Elizabeth Mensh, who became a charter subscriber of the National Symphony Orchestra in 1930.

She's in her seat at the Kennedy Center every Thursday night -- cheerful, interested, immaculately dressed and wearing one of her dozens of hats. Indeed, players in the National Symphony Orchestra have come to refer to Elizabeth Mensh as the "hat lady," and she is a beloved figure in Washington musical life.

Almost 67 years ago -- on Jan. 31, 1930 -- a new and shaky ensemble known tentatively as "The National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C." played its first concert. Elizabeth Mensh was there, listening from the balcony of Constitution Hall. When the orchestra began its first full season the following year, under the leadership of its initial music director, Hans Kindler, Mensh became a charter subscriber. She was 19 years old.

Since then, hundreds of players and conductors have come and gone but Mensh has remained fiercely faithful to her cherished orchestra. Until the end of the 1990-91 season, she was a subscriber and she would undoubtedly still be one today, had not the NSO presented her with a special ticket, one that would be good "forever" for the opening concert of every program.

Mensh is a convivial and wide-ranging conversationalist. Like many music lovers who never took advanced lessons, she knows and understands the art better than she thinks she does, and her opinions are usually generous and wise. And she has unquestionably "heard 'em all."

Sergei Rachmaninoff? "Oh, my God! This little shy man, completely wrapped up in himself -- I don't know whether he knew English or not, he seemed so uncomfortable. But such a performance and such music!"

Vladimir Horowitz? "Never missed him. There was an intensity, a magnetism about him that I never found in any other pianist, not even Rubinstein."

Kirsten Flagstad? "What a soprano! She sang a 'Liebestod' [from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde"] that had me loving it for the rest of my life."

That life has been spent entirely in Washington. Her parents, Louis and Hannah Rebecca Mensh, moved here at the turn of the century from the province of Galicia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and has now been incorporated into Poland. Louis Mensh ran a grocery store at the corner of Ontario and Kalorama roads NW, and the family lived upstairs. "The building is still there, but it's now an annex for a black Baptist church," Mensh said. "Along with most of my brothers and sisters, I was born upstairs, delivered by a midwife. There were 10 people living in a house with one bathroom. If that doesn't teach you to get along, nothing will!

"When World War I broke out, Papa went to register and he was asked about his family. He said that he had eight children, and the lovely old lady who was in charge said, 'You go home now, Louis Mensh, you've got an army already.' "

The neighborhood in which Mensh grew up is now known as Adams-Morgan, and even then it was integrated, at least by the standards of the day. "Black and white, it made no difference to us," she recalled. "There was no difference. These were nice people. You could leave the doors and windows open all night. There was nothing to be afraid of."

The Mensh family store extended credit to neighbors and made quick deliveries both to area homes and to the embassies that then lined 16th Street. "We all worked putting inserts in the newspapers that were to be delivered. In fact, it was work that saved two of my brothers' lives when the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater collapsed in 1922 after a blizzard. We lived only 3 1/2 blocks from the Knickerbocker -- it was at the corner of 18th and Columbia, where the Crestar Bank is now -- but the papers were late that day and so my brothers couldn't do their inserts in time to get to the theater. And that's what saved them. One of the kids down the block didn't get saved. Oh, that was a horrible tragedy -- so many dead. I remember they got baskets at Papa's store to carry out the bodies."

Elizabeth Mensh graduated from business high school at the age of 16. "I was two years younger than everybody else in the class and I was given a scholarship to law school, which I did not take -- that was stupid on my part. But I got a job at Shannon & Luchs real estate, which at that time was one of the biggest such organizations in the city. It was supposed to be a temporary job but when my boss dictated 45 letters in the morning and I had them all written and mailed by 5:30, they asked me to come back the next day. That would have been 1928. In 1929, when the crash came, we went from 157 employees to only 19. I replaced 10 people in the insurance department and the stenographic department."

Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Mensh became an agent for the Massachusetts Indemnity Insurance Co. "This was an era when women hadn't really gone into business as they have now," she said. "There weren't many women lawyers, many women doctors. And men simply didn't want a woman telling them about insurance and death and wills and all that sort of stuff." She shook her head. "That's all changed now, but it was pretty tough for us back then."

For five years, Mensh wrote a regular column for what is now Washington Jewish Week. "Do you know what a mensch is? It means a person of character. And so I called my column 'Among Us Mensches' and then wrote about anything that I wanted to write about. I interviewed everybody -- I don't think anybody ever turned me down, not even Jascha Heifetz."

In Good Hands

Throughout it all, Mensh kept up her subscription with the National Symphony. "It's important to have a subscription," she insists, "because it helps the orchestra know the bills will be paid, and it gives the listener an opportunity to find out about new things." She has vivid memories of all the music directors. Kindler, who led the orchestra from 1931 to 1949, was an "enormous presence," she says. "He had wonderful hands, some of the most expressive hands I ever saw, outside of [Leopold] Stokowski. Nobody had hands like Stokowski."

Mensh was personally acquainted with Howard Mitchell, who took over the orchestra in 1949 and conducted it until 1969. "He was a charming man with a lovely wife and several children. Our cantor at Adas Israel, Robert Barkin, was very friendly with the Mitchells and used to ask me to come along when they socialized. Poor Howard Mitchell got panned a lot by the press, but he worked hard and did quite a bit for the symphony."

Still, the music director she admired most was Antal Dorati, who led the orchestra from 1970 to 1977. "As far as I'm concerned, with my meager musical background, Dorati was responsible for changing the orchestra forever. A huge change -- just night and day. And I don't understand to this day why they let him go. He was attractive, dignified, professional, a complete musician."

Mensh has mixed feelings about Mstislav Rostropovich, music director from 1977 to 1994. "He was one of the greatest cellists I ever heard and quite a celebrity," she said. "But I always had the sense he didn't know the music the way he might have. He was always looking at the score. A wonderful woman who sat next to me summed him up perfectly -- instead of the music being in his head, his head was always in the music!"

She seems both intrigued by and slightly afraid of the agenda set down by the current music director, Leonard Slatkin. "After all the Shostakovich and Prokofiev and Russian stuff with Rostropovich, Slatkin is going to emphasize American music and turn this into a real national symphony," she said. "I think that's wonderful in a lot of ways. But what Slatkin is doing is surgery, and he's giving us a lot of things that are very difficult for me to listen to because I don't find them beautiful to my ears. So much of it is a reflection of the ugliness in our society -- in some pieces, I feel like I can hear the traffic going by -- and I don't always leave the Concert Hall uplifted and feeling beautiful the way I used to. But he is a great musician, and very personable, and I want to support my orchestra and I want to become one of his fans."

Mensh knows many of the musicians in the orchestra. "Some of the older players used to come to Papa's store," she said. "John Martin, who just retired and played cello in the NSO for about 50 years, lived just up the street from me. I used to call him up every now and then. I've been friends with the man who beats those things -- you know, the timpani -- for years, Fred Begun. Some of the people there may not know who I am, but I know most of them by name. I love the way [associate concertmaster] Elizabeth Adkins plays; I think she's wonderful."

The Price of Patronage

Once, Mensh almost stopped going to concerts. "I gave up my subscriptions to both the Boston and the Philadelphia orchestras because I was scared to come out by myself after dark," she said simply. "Much as I love the place, it's hard to get to the Kennedy Center -- I still wish that they'd built it at 15th and Pennsylvania, where it would have been convenient to everything, with a Metro stop right there. In any event, I didn't know anybody who could give me a ride home. I used to take a bus in and out, but I started to get nervous late at nights waiting to go home."

