Stormy Weather

The weather has been a wet blanket to big-time outdoor symphonies this summer. In Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell, 50% of the scheduled performances have been called on account of rain. In Manhattan, about one out of four of the famed Lewisohn Stadium concerts have been canceled, and another 16 of the scheduled 53 were umbrella nights, when the orchestra blew and fiddled but the cash register only tinkled. Last week the biggest deficit ($80.000) in Lewisohn's 28 years faced its promoter, grey-haired, peppy Mrs. Charles S. (Minnie) Guggenheimer, 63, the matriarch of New York's summer music.

Bankers & Budgets. Minnie Guggenheimer, who has had to make up losses every year before, is rich, and she knows people who are. In fact, she started the concerts for World War I doughboys by persuading a friend and distant inlaw, the late millionaire-banker Adolph Lewisohn, to lend her the football stadium he built for the City College of New York. She also lined up the Lewisohn family as her biggest financial contributors.

After the armistice, civilians crowded the Stadium, so Minnie Guggenheimer decided to keep the concerts going. In 1923 she hired the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and began expanding her annual budget, which now exceeds $250,000. That pays for big-name conductors and soloists, and for special programs of opera and ballet under the stars. In better seasons than this last one, 350,000 New Yorkers and out-of-town vacationers hear Stadium concerts.

Weather & Words. In her office on Manhattan's good-music row, West 57th Street, Minnie Guggenheimer spends her winters planning programs, signing soloists; her springs, tapping people for money; her summers, worrying about the weather. During the concert weeks she studies the skies as closely as a New England fishing captain, and keeps a wary eye on an office barometer. Every few minutes on cloudy days, she telephones the Weather Bureau.

Her chief personal indulgence is speechmaking, which Lewisohn audiences have come to love. Wearing full-masted, brightly-hued hats which make her seem larger than her 5 ft. 2 in., she climbs to the Stadium shell and chats spontaneously with her audiences whenever she feels the urge.

Nights when she doesn't feel like it, the crowd often chants a fugue-like "We want Minnie!" Her major theme for 1945 has been "those naughty rain clouds."

Last week Minnie Guggenheimer found a silver-lined way through the clouds. She arranged two post-season "benefit" concerts, and persuaded her 80 musicians to play for nothing. Then she signed Grace Moore to sing, and New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, ever willing to put on a show, to conduct The Stars and Stripes Forever.* To her fans, she confided: "The Mayor's going to decorate Miss Moore. I really don't know with what. ..." When uproarious applause interrupted her, she scolded: "I think you're all just dreadful people."

*Previous orchestral conquests by LaGuardia (whose father was an Army bandmaster): the Rochester Philharmonic, the National Symphony, the Goldman Band, the New York Police, Fire and Sanitation Bands.

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