Wally Amos, founder of Famous Amos cookies, dies at 88

Wallace “Wally” Amos, the entrepreneur and founder of Famous Amos cookies who later became a children’s literary advocate, died on Tuesday at the age of 88, his family 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.

On Tuesday, Amos died at his home in Honolulu with his wife, Carol, at his side, his children said. He died from complications with dementia.

Amos created the Famous Amos cookie empire and opened his bakery in 1975 on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where he sold bite-sized chocolate chip cookies, according to the company’s website, using an original family recipe and high quality ingredients.

From there, the Famous Amos cookies took off, the company says, and became a Hollywood success story, with musicians and Hollywood celebrities “singing the praises of the delicious cookies from a small bakery on Sunset”.

His children said that Amos “inspired a generation of entrepreneurs when he founded the world’s first cookie store” in 1975.

While Amos was a great promoter, he struggled as a businessperson and eventually lost control of the company. His daughter, Sarah Amos, said that he walked away from it because he did not want to just be its face.

Losing the business and the right to use his name was deeply painful and personal, his son, 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.”

In his later years, Amos became a proprietor of a cookie shop called Chip & Cookie in Hawaii, where he moved in 1977, after previously being stationed there with the US Air Force. Inside his now-shuttered Hawaii cookie shop, Amos sold bite-sized cookies similar to the ones he first sold at the Famous Amos Hollywood store.

Amos also co-founded Uncle Wally’s Muffin Co, in 1992, whose products are found in stores nationwide. The muffin company, based in Shirley, New York, was originally founded as Uncle Noname Cookie Co, several years after Amos lost Famous Amos. Uncle Noname, however, foundered because of debt and problems with its contracted manufacturers.

Amos said the fame never really mattered much to him.

“Being famous is highly overrated anyway,” Amos told the Associated Press in 2007.

Born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1936, 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.

Amos 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.

To honor the legacy of Amos, Famous Amos launched an initiative that boosts Black-owned small businesses with $150,000 in grants to support their growth, named Ingredients for Success, per the company’s website.

Amos earned numerous honors for his volunteerism, including the Literacy Award presented by George HW 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 1987, Amos was recognized as a Horatio Alger award recipient, which is awarded to “exceptional leaders who have triumphed over adversity to achieve greatness” and those who “personify the American Dream and their life experiences are proof that, with perseverance and unwavering belief, anything is possible in our country through the free-enterprise system”.

The Horatio Alger Association website states that Amos was a firm believer in the benefits of a positive attitude. “When people fill their lives with love, positive energy, faith, giving, and enthusiasm, they will be a success,” Amos said.

During his life, Amos was married six times to five women, his son Shawn said, explaining that he and Carol had split up, reacquainted and then remarried.

“He loved love,” Sarah Amos said.

In a 1991 interview with Detroit Black Journal, Amos said that he started making cookies “just to make a living and to be happy doing what I was doing … I was so committed and so involved and so joyous about it.”

He continued: “I didn’t say hey, ‘I’m going to go in the cookie business and make a lot of money, sell a lot of cookies.’ I said, ‘I’m going to do something I like, the way I wanna do it, I’m gonna have fun doing it, I’m gonna share it with people and I’m going to do my best’ and I just did it.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting