Mary Perot Nichols, a former muckraking columnist and city editor of The Village Voice, served two separate terms as head of WNYC. Strong-willed with a no-nonsense approach to leadership, she advanced WNYC's independence from the City of New York through the creation of the WNYC Foundation after years of fiscal cutbacks. While Nichols also launched new award-winning programming, she is perhaps best known, unfortunately, for being sabotaged by Mayor Edward Koch on the issue of 'The John Hour.' This occurred on October 23, 1979, when WNYC broadcast the names of men convicted of patronizing prostitutes.
The WNYC Foundation
When Ed Koch appointed Nichols to run WNYC in 1978, the stations (AM, FM & TV) were in a dismal state of affairs, both physically and economically. Taking charge during the city's fiscal crisis and renewed calls for the sale of WNYC (a perennial appeal by station opponents and fiscal conservatives since its founding) proved to be a major challenge. Just four months into the job, Nichols was thoroughly frustrated. In a confidential 10-page memo to Koch she wrote, "I cannot hope to achieve this administration's twin goals for WNYC--improved programming and financial self-sufficiency without a way to spend my federal and other potential grant funds quickly and creatively."[1] She went on to attach an appendix of 'horror stories' and concluded, "If you want WNYC to become self-sufficient, you must give me the tools to do the job, i.e., a foundation." [2] Despite the frustration, Nichols was both excited and challenged by WNYC, saying working at the station "was like cooking a gourmet meal while standing on a floor covered with glue."[3] Thus came a solution that would mark the beginning of the end of WNYC's relationship with the City of New York. The WNYC Foundation was established on August 10, 1979.[4]
New Programming
Until the foundation took root and funding started to come in Nichols and her staff initiated a number of efforts to support new programming that would expand listenership. Among these were Senior Edition, New York Considered, Morning Pro Musica (from WGBH), a storytelling festival, NPR's new Morning Edition, and in response to the August 1978 newspaper strike, The Sunday Papers.Teaming up with NPR and reporters from the Times, News and Post, WNYC produced a news program to fill the gap created by the walkout. The show was patterned after the Sunday newspapers, with a mixture of news and features that New Yorkers were unable to read, including local politics and the courts. It was WNYC's first effort at national programming in partnership with NPR and the station's first significant syndication since the 1950s when it was working closely with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. She obtained a Ford Foundation grant to review radio programming. Nichols and her legal team also seriously looked into the leasing of television air time as a way of broadening the communications group's revenue stream. She created a development office to bring in non-city monies for renovating the facilities and, with guidance from veteran engineer Chuck Corcoran, established WNYC's earth station, one of fifteen for the NPR satellite system. The station's outward identity changed as well. WNYC AM, FM, and TV became known as the 'WNYC Communications Group' in order to distance itself from the city-bound 'Municipal Broadcasting System.' But just as Nichols was gaining some momentum for significant change, she was undermined by her boss.
The John Hour
It has become a part of city folklore as WNYC's most notorious series. The truth be told, it ran only once and wasn't an hour, but just under two minutes. The broadcast was announced by Mayor Koch and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau while Nichols was on vacation in a remote part of Nebraska and not easily reached in this pre-cell phone, pre-Internet period. They argued the airing of the names of convicted 'Johns' would act as a deterrent to prostitution by cutting into the demand and that this sort of mayoral dictate over programming was reasonable. For Nichols, it was a foolish bit of political grandstanding by the mayor at a time when she was wooing critical public and foundation support for the stations and needed to demonstrate to donors that WNYC was insulated from whims and abuses of City Hall. News of the pending broadcast spread like wildfire. There was a spoof on Saturday Night Live and an essay by William Safire in the New York Times comparing Ed Koch's sense of justice with that of Ayatollah Khomeini.[5] Meanwhile, Nichols' absence left her lieutenants fielding a cascade of calls from the press, and sadly, women who wanted to find out if their husband’s names were on the list.
Both WMCA and The Daily News voluntarily complied with the appeal by Koch and Morganthau and publicized the names with little fanfare. But Koch himself made the broadcast controversial by effectively ordering WNYC to air it. With of all the hoopla, Nichols made a desperate attempt to make it appear that programming wasn't being dictated by City Hall, but that WNYC was airing the segment because it was "news." (The now infamous segment read by announcer Joe Rice below has had the surnames and addresses of individuals obscured.
Behind the scenes, Nichols demanded Koch hold a breakfast at Gracie Mansion for the directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to assure them he wasn't dictating programming.[6] In the end, she salvaged the $1.1 million she was hoping for from CPB[7] but lost out on a quarter-of-a-million from the Revson Foundation, a key player in the foundation community. Nichols would later say, "I had worked for two years to build the station up to this, to get this $1.1 million, and here Ed, in some stupid moment, had just about destroyed everything."[8] NPR head Frank Mankiewicz called it "the most expensive minute and forty-five seconds in the history of public radio"[9] Soon afterward, Nichols decided to accept a job as Director of Communications for the University of Pennsylvania. The Koch Administration brought in WGBH chief John Beck as her replacement.
But that's not the end of the story! For more, go to Mary Perot Nichols: Guiding WNYC's Rebirth and Renewal - Part 2
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[1] Nichols, Mary Perot, Confidential memo to Edward Koch, October 5, 1978, pg. 1. La Guardia and Wagner Archives, Edward I. Koch collection.
[2] Ibid. pg. 10.
[3] Phone conversation with Mary Daly, October 21, 2014.
[4] Nichols' predecessor Arnold Labaton had tried to free up funding for WNYC by making the station a public benefit corporation, a move requiring legislation from Albany. Language was drafted but there were some concerns with the civil service status of employees as well as operating in a public building with equipment purchased with public funds. As a result, the effort got little traction. By the time Nichols was appointed by Koch, the station had been raising money on the air in an effort to get around some of the more onerous municipal government rules. Still, there were a number of issues to address in order to keep that private money from going into the city's byzantine financial structure.
[5] Safire, William, "The John Hour," The New York Times, October 11, 1979, pg. A2.
[6] Reminiscences of Mary Perot Nichols, Columbia University Center for Oral History Collection (hereafter CUCOHC), pgs. 74-75.
[7] On December 2, 1979, CPB awarded WNYC a $1.1 million five-year station improvement grant. The money was earmarked for increasing the quality and variety of programming. It was the fourth and largest single grant of its kind that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had ever given. Programs supported by these funds included: a series of live concert broadcasts; the "Broadway Radio Hour," a thirteen-part history of the American musical theater, hosted by Dorothy Rodgers; the "WPA Writers Project;" an oral history of the 1930s federal arts program for the elderly; "O' Aural Tradition," a dramatization of the Tristan and El Cid myths; and the "Lonely Passion of Simple Simon," an original opera for radio by Eric Salzman. Funds were also to be used for showcasing the work of the nation's best independent radio producers.
[8] Reminiscences of Mary Perot Nichols, CUCOHC, pg. 75.
[9] Ibid. pg. 73.
Special thanks to Eliza Nichols, Evelyn Junge, Mary Daly and B.J. Kowalski.
