The image of Betty Crocker, an American icon in the 1950’s, was actually Adelaide Cumming, an English teacher.

Betty Crocker was an icon of America womanhood in the 1950’s, but did you know the marketing image of the famous housewife was actually that of Adelaide Hawley Cumming, an English teacher?

This remarkable educator portrayed the fictional Betty Crocker on a weekly half-hour television show called The Betty Crocker Show. She also starred in walk-on commercials on the Burns & Allen Show, where comedian George Burns would say to his wife, “I don’t know how to bake a cake, Gracie, but here is Betty Crocker to show us how.”

Adelaide was born in 1905 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. A vaudeville performer and broadcast pioneer, Adelaide majored in piano and voice at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, New York. Following her graduation from college, she taught music for two and a half years at the Alabama College School of Music in Montevallo, Alabama.

From 1937 to 1950, the talented teacher was the host of the Adelaide Hawley Program, first on NBC radio and then on CBS. At the height of her career, Adelaide was a nationally recognized figure, second only to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. According to Adelaide’s daughter, Marcia Hayes, the teacher and actress was a feminist in her private life, and was not especially fond of cooking. “I am merely the manifestation of a corporate image,” she once told autograph-seeking fans. She practiced her autograph as Betty Crocker by copying the signature from the top of the cake mix box.

When General Mills replaced her with a more updated image in 1964, Adelaide went back to school, earning a doctorate in speech education from New York University in 1967. She taught English to second-language learners in Washington state until her death at age 93 in 1998, a career as an educator that spanned nearly thirty years.

To read more about the marketing of Betty Crocker, see this article entitled Betty Crocker: A Brief Biography.