NYPR History Notes

NYPR Archives & Preservation
April 8, 2016 - Volume 15 Issue 15

Edition # 704

BROADCAST ON WNYC TODAY INâ€¦

1930: Dr. (George) Clyde Fisher, educator and astronomer, asks the WNYC listening audience, "Is there life on Mars?" Fisher was curator of the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Astronomy and the founding astronomer of the museum's Hayden Planetarium. At the time he believed in the existence of a highly organized animal life on Mars, including the possibility of a civilization of intelligent beings.

1945: Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia explains the city budget pending before the Board of Estimate.

2005: The Next Big Thing brings you stories from survivors, collected by Belarussian writer Svetlana Alexievich, nearly twenty years after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster

Once Upon a Time, U.N. Coverage Was a Big Deal

(WNYC News and Special Events Director Lilian Supove's 1947 U.N. I.D. courtesy of Edwin Blake/WNYC Archive Collections)

October 3, 1943

Artists Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko discuss, "The Portrait and the Modern Artist," on WNYC's Art in New York with Hugh Stix

The abstract expressionist painters respond to a letter writer who asks: "The portrait has always been linked in my mind with a picture of a person. I was therefore surprised to see your paintings of mythological characters, with their abstract rendition, in a portrait show, and would therefore be very much interested in your answers to the followingâ€”

1. Why do you consider these pictures to be portraits?
2. Why do you as modern artists use mythological characters?
3. Are not these pictures really abstract paintings with literary titles?
4. Are you not denying modern art when you put so much emphasis on subject matter?"
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Editor's Note: Congratulations to reader Robert Auld for taking on the challenge to determine fact from fiction in last week's April Fool's edition of the History Notes. It was an impressive effort!

WNYC first day of broadcast, July 8, 1924 (Municipal Archives Collection)

A WQXR Blast from the Past

Robert Sherman plays a rare snippet about the "speed gadget" from Alec Templeton's April Fool's Show in the 1940s, followed by announcer Lloyd Moss telling a story about introducing conductor Thomas Schippers.

Other clips include: Executive Vice President of WQXR Norman McGee's 1965 announcement of a new radio transmitter at the Empire State Building, with Elliott M. Sanger recalling the memory of Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor of modern frequency modulation (FM) radio; an interview with Elliott and Eleanor Sanger, who remember WQXR President Walter Neiman, and a rare clip of Neiman's voice. LISTEN!

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91.5

WNYC celebrated its 91st anniversary last July. Just think, 8-and-a-half short years to the big centennial. In this space we'll be linking to various historical WNYC champions, broadcasts and milestones celebrating nearly a century on the air in the public interest. This week: The Reader's Alamac with Walter James Miller.
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This week's NEH-funded Annotations blog series features: Abe Burrows, Librettist and Proud of It.

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WNYC's Way Back series
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April is Poetry Month. Check out our compilation of major holdings at: POETRY

The WNYC Archives is on Twitter with 2,865 followers @wnycarchives. We tweet daily reminders of, and links to, WNYC broadcasts from that day in the past.

Weâ€™ve got a Tumblr page too! More than 10,000 followers. Check it out at:

nyprarchives.tumblr.com
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WNYC Archives in theâ€¦