Dolores "Sissy" Cush, whose whisper thundered against the tobacco industry after doctors removed her larynx, died Sunday of the cancer she staved off for 21 years, declaring she had, at the very least, won a moral victory over the disease.

She was 75 and lived in Munhall.

"She said, 'Look, the way I look at it, I kind of beat it. I hung around 21 years after I first got that throat cancer. I can't complain,' " said a friend, Bill McCallister, whom she visited two weeks before her death.

Mrs. Cush began smoking the way many youngsters do: At 15, she stole cigarettes from her parents. By the time of the first Great American Smoke-Out in 1976, she was already up to more than two packs a day.

The following year, doctors diagnosed her with throat cancer. After seven years of unsuccessful treatments and recurrences, doctors removed her larynx.

They left behind a hole in her throat through which to breathe, and a prosthetic voice box through which she would later rasp her story to spellbound school children, many serving in-school punishment after they were caught lighting up.

"With teen-agers, you can talk to them till you're blue in the face," she said in a 1998 interview. "But you show them a hole in the neck that you breathe through, they wake up."

Mrs. Cush spent nearly 30 years waking up youngsters with speeches, and helping other sufferers find new voices through a group called Let's Talk, a support organization for persons with laryngectomies.

Yesterday, friends and family remembered, too, the diminutive, almost pixieish, woman who ran a small store in Homestead, and delighted in practical jokes.

When a delivery man came to stock the store with crackers and chips, she slipped into his truck and rearranged the inventory, remembered her daughter, Beverly Cush Evans of the South Side Slopes.

"He once came back in and picked her up and put her in the meat freezer and shut it," Mrs. Evans remembered.

She remembered, too, that Mrs. Cush's shop was among 11 robbed by a gunman who terrorized stores in the town.

"She was the only one who was willing to testify," said Mrs. Evans.

Members of the Let's Talk group described Mrs. Cush as a pivotal figure in their recoveries -- not the medical type, but the harder-to-reach sense of self that eluded many people who underwent the removal of their larynxes.

"She was just so willing to accept her worries, easier than I would have thought," said Patrick Wintermantel, a Swissvale resident who lost his voice box in 1996. He had met Mrs. Cush several years earlier, when his younger sister underwent the same operation for the same type of cancer.

"Your whole life changes. You have no voice for a while," Mr. Wintermantel said. "Dolores was always there to assure you that you will get a voice eventually."

Mrs. Evans noted that her mother had asked to be cremated and said that one of her mother's great pleasures had been visiting Myrtle Beach, S.C.

"Once she had her radiation [treatment] she couldn't spend time in the sun and that had to end. She missed it terribly," Mrs. Evans said.

After Mrs. Cush's ashes are divided five ways, Mrs. Evans said she will visit Myrtle Beach in September.

She plans to place an urn with her mother's ashes in a beach chair, next to a beer.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her husband, Raymond Cush of West Homestead, and three grandchildren.

A private graveside service for family will be held at Jefferson Memorial Cemetery, Pleasant Hills, under supervision of the George Irvin Green Funeral Home of Munhall.