Obituary of Elizabeth Annis DeLashmutt McCrackin

Elizabeth (Betty) DeLashmutt McCrackin passed away on April 18 at age 97 after a stroke. She lived at Asbury Retirement Community's Wilson Health Care Center. Elizabeth was born July 20, 1919 in Columbus, Ohio. She grew up as both a country child near rural Hamden on a farm, and a city child in Columbus where her father taught. She was reading Dickens before she started school. She attended the Ohio State University in Columbus and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. During World War II she worked in Washington D.C. with security clearance checking wiring in planes. In D.C., while folk dancing, she met her future husband, Frank Lewis McCrackin, a physicist with the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST.) She earned an M.A. in 1955 from the University of Maryland in Speech and she worked as a speech therapist at Walter Reed. Betty and Frank lived in Kensington and then Derwood, Maryland where they raised three children. She loved to read, write, feed wild birds, and search nearby parks for deer. Elizabeth is survived by her three children Frances McCrackin (Michael Geglia), Hugh McCrackin (Gina Columna) and Andrew McCrackin (Priscilla McCrackin), by her six grandchildren Emily Geglia (Friedrich Gurtler), Mary McCrackin, Elizabeth Geglia, Andrew James McCrackin, Joseph Geglia and Samantha McCrackin, as well as two great grand-children, Jonah Gurtler and Holly Gurtler. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to your local Planned Parenthood chapter or to The Washington Ear Organization, where Betty used to record readings for the blind and others unable to read: www.washear.org.