Harry E. Hiller was at the controls when WNYC officially signed on the air. He was among WNYC's original staff of 17 and hired for $2,700 a year. Hiller had come to WNYC from WBZ, which at the time was located in Springfield MA. Like WNYC's Chief Announcer Tommy Cowan, Hiller was a radio pioneer, also having worked at WJZ in Newark, the New York metropolitan area's first radio station.

 

8:58 Star Spangled Banner with Police Band and soprano - ACN. 

Marian Fein is the soprano who sings the national anthem. ACN is the announcer Thomas H. Cowan. He is known to listeners only as "ACN" which stood for "Announcer-Cowan-New York" since, at that time, announcers and engineers did not reveal their real names on the air. WNYC’s founder Grover A. Whalen hired 'Tommy' just a week earlier to be WNYC's Supervisor of Broadcasting at the princely sum of $3,000 a year and wrote, "the opportunity which is before you...is so great, so broad, and so limitless..." Cowan's was the first voice heard when we went on the air July 8, 1924. Tommy was also the first announcer on the air in the New York metropolitan area when WJZ Newark started broadcasting in 1921. He announced the first World Series broadcast based on descriptions phoned into him from the game, as well as covering the June 1924 Democratic National Convention from Madison Square Garden for WJZ. 

9:02-9:09 Invocation, Blessing, and Prayer

Catholic - Monsignor Charles A. Cassidy of Staten Island represented New York Archbishop, Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes.

Protestant - Reverend Dr. Charles H. Nauman represented Bishop William T. Manning.

Jewish - Rabbi Bernard Drachman (1861-1945) was the leader of Orthodox Judaism in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. 

9:16 Selection Police Band

The Police Department Band was a staple of public events. At the time, the police, fire, and the sanitation departments all had bands performing for the on-going assortment of ribbon-cutting and cornerstone-laying ceremonies that frequently populated the municipal daybook. However, this evening's studio performance was no plum assignment. The new studios had just been painted a day earlier. Unfortunately, the paint sealed the special acoustic wallpaper so that sound bounced off of it rather than being absorbed. It was a fact that only became apparent as the broadcast was about to begin. At the last moment, heavy drapes were hung on the walls and ceiling to dampen the sound but this also resulted in making the studio airtight. Needless to say, the performers were not pleased on that humid July evening.

Writing in the pulp magazine Radio Stories, Hazel Ross described the scene: "With fifty or more, their instruments and music racks jammed into that one small, heavily insulated room, the atmosphere took on the nature of a Turkish bath. Dripping drummers fled to the outer air in the very midst of martial selections...sweating saxophonists, casting fame and discretion to the winds, struggled out of the torture chamber, tearing open their shirts and gasping for air. Director Christie Bohnsack gave them time to mop their swimming brows, dosed them with ice-cold orange juice, and then herded them back into their proper places with a masterly tactfulness..."

9:19 one moment please 

Although not noted in the log, newspaper accounts reported that at this point Rodman Wanamaker followed the police band and introduced Mayor Hylan. The department store magnate had headed up the original Board of Estimate committee appointed to study Whalen's proposal of a city-owned and operated radio station. In April 1922 Mayor Hylan announced the committee at the opening of Wanamaker's New York radio station WWZ.

Wanamaker's introduction was interrupted by a furious summer thunderstorm that sent those listening on the rooftop racing for cover. The Brooklyn Standard Union's front page the next day reported, "It supplied the real thrill of the evening. The crowd jammed the doorways, getting thoroughly drenched. One woman fainted but was revived when taken downstairs to the offices of the Parole Commission, which immediately became the scene of animated but confused activity. An obliging youth named Mulligan, a city employee put in an appearance with a handful of towels which the youngsters and the fairest of the visitors seized forthwith. Several young women discovered that their wet dresses were shrinking. Numerous hats were shrinking. Park Commissioner Edward T. O'Loughlin of Brooklyn flitted back and forth through the corridors drenched to the skin and anxiously looking for 'Ma' O'Loughlin, from whom he had been separated in the crush. Borough President Connolly of Queens, who had remained inside all of the time, nearly started a 'riot' by asking an acquaintance if 'it had been raining outside.' "

9:22 Mayor Hylan speaks

"Municipal information, formerly available only after perusal of reports, is now to be brought into one's home in an interesting, delightful, and attractive form.  Facts, civic, social, commercial, and industrial, will be marshaled and presented by those with their subjects well in hand. Talks on timely topics will also be broadcasted. 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.

"Through the employment of this modern and very effective means of transmitting information, an aroused public interest in the municipal government may logically be expected to ensue upon a broader understanding, a clearer knowledge, and a deeper appreciation of its functioning. And it follows, as night the day, that the more enlightened the citizenship, the better it becomes." To read Mayor Hylan's complete address go to: Hylan's WNYC Speech. And, for more on the Hylan-WNYC backstory see: Mr. Hylan in the Air.

9:42 1/2 Ax Re: Vincent Lopez now in studio.