Her problem was solved one evening when two neighbors, Robert and Sheilah Pinsker, saw her waiting for a bus after a concert. "They stopped and said, 'Don't you live on Connecticut Avenue?' And I said that I did, and they said, 'Come on in, we do too, and we'll take you home.' And these two wonderful people have been taking me home now for about 10 years and they won't let me do anything for them in return, not even pay for parking. But I've just won a raffle for a dinner at a little French restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, and maybe I can coerce them into coming along with me.

"It saddens me to be afraid to go out at night, after having lived a long and full life in Washington," she continued. "This used to be such a wonderful city. The trees were taken care of, the streets were swept, even the gutters were cleaned out every day -- I know, because when we were kids we'd lose a tennis ball or something down there, and we'd wait for the man to come clean it out and give us our ball back."

Mensh is equally concerned about the high cost of concertgoing. "My sister sent me something that she'd cut out from an old NSO program book dating from the 1941-42 season. Back then, the orchestra used to play seven concerts a year at the Lyric Theater in Baltimore. And an entire subscription, all seven concerts, with great soloists like Joseph Szigeti and Rudolf Serkin, cost only between $ 9.99 and $ 13.53, including federal and state tax. Today, it's hard to find a single seat for $ 13.53! You might have to settle for an obstructed view."

One might expect such a devoted music lover to have many recordings. In fact, Mensh has neither a cassette machine nor a compact disc player -- indeed, she doesn't even have an old turntable. "Isn't that terrible? I have absolutely no mechanical aptitude whatsoever and the thought of having to go out and buy something and have to set it up and fool around with it -- " She gives a faint shudder. "I'm still living in another world, I guess. I still have most of Mama's old appliances, although I did have to replace the Toastmaster and the vacuum cleaner."

Although she has a radio and television, she is not pleased with much of what she finds on their stations. "So much garbage is coming to the American people," she said. "It's all so lowbrow. We have to find a way to get the National Symphony Orchestra on television -- interviews with the conductor and musicians, performances. We have to let people know that this great music is out there and that everybody is welcome to partake of it. I've been responsible for introducing my nieces and nephews to music, and some of them have become concertgoers. I love literature and reading, but there is something about music for my soul that makes life worth living."

Now in her mid-eighties, Mensh remains active in community affairs. "I go every Monday to a retirement home on Connecticut Avenue and make a presentation of local, national and international news, with some personality stories and some humor to sweeten it up," she said. "And then I stay and have lunch. I'm older than a lot of the people who live there, but one of my best friends in the home just had her 101st birthday. It's only recently that she's gone a little off -- such a shame!"

On Wednesdays, Mensh participates in a book club at the Cleveland Park Library. Thursdays, she can be found at the greetings office of the White House. "Every day, there are 30 to 40 volunteers opening up mail for the president and first lady," she said. "Everybody wants to invite them for weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduations all over the country. If they're over 80, they might want a card saying 'Happy Birthday.' Millions of pieces of mail must come into that office. This has been going on since Eisenhower."

And then, of course, on Thursday night, Mensh will be back in her seat at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, continuing a tradition that has enhanced and enriched her life for almost seven decades, and wearing her hat. "Listen, at my age, if they don't know me for anything else at least they call me 'the hat lady.' It's a fun thing. I love hats."

Mensh doesn't know just how many hats she has. "I put them in boxes the way they do at a millinery shop, one inside of the other," she said. "And I've got a lot of those boxes. I rarely, if ever, throw out a hat, but I sometimes give them to people I like." Her favorite is one her sister brought her "all the way from Europe on the Normandie ocean liner. It has some beautiful rose red velvet in front," she added. "I don't have the nerve to wear it today, I don't think, but I'll keep it forever, out of sheer sentiment."

Whatever she wears, Mensh looks grand and proud as she walks down the aisle of the Kennedy Center -- a vital, vivid reminder of a more elegant era in the nation's capital. "Can you believe it?" she asked, her expression growing suddenly wistful. "Nowadays, most of the time I'm the only person in the house who even wears a hat."