39, ed., Max Wylie, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1939, pgs. 138-139.

The author Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) worked with WNYC producer Marty Goldensohn on a 1998 series known as Reports on the Afterlife. A year earlier, Vonnegut explained these reports would come as a result of "controlled near-death experiences."

Making this possible were Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the facilities of a Huntsville, Texas execution chamber. Together they provided the author with the ability to make "more than one hundred visits to Heaven, and my returning to life to tell the tale," he wrote. That tale is about Vonnegut's take on the way a number of the dead review their own lives. Among those interviewed were the famous, infamous and little known. They included: Eugene Victor Debs, Sir Isaac Newton, Frances Keane, Peter Pellegrino, Adolf Hitler and Burnum Burnum.

Subsequently, most of these reports were drawn together into the book, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian and published in 1999 by Seven Stories Press. In the introduction Vonnegut writes:

"This booklet of my conversations with the dead-and-buried was created in the hope that it would earn a little bit of money--not for me, but for the National Public Radio Station WNYC." And it did. The reports, like the one above and those below, provided listeners with an opportunity to catch Vonnegut's keen observational skills as a reporter from a distant place, where neither before, nor since, WNYC has had a stringer.

Editors Note: We have not been able to locate all of the interviews in this series since they were produced before the archives was founded as a formal department. Missing reports (Shakespeare and Asimov and any others) will definitely be included if they turn up.

Eugene Victor Debs

Karla Faye Tucker 

Dr.  Fred H. Mattson

Adolf Hitler

John Wesley Joyce

Roberta Gorsuch Burke

Sir Isaac Newton

Frances Keane

James Earl Ray

Dr. Mary D. Ainsworth

Salvatore Biagini

Harold Epstein

Peter Pellegrino

Clarence Darrow

Debate on Hell

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Broadcast on WNYC Today in:

1924: A talk by Bird S. Coler, New York City Commissioner of Public Welfare.

1938: Douglas "Wrong-Way" Corrigan addresses the Advertising Club of New York upon his return from a flight to Dublin, Ireland that was intended to be a flight to Long Beach, California. The aviator sticks to his story: it was all a big mistake.  

1940: The National Park Service in cooperation with WNYC presents Two on a Trip: The story of a lost civilization in Mesa Grande National Park. Directed by Mitchell Grayson.

1952: In this episode of Music for the Connoisseur, David Randolph plays unfamiliar works by familiar composers. He begins with a short work by Mozart: Rondo in C-Major for violin and orchestra. We also hear the String Quartet #2, Opus 69, by Dimitri Shostakovitch.

1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson speaks at Syracuse University on "The Communist Challenge in South East Asia." Note: The President's speech was part of the dedication of the new Journalism Department building at the Newhouse Communications Center.

1989: Radio X - Program #68.

1999: New Sounds features the Hildegurls. The four New York composers, Eve Beglarian, Kitty Brazelton, Lisa Bielawa, and Elaine Kaplinsky, present excerpts from their remarkable interpretation of the 12th century "Ordo Virtutum" by Hildegard von Bingen.

2005: On the Media presents 60 Years Late: An Untold Story. When the atomic bomb exploded over the port city of Nagasaki, Japan on the morning of August 9th, 1945, tens of thousands of civilian Japanese died immediately. By October, many thousands more were dying of a mysterious disease, but journalists were barred from the affected areas, so few accounts of the suffering would reach readers here at home. Brooke Gladstone talks with Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell about the very first reporter on the scene, George Weller, who wrote a series of articles that were not published until 2005.

It's always exciting when we turn up an important long lost recording.  In this case, the unlabeled flip side of one of Mayor La Guardia's talks had half-a-show that's not been heard for 67 years. Hailing from February 14th, 1944, we hear two friends get together to share some music with each other and WNYC's listeners. And what better venue than the station's annual American Music Festival, eleven days of studio performances and concerts around the city dedicated to home-grown music and talent?  Talent indeed. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, a renowned folksinger and bluesman, performed with pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax.

It was Lomax and his father John who brought Leadbelly from the deep South to wider notice. While on one of their early folksong collecting trips for the Library of Congress in July, 1933, the father and son team stopped at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. There, on a conviction of assault with intent to murder, was Leadbelly, whom they recorded on their "portable" disc-cutter. Released a year later for good behavior, Leadbelly wrote to John A. Lomax offering his aid. He was hired as an assistant to John while Alan was recuperating from an illness.

In December, 1934 the Lomaxes initiated a series of lectures and fundraising talks, where Leadbelly would perform. They appeared first in Washington, D. C. and then at the annual Modern Language Association meeting in Philadelphia, where Leadbelly caught the attention of newspaper reporters. This, plus the release that year of John and Alan Lomax's book American Ballads and Folk Songs, and the novelty of a black ex-con performing for audiences of prominent white academics, put Leadbelly on the road to fame. 

Not long after, John A. Lomax and Leadbelly had a falling out. But Alan and Leadbelly remained friends, and the younger Lomax, working as Assistant in Charge of the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, recorded just about every song he could get Leadbelly to sing. He introduced him to an expanded circle of folksingers including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Josh White and Aunt Molly Jackson. Alan Lomax was also instrumental in getting Leadbelly commercial recording sessions with RCA Victor and Musicraft records.[1] Around this time (1940) Leadbelly got his own show on WNYC, Folksongs of America. The show was produced by Henrietta Yurchenco.

Alan Lomax wrote that Leadbelly was one of the" greatest folk song artists" he and his father ever came across.

"Leadbelly called himself 'de king of de twelve-string guitar players ob de world.' He wasn't modest, but he was right. From him we got our richest store of folk songs, over a hundred new songs that Leadbelly had heard since his childhood in Morningsport, Louisiana, and had varied to fit his own singing and playing style."[2]

Tragically, Leadbelly died in 1949 before he could become a commercial success, although his WNYC theme song, Good Night Irene, was a huge hit as released by the Weavers a year later. Still, Leadbelly's legacy is matched by few. He helped to keep alive scores of ballads that might otherwise have vanished while also bringing folk music and blues to a wider audience. 

Alan Lomax went on to travel the world as a folklorist, musicologist, writer and producer. In 1983 he founded the non-profit Association for Cultural Equity, "to explore and preserve the world's expressive traditions with humanistic commitment and scientific engagement." Lomax was concerned that mass communications and centralized education systems were blotting out local cultural expressions and languages. He argued that folklorists and anthropologists could not stand by while these voices and ways of living were marginalized and overrun by standardization and the powerful entertainment industry.

Alan Lomax died in 2002. In 2004 the Library of Congress acquired his collections.

[1] Harold, Ellen and Don Fleming, Lead Belly/Lomax Chronology, Association for Cultural Equity site.

[2] Lomax, Alan, "Music in Your Own Back Yard," Alan Lomax: Selected Writings 1934-1997, ed., Ronald D. Cohen, Routledge, 2003, pg.51  Music in Your Own Back Yard was first published in The American Girl, October 1940.

Audio courtesy NYC Municipal Archives collection.