"Hello, Minnie"

The little grey-haired woman in the rubber-soled shoes trots from the wings to the front of the stage and, flourishing her right arm, cries, "Hello, everybody." Back comes a chorus: "Hello, Minnie!" Thus do New Yorkers ritualistically hail the opening of the nation's oldest summer musicale--the 42-year-old Lewisohn Stadium Concerts. This week the subway commuters are thronging again to Lewisohn on Manhattan's upper West Side to hear the 43rd season ushered in by Conductor Pierre Monteux--and Mrs. Charles ("Minnie") Guggenheimer.

To thousands of New Yorkers, Minnie at 78 personifies Lewisohn Stadium. She organized the concerts in the summer of 1918, hit on the crowd-catching mixture of jazz, pop music, "Viennese Nights" and serious classical endeavor. And it was Min nie who gave some of the best known names in music--Marian Anderson, Larry Adler, Eugene Ormandy--their first major concert audiences.

Minnie's achievements are celebrated in a new book by her daughter, Sophie Guggenheimer Untermeyer, and Pressagent Alix Williamson, titled Mother Is Minnie (Doubleday; $3.95). The book does little to explain what it is that equips Minnie Guggenheimer to raise some $100,000 for Lewisohn each year, but it demonstrates unmistakably why she has become as celebrated a figure at the stadium as most of the soloists who have appeared there.

Putting the Touch. Daughter of Samuel Schafer, a Manhattan stockbroker, Minnie studied piano as a girl, later grimly entertained her husband, Lawyer Charles Guggenheimer, with "my $1,000 piece, Isolde's Liebestod." When she took on her stadium chores, she gave up the piano, and apparently has not looked seriously at music since. Her musical miscues are leg endary. Reading from notes during one of her stadium intermission talks, she an nounced that the coming attraction would be "Ezio Pinza Bass," and then added over the roars of laughter: "Oh no, that can't be right; that's the name of a fish." She has been known to refer to H.M.S. Pina fore as "everybody's favorite by Gilbert and Solomon," or to announce that "Rodger Hammerstein personally will conduct a number from South Pacific." To anybody familiar with her ways, it is per fectly obvious that when she announces a performance of "that wonderful concerto, the one with the tune," she is referring to Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C-Minor. To a radio audience she once announced that she was planning a pro gram by living American composers and added: "You'd be surprised to find how many American composers are living." A small, energetic woman, Minnie Guggenheimer labors the year round raising money for her seven-week stadium season. She never hesitates to put the touch on an absolute stranger. "If I'm walking down Fifth Avenue," says she, "and see a lady in sable. I go up to her and say, 'You look as though you've got money to spare. I'm Minnie Guggenheimer and I need it.' " Smelling Rain. The success or failure of a stadium season depends as much on the weather as it does on donations. Minnie has the sole responsibility for canceling a concert (at a loss of as much as $30,000) in case of rain, and the responsibility weighs heavily on her. Once, so the story goes, after she had decided to gamble on a concert against the advice of the Weather Bureau, she scurried to the footlights and said: "I don't know what the hell to do. It's one of those nights that's driving me nuts." After 15 minutes the clouds cleared away. "They'll think I'm a witch," said Minnie.

Last week Minnie found herself $30,000 in the red for 1960. On top of that, she feared that one of her favorite weather prognosticators, a double bass player named Carlos Raviola, known to Minnie as "Mr. Spaghetti," would at any moment begin "smelling rain." Minnie concluded that she had about had it. She would give up the whole business, she told a visitor, the day after the stadium celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1968.

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