"Convinced that modern girls are tidy bodies who wash out their stockings every night if possible, detectives of New York City's Missing Persons Bureau always take a second look when they pass a girl with soiled and sagging hose. The odds are that she is a runaway, homeless in the big city. Last year the Missing Persons Bureau, which does the biggest job of its sort, located all but 25 of the 2,059 local missing girls reported to it. Most of them turned up at employment and charity agencies, but an appreciable few went home in response to the Bureau's famed daily five minutes of missing persons alarms over 'New York City's Own Station,' WNYC, kindly father of this sort of broadcasting..."

Source: Time Magazine, February 27, 1939.
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Fair Fare Hearings?

"Hotted up by years of ding-dong debate, the five-cent subway fare in New York had become the most inflammatory civic issue on the books.  When Mayor O'Dwyer announced the open hearings on the fare question with the public invited to participate, WNYC sensed drama, threw lines into the hearing hall, broadcast every word uttered.  For two days and nights the people of New York listened fascinated to the point-counterpoint of democracy in action, in one of the greatest mass civics lessons in the history of radio. For this,  capping a year of other notable services to the citizens of New York, a Variety Award to WNYC, the most intelligently-operated non-commercial radio station in America." 

Source: 1946 Variety Show Management Award for Responsibility to the Community.
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Presented each Sunday afternoon on WNYC at 4:30 PM in the 1970s and 80s, Artists in the City was "designed to introduce you to some of the professional artists who are doing exciting work in the communities and neighborhoods of New York." The show was hosted by Doris Freedman and Jenny Dixon and comes to us courtesy of The Public Art Fund.  Listen to some of them at: ARTISTS IN THE CITY.
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Did you know that Aaron Copland  once said of the WNYC American Music Festival: "I hope for bigger and better WNYC festivals in the future." See: NAME DROPPER