Tommy Cowan tells the listening audience that dance band leader Vincent Lopez (1895-1975) has just come into the studio. Vincent Lopez was a popular radio dance band leader. He began broadcasting a 90-minute program over WJZ Newark in November 1921. Lopez became one of the country's most popular bandleaders through the 1940s, and his flamboyant style was said to have made an impression on Liberace. In 1941 Lopez and his orchestra launched a twenty-year stint as the house band at Manhattan's Taft Hotel.    

9:43  "Novelette" Mr. H. Neumann pianist. 

Herman Neumann was hired as WNYC's first music supervisor or music director and an assistant announcer at $2,700 per year. During WNYC's earliest days, Neuman also acted as staff pianist. In 1929 he started The Masterwork Hour, radio's first regular and later, longest-running, program of recorded classical music. In a 1964 interview, he recalled he would give as many as five piano recitals a day, announcing the selections himself from a standard volume called Masterpieces of Piano Music. Neuman said that many of the vocalists he accompanied were "song pluggers" who were dispatched to the station by music publishers to sing their latest songs on the air and encourage the sale of sheet music.

9:45 Mr. Lopez speaks

9:47- 10:27 Lopez and Orchestra Perform:

June Night, Limehouse Blues, Aida (modernized), Nola, Hottest Man in Town, Echoes of New York,  Rubetown Frolic, What'll I Do, Kitten on the Keys, piano solo, In a Ronderouz, I Can't Get You, and a medley of George Cohan hits.

10:27 end of dance selections  Thanks for calls and etc. Anx

Tommy Cowan back-announces the last musical selection and thanks all of the station's well-wishers for their calls.

10:29 Microphone crackles. Loose battery connection.

This was WNYC's first official on-air technical difficulty. It was not, however, the only electronic snafu of the evening. The New York Times reported the following day that Mayor Hylan's wife, "on an upper level, missed the Mayor's speech when the amplifier failed to yield to his voice. It was found that the horn was rigged to a microphone whose adjustment had been overlooked so that it had not been 'tuned in.' "

10:30 Grover Whalen speaks.  (Relay trips)

Grover A. Whalen was the outgoing Commissioner of Bridges, Plant and Structures, the parent agency of WNYC. It was Whalen's strong belief that New York City should have its own radio station. He fought long and hard from 1922-1924 to make this idea a reality. He convinced the Board of Estimate to appropriate the necessary $50,000 to get the station on the air and battled against the emerging communications giants (AT&T, Westinghouse, General Electric, and RCA), those he called "the radio trust," to get a transmitter on his own terms. According to L. E. Brown in The Sun, Whalen "gave a brief outline of the difficulties encountered in securing the apparatus and installing it."

10:35 President Connolly, Boro of Queens, speaks.

Maurice E. Connolly was significant because he had a sympathetic ear for technical innovations and sat on the city's Board of Estimate and Apportionment, the governing body that appropriated money for capital projects. He was the first person Commissioner Grover Whalen approached in 1922 about the idea of a city radio station. As the Commissioner of the Department of Bridges, Plant and Structures, Whalen suggested to Connolly that he submit his (Whalen's) proposal for a city radio station to the board. On March 17, 1922, Connolly recommended to the board that a committee study the proposal.

10:48 JA Lynch Boro President of Richmond speaks. 

John A. Lynch is the Borough President of Staten Island and a member of the Board of Estimate.

10:54 GAWhalen speaks. -ACN-  HEHiller 

Commissioner Grover Whalen returned to the microphone. It appears he was joined by announcer Tommy Cowan (ACN)...

10:59 short intermission

11:02 Ernest Jones Billy Hare & Vaughn DeLeath in a humourous dialogue.

Jones and Hare were among the most popular radio entertainers and recording artists of the time. Performing as The Happiness Boys, they were perhaps known best for their release on Victor Records Twisting the Dials, a comic vaudeville routine about that new media known as radio. Vaughn DeLeath was a popular jazz singer and crooner in the 1920s earning the nicknames The Original Radio Girl and The First Lady of Radio. She was best known for her rendition of Are You Lonesome Tonight. However, it is curious that in reviewing the numerous newspaper and magazine articles about this event, not one mentions these leading radio performers or their routine. 

11:12 Estelle Carey. Soprano

Estelle Carey (1890-1963) was a Canadian-born soprano who pursued a career in the United States in the 1920s performing in Detroit, Chicago, and New York. The Canadian Encyclopedia writes that during a year-long engagement at New York's Strand Theater in 1923, her charming coloratura voice earned her the title, 'The Little Brown Thrush of Broadway.'

11:13-11:23

Carey performed, The Winds in the South, Daddy, and Our Little Songs.

11:24 Six Brown Brothers - Saxophones. 

The Six Brown Brothers were a celebrity saxophone sextet. They were instrumental in popularizing the saxophone in the 1920s and often performed in clown costumes in both white and black face. They were William, Tom, Alec, Percy, Fred, and Vern Brown. They began working in circuses and then minstrel and vaudeville shows. Bandleader Tom Brown claimed to have transformed the 'siren of Satan' to the apex of 'the cool.' The group's records were the first discs of a saxophone ensemble in wide circulation.

