Wally Amos, cookie empire creator and literacy advocate, dies at 88

HONOLULU (AP) — Wallace “Wally” Amos, the creator of the cookie empire that took his name and made it famous and who went on to become a children’s literacy advocate, has died. He was 88.
Amos created the Famous Amos cookie empire and eventually lost ownership of the company — as well as the rights to use the catchy Amos name. In his later years, he became a proprietor of a cookie shop called Chip & Cookie in Hawaii, where he moved in 1977.
He died Tuesday at his home in Honolulu, with his wife, Carol, at his side, his children said. He died from complications with dementia, they said.
“With his Panama hat, kazoo, and boundless optimism, Famous Amos was a great American success story, and a source of Black pride,” said a statement from his children, Sarah, Michael, Gregory and Shawn Amos.
He was married six times to five women, son Shawn said, explaining that he and Carol had split up, reacquainted and then remarried.
“He loved love,” Sarah Amos said.
They said their dad “inspired a generation of entrepreneurs when he founded the world’s first cookie store” on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1975.
He had been stationed in Hawaii with the Air Force, and Famous Amos gave him the means to later make it his home.
Sarah Amos, who was born in Hawaii, remembers her dad flying back and forth to the U.S. mainland and taking business calls at 4 a.m.
“It’s hard to run a business and to work with people on the mainland when you’re in Hawaii,” she said. “But he made the sacrifice.”
While Wally Amos was a great promotor, he struggled as a businessperson and eventually lost control of the company. He walked away from it because he didn’t want to just be its face, Sarah Amos said.
Later losing the business and the right to use his name was deeply painful and personal, Shawn Amos said: “The remainder of his life and the remainder of his professional pursuits were attempts to get him to, you know, reclaim that space.”
Wally Amos was also co-founder of Uncle Wally’s Muffin Co., whose products are found in stores nationwide. But Amos said the fame never really mattered much to him.
“Being famous is highly overrated anyway,” Amos told The Associated Press in 2007.
His muffin company, based in Shirley, N.Y., was originally founded as Uncle Noname Cookie Co. in 1992, a few years after Amos lost Famous Amos, which still widely uses his name on its products.
Amos had said the Famous Amos cookies sold today are unlike his cookies, which had lots of chocolate, real butter and pure vanilla extract.
“You can’t compare a machine-made cookie with handmade cookie,” he told the AP. “It’s like comparing a Rolls Royce with a Volkswagen.”
Uncle Noname, however, foundered because of debt and problems with its contracted manufacturers.
The company filed for bankruptcy in 1996, abandoned cookies and went into muffins at the suggestion of Amos’ business partner, Lou Avignone.
Inside his now-shuttered Hawaii cookie shop, he sold bite-sized cookies similar to the ones he first sold at the Famous Amos Hollywood store.
Amos also was active in promoting reading. His shop, for example, had a reading room with dozens of donated books, and Amos usually spent Saturdays sitting on a rocking chair, wearing a watermelon hat, reading to children.
Sarah Amos recalled him reading to children at Hanahauʻoli School and continuing to do so even after she graduated from the small elementary school.
The former high school dropout penned eight books, served as spokesperson for Literacy Volunteers of America for 24 years and gave motivational talks to corporations, universities and other groups.
Amos earned numerous honors for his volunteerism, including the Literacy Award presented by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.
“Your greatest contribution to your country is not your signature straw hat in the Smithsonian, but the people you have inspired to learn to read,” Bush said.
In one of his books, “Man With No Name: Turn Lemons Into Lemonade,” Amos explained how he lost Famous Amos even before it was sold for $63 million to a Taiwanese company in 1991. Despite robust sales, by 1985, the business was losing money, so Amos brought in outside investors.
“The new owners gobbled up more of my share until all of a sudden, I found I had lost all ownership in the company I founded,” Amos wrote. Before long, the company had changed ownership four times.
Sarah Amos said that after parting ways with Famous Amos, he stopped baking for about two years. After rediscovering a love of baking, he launched the Hawaii business, Chip & Cookie, in 1991.
Born in Tallahassee, Florida, Amos moved to New York City at age 12 because of his parents’ divorce. He lived with an aunt, Della Bryant, who taught him how to make chocolate chip cookies.
He later dropped out of high school to join the Air Force before working as a mailroom clerk at the William Morris Agency, where he became a talent agent, working with The Supremes, Simon & Garfunkel and Marvin Gaye before borrowing $25,000 to launch his cookie business.
He was the first Black agent in the business, Shawn Amos, said.
Shawn and Sarah said that after becoming parents themselves, they realized how meaningful the chocolate chip cookie is to their family.
“The first time we made cookies with our kids, it sort of sunk in, this is actually a family thing,” Shawn said. “It’s a gift he gave us. It’s part of our heritage.”