Bessie Cook Kavitky; City of Hope Fund-Raiser, Volunteer

Bessie Cook Kavitky, a key volunteer and fund-raiser for the City of Hope National Medical Center since her childhood, has died at the age of 92.

Kavitky, whose parents helped create the treatment and research facility, died Friday in Los Angeles, City of Hope spokesman Joe Broady said Tuesday.

Since 1939, Kavitky had been president of the support group called City of Hope Pioneers. She worked as a typesetter and was active in the Sam Cook Uniform Co., which made uniforms for the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. But she became best known over her long life for her organizational and fund-raising skills on behalf of the medical center.

Kavitky cajoled such celebrities as Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, Edward G. Robinson, Cesar Romero, Eddie Cantor and Vivian Blaine to headline the charitable dinners she organized at the Ambassador Hotel, Earl Carroll’s Theater Restaurant and the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“They all came,” she recalled of stars and contributors alike in a recent interview with Broady for a City of Hope newsletter. Her events typically drew 1,500 contributors.

Kavitky’s home was papered with news clippings, photographs of such famous supporters as Eleanor Roosevelt and Pierre Salinger, citations from the city and county of Los Angeles and congratulatory letters from Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush.

She was 6 when a 21-year-old employee of her father’s downtown tailor shop died in the street of tuberculosis. Her parents, Sam and Ida Cook, were so moved by the young man’s death and general suffering from the “white plague” epidemic that they helped start the Jewish Consumptive Relief Assn. of California supporting the Los Angeles Sanitorium. Chartered in 1913, the organization designed to treat tuberculosis evolved into the City of Hope, which concentrates on cancer.

Kavitky, who also recruited her husband, Nathan Kavitky, as a volunteer, followed her mother as an officer of the Pioneers, which was founded in 1920.

Among the memorabilia Kavitky recently presented to Broady for the medical center’s archives were the thimble and pocket watch of the young tailor whose death set her family on its fund-raising and volunteer course.

Kavitky is survived by three nephews, Lou and Frank Cook and M. Ronald Sherman.

Services are scheduled at 2 p.m. Thursday at the Hollywood Cemetery in Hollywood.