11:26-11:37 The saxophone group performed Daughters of the American Revolution March, "Medley" and At Dawning. 

11:38-11:50 Senor Alonzo, violinist

'Senor Alonzo' or Señor Alonzo, I believe, is a pseudonym for the Catalan-born violinist and band leader Enric Madriguera.  The station's 20th-anniversary celebrations made much of his appearance on WNYC's opening night and no other violinist is listed in the log.  He performed Ave Maria with piano accompaniment (probably Herman Neuman) and Spanish Dance. Twenty years later he would compose and conduct A Latin American Tribute to WNYC.

11:52 Six Brown Brother Descriptive Selection

11:59 Thanks for good wishes from WOR and others

The New York Telegram and Evening Mail reported the next day that hundreds of congratulatory messages had been received by telephone and telegram from persons who had listened in for the first time. Charles B. Poponoe, the director of station WJZ, also sent a huge bouquet of roses with a note that the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and New York's pioneer station wished the first municipal station "all the luck in the world."

 July 9, 1924, A.M. 

12:01 "Elegie" transcription Huston Ray pianist

Huston Ray was the stage name for Ray Daghistan of Elmira, New York. The Post Star of Glen Falls, New York had this to say of Ray in August 1924: "Of all the people in the world who play the piano there is not over two score brilliant pianists and Huston Ray has the honor and distinction of being one of the small number. He is an accomplished musician, one whose technique and expression are faultless and with all the intimate personality that immediately puts him on good terms with his audience."  Ray was described as a graduate of the Winn School of Popular Music in Elmira, New York, where he also taught popular music and ragtime.

12:05-12:11 Ray performs Hungarian Rhapsody #6" and What'll I Do.

12:12 95th Ballot returns. Dem Conv.  

WNYC went on the air in the final hours of the 1924 Democratic National Convention, held uptown at Madison Square Garden from June 24 to July 9. Grover Whalen's original schedule had the station's opening ceremonies on Friday, June 20 with regular broadcasts beginning the following Tuesday by covering the convention's opening.  However, Whalen did not announce the station's completion and readiness for air until June 18 in a letter to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover requesting a wavelength of 525 meters. Hoover responded by telegram late on June 21, issuing an experimental license with the call letters 2XBH. Still, Whalen needed a permanent Class B license and it appears political opposition was coming from WAOW in Omaha, which also operated at 525 meters. Meanwhile, The Sun wrote, "The Commissioner is ready to install direct wires from the studio in the Municipal Building to the Convention Hall at Madison Square Garden as soon as the permanent license is received." WNYC got the Class B license, but not in time to cover the convention.

Additionally, WNYC caused some upset among some convention listeners with its test broadcasts on July 5 and 7, as well as the official opening on the 8th. Newspapers reported that those with homemade receivers or less elaborate commercial sets were at a disadvantage in distinguishing between WNYC's 525 meter wavelength and WEAF's 492 meter signal, leaving the listener with a jumble of the two. Hazel Ross wrote, "Just when the balloting was hottest, WNYC, gleefully taking her maiden dip in the ether, came in so strong that it was impossible to tune her out!" 

It took a record 103 ballots to nominate a Democratic presidential candidate in 1924. It was the longest continuously running convention in United States political history. John W. Davis, initially an outsider, eventually won the presidential nomination as a compromise candidate following a virtual war of attrition between front-runners William Gibbs McAdoo and Al Smith.

12:15 Auld Lang Song  Chorus.  

12:16 1/2 "Old Kentucky Home" "Home Sweet Home"  Huston Ray pianist

12:17 1/2 Grover Whalen speaks  

Grover Whalen provided concluding remarks for the evening's festivities. He had resigned as the Commissioner of Plant and Structures several days earlier to work for Rodman Wanamaker. There were rumors something had come between him and Mayor Hylan. The commissioner, however, publicly insisted that the $10,000 a year he made just wasn't enough to support his family. Mayor Hylan made him Honorary Radio Chief. The man now in charge of WNYC was Whalen's deputy, William Wirt Mills.

12:20 Sign off

Newspaper accounts also mention two singers performing that evening not noted in the logbook: Soprano Muriel Tindal and a contralto named Rene Warwick. The British-born Tindal was at the Metropolitan Opera from 1921 to 1923. Despite research, information about Rene Warwick has not yet been located.

Special thanks to Alexandra Hilton, Archivist at the New York City Municipal Archives for her assistance with this article.

Special thanks too to those who made the repatriation of the first WNYC engineering logbook possible: Gerald Singleton, Senior Counsel, New York City Law Department; Pauline Toole, Commissioner, NYC Department of Records; Kenneth R. Cobb, Assistant Commissioner, NYC Department of Records, Ivan Zimmerman, General Counsel, New York Public Radio.