Mason Adams spent much of his career being recognized by sound before he was recognized by face. His voice had an unusual combination of authority and reassurance: educated without sounding remote, paternal without becoming sentimental, and precise without feeling mannered. For decades, radio drama, commercials, narration and eventually television all made use of that quality.

Adams was born in Brooklyn in 1919 and studied at the University of Wisconsin before training at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse. He also taught speech there, a detail that helps explain the technical control listeners hear in his early work. Radio was not a sideline. It was where he established himself professionally, moving through serials, dramas and adventure programs at a time when New York actors could spend a day crossing Manhattan from one studio call to another.

His credits included Big Town, Gasoline Alley, Grand Central Station, Inner Sanctum and The Adventures of Superman, where he played the Atom Man, a villain whose power derived from Kryptonite. The role required something very different from the genial authority Adams later became known for. It also showed the breadth expected of radio repertory actors: the same performer might be a menace in one studio and a reassuring family presence in another.

The longest radio commitment of Adams’s career came with Pepper Young’s Family. He assumed the title role in the mid-1940s and remained with the daytime serial until it ended in 1959. That kind of longevity is easy to underestimate now. Daytime radio depended on performers who could inhabit a character not for a few prestige broadcasts but through years of domestic crises, changing storylines and relentless production schedules. Adams’s steadiness was part of the job.

When network radio declined, his voice did not disappear. It simply migrated. Adams became one of the most recognizable commercial narrators in the country, most famously delivering the Smucker’s slogan, “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.” His voice also appeared in documentaries and advertising for a wide range of products. The familiarity of that sound preceded the television role that finally made his face widely known.

As Charlie Hume on Lou Grant, Adams played the managing editor as a man who could be firm without theatrics. The performance earned three Emmy nominations and benefited from the same restraint that had served him in radio. Ed Asner later praised the depth and intelligence Adams brought to the series. It was not a reinvention so much as a visual extension of qualities he had been practicing behind microphones for decades.

Adams continued working on stage, in film and in narration into old age, including a Broadway appearance in Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck in 2002. He died at his Manhattan home on April 26, 2005, at 86.