Adelaide H. Cumming; Personified Betty Crocker on TV

Adelaide Hawley Cumming, 93, who played Betty Crocker on TV in the 1950s. General Mills concocted the name Betty Crocker in 1921 for a line of home baking mixes; Cumming was hired to personify the brand name on television and radio in 1949. She starred as the fictional happy homemaker on TV’s half-hour “Betty Crocker Show.” She also did walk-on commercials on the Burns & Allen show, where George Burns would say, “I don’t know how to bake a cake, Gracie, but here is Betty Crocker to show us how.” A broadcast pioneer, Cumming studied piano and voice at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. From 1937 to 1950, she hosted the “Adelaide Hawley Program,” first on NBC radio and then on CBS. There were other Bettys, but in her heyday, Cumming was the best known, “the second-most recognizable woman, next to Eleanor Roosevelt,” General Mills spokesman Jack Sheehan said. According to Cumming’s daughter, Marcia Hayes, she was a feminist in private life who did not love to cook. She practiced signing autographs for Betty Crocker by copying the signature off the tops of cake mixes. “I am merely the manifestation of a corporate image,” she told autograph-seeking fans. When General Mills tossed her in favor of a more sophisticated image in 1964, Cumming earned a PhD in speech education at New York University, and taught foreign students English for almost three decades. She taught her last class Friday. On Monday in Bremerton, Wash.

Allan D’Arcangelo; Pop Art Painter

Allan D’Arcangelo, 68, a painter associated with the Pop Art movement who was known for his abstract images of the American highway. Born in New York to Italian immigrants, D’Arcangelo produced a number of works in the early 1960s that linked him with Pop Art, including the 1963 painting “Madonna and Child,” which showed the featureless faces of Jackie Kennedy and daughter Caroline ringed with halos. But he was better known for pictures such as the 1962 “Full Moon,” a series of four canvases that depict the endless highway from the perspective of a driver. In that work, the eye zooms toward a distant horizon dominated by an ominous, rising moon emblazoned with the Gulf gasoline logo. In his later years, D’Arcangelo shifted to vistas of flatly painted highway overpasses, jet wings, grain fields and electric lines, always focusing on “icons that matter.” He exhibited regularly in Europe and New York, and his works have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim and Whitney museums. On Dec. 17 in New York City of leukemia.

Anna Espenschade; Expert on Children’s Development

Anna S. Espenschade, 95, former UC Berkeley professor and national expert on children’s physical fitness and development. Espenschade was a professor of physical education at Berkeley from 1928 to 1968. Her 1967 book, “Motor Development,” coauthored with colleague Helen Eckert, was considered the definitive work in the field for many years. She began studying the development of motor skills in children while working on her doctorate. In 1940 she published the findings of a long-term study that assessed children’s skills at running, jumping and throwing. Espenschade became ill on a cruise on the coast of Africa, dying a few days later. On Nov. 27 in Laguna Hills.

Emilio Mignone; Argentine Human Rights Activist

Emilio Mignone, 76, Argentine human rights activist. Mignone was a lawyer who fought to expose human rights abuses by Argentina’s former military dictatorship for years before his struggle became a personal one. He helped found the Center of Legal and Social Studies, a human rights group, and was the author of books on Argentina’s so-called “dirty war” against leftist guerrillas in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when about 9,000 to 30,000 people disappeared after being abducted by security forces. Mignone charged that the policy of secretly killing “subversives” was decided at the highest levels of the Argentine armed forces and that many of the killings were done on “death flights” on which the targets were drugged and thrown from planes into the ocean. “They invented a system that they thought was a solution no one would find out about,” he said recently. But bodies began washing ashore. His allegations were supported when a former lieutenant commander in the Argentine navy made headlines in 1995 with detailed accounts of his participation in death flights. Just as the death flights began, Mignone’s daughter, Monica, was abducted from the family’s apartment in May 1975. Mignone later determined that she had been taken to the Navy Mechanics School. Her body was never found. On Monday in Buenos Aires of cancer.