Television's First Betty Crocker Dies -- Was Wife Of Whidbey Commander

Adelaide Hawley Cumming, the original television Betty Crocker and a longtime Northwest resident, has died at Harrison Memorial Hospital in Bremerton, where she was being treated for kidney failure and a collapsed lung. She was 93.

The cause of her death Monday had not been determined, her sister, Marcia Hayes of Roxbury, N.Y., said yesterday.

Mrs. Cumming started her entertainment career in vaudeville and ended teaching English to foreign students.

A feminist in private life, Mrs. Cumming was best known as a cheerful homemaker who mixed batter and sold pancake mix in the 1950s and early '60s for General Mills, which billed her as "America's First Lady of Food."

In an interview for The Sun newspaper of Bremerton in August 1997, she recalled instructing her daughter to tell curiosity seekers that "I am the current incarnation of a corporate image. That'll shut them up."

General Mills archives indicate Mrs. Cumming was once "the second-most-recognizable woman, next to Eleanor Roosevelt," said Jack Sheehan, a company spokesman in Minneapolis.

"Certainly she was a broadcasting pioneer and probably the most visible Betty of all time."

Born as Dieta Adelaide Fish, she grew up in Willet, N.Y., and earned a teaching certificate with a major in piano and voice at the University of Rochester.

After two years as a teacher in Montevallo, Ala., she moved to New York in 1929, went to work as a sales clerk and joined two friends to form a vaudeville singing trio, Red, Black and Gold, with hair dyed accordingly. In New York, she met her first husband, Mark Hawley, an announcer and newscaster known as the voice of Pathe newsreels.

From 1937 to 1950 she drew an estimated 3 million listeners as host of the "Adelaide Hawley Program," first on NBC radio and later on CBS.

In the early, pre-network years of TV, she wrote and narrated the show "Fashions on Parade."

"Everyone was working for peanuts in the early days of TV," she said in a recent interview, "but it was the people with that early experience who got the jobs when the network came through."

The name "Betty Crocker" was cooked up by General Mills in 1921, but only in 1949 was Mrs. Cumming hired to assume that persona on radio and television.

Her half-hour "Betty Crocker Show" was shown on CBS in 1950-52, followed by the "Betty Crocker Star Matinee" and "Bride and Groom," both for ABC in 1952.

Divorced from her first husband, she met and married Navy Cmdr. Lawrence Gordon Cumming.

In 1964, seeking a more sophisticated image, General Mills dropped Mrs. Cumming. She returned to school, earning a doctoral degree in speech education from New York University in 1967.

In succeeding years, she moved to the Pacific Northwest with her husband, who was assigned to help establish Whidbey Island Naval Air Station.

Mrs. Cumming taught English to foreign students and continued that work when she moved to Poulsbo, after he died.

Her last class was last Friday. The next night she entered the hospital.

Besides her sister and daughter, survivors include another sister, Ellen Miller of Vienna, Maine, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. A private memorial service is planned at her home next week.