This year, the NBC4 anchor emceed her 25th consecutive DC Adoption Day at the court, introducing each child as they formally joined their new family. In the fickle world of local news, Harrison has become a permanent fairy godmother to the city’s foster kids with her signature “Wednesday’s Children” segments — and presided over every adoption ceremony since DC’s first in 1987.

“This is the 25th? I can’t believe it!” she gasped to the audience. “I guess I started when I was 10?”

Not quite, but she was a young reporter 30 years ago when the station first asked her to do an occasional series on “forgotten children.” Within weeks she realized that “there are probably a lot more kids in foster care who were lost in the system.” Harrison asked her bosses to turn their stories into a weekly feature; now station in cities all over the country have regular programming modeled after “Wednesday’s Child.”