HONOLULU — Wallace “Wally” Amos, the founder of the cookie empire that bore his name and who later became a child literacy advocate, has died. He was 88 years old.
Amos built the Famous Amos Cookies empire, eventually losing his ownership of the company and the rights to use the catchy Amos name. In his later years, he moved to Hawaii in 1977, where he became the owner of a cookie shop called Chip & Cookie.
He died Tuesday at his Honolulu home, surrounded by his wife, Carol, from complications of dementia, his children said.
“With his Panama hat, kazoo and boundless optimism, Famous Amos was a great American success story and a source of black pride,” his children, Sarah, Michael, Gregory and Shawn Amos, said in a statement.
His son Sean said he had been married six times to five different women, and that he had split up with Carol, reunited and then remarried.
“He loved love,” Sarah Amos said.
Their father, they said, “founded the world’s first cookie shop” on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles in 1975 and inspired many entrepreneurs to follow.
He was stationed in Hawaii with the Air Force, and Famous Amos later gave him the funds to make Hawaii his home.
Sarah Amos, who was born in Hawaii, remembers her father flying back and forth to the mainland and taking work calls at 4 a.m.
“It’s hard being in Hawaii and doing business and working with people from the mainland,” she said, “but he made the sacrifice.”
Wally Amos was a good promoter but struggled as a businessman and eventually lost control of the company. He left because he didn’t want to be just the face of the company, Sarah Amos said.
The subsequent loss of his business and the right to use his name was deeply painful and personal for him, Shawn Amos said, and “the rest of his life and the rest of his professional pursuits was an attempt to reclaim that status.”
Wally Amos is also co-founder of Uncle Wally’s Muffins, whose products are sold in stores across the country, but Amos said fame has never been that important to him.
“Being famous is overrated anyway,” Amos told The Associated Press in 2007.
His Shirley, New York-based muffin company was originally founded as Uncle No Name Cookie Co. in 1992, a few years after he lost Famous Amos, which still uses his name extensively on its products.
Amos said the Famous Amos cookies sold today are different from his cookies, which were made with lots of chocolate, real butter and pure vanilla extract.
“You can’t compare a machine-made cookie to a homemade cookie,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s like comparing a Rolls Royce to a Volkswagen.”
However, Uncle No Name went bankrupt due to debt and problems with contract manufacturers.
The company filed for bankruptcy in 1996 and, at the suggestion of Amos’s business partner, Lou Avignon, stopped making cookies and switched to making muffins instead.
A now-closed Hawaii cookie shop sold bite-sized cookies similar to those originally sold at the Famous Amos’ Hollywood store.
Amos also actively promoted reading: His store had a reading room filled with dozens of donated books, and on most Saturdays Amos would sit in a rocking chair wearing a watermelon hat and read to children.
Sarah Amos recalled her father reading to children at Hanahauoli School and continuing to do so after she graduated from the tiny elementary school.
A high school dropout, she has written eight books, served as a spokesperson for the National Association of Literacy Volunteers for 24 years, and is a motivational speaker at corporations, universities and other organizations.
Amos received numerous honors for his volunteer work, including a literacy award presented to him in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush.
“Your greatest contribution to our country is not your trademark straw hat at the Smithsonian, but the fact that you inspired people to learn to read,” Bush said.
In his book, “The Man with No Name: Turning Lemons into Lemonade,” Amos describes how Famous Amos incurred losses before being sold to a Taiwanese company for $63 million in 1991. Despite strong sales, by 1985 the business was losing money, and Amos brought in outside investors.
“Each new owner gradually took away my equity, and before I knew it, I had lost all ownership of the company I had founded,” Amos wrote. Soon the company had changed hands four times.
Sarah Amos said she stopped baking for about two years after splitting with Famous Amos, but after rediscovering her love for baking, she opened a bakery called Chip & Cookies in Hawaii in 1991.
Born in Tallahassee, Florida, Amos moved to New York City at the age of 12 after his parents divorced. He lived with his aunt, Della Bryant, who taught him how to make chocolate chip cookies.
He then dropped out of high school to join the Air Force, then worked as a mailroom clerk at the William Morris Agency, where he became a talent agent and worked with the Supremes, Simon & Garfunkel, and Marvin Gaye, before borrowing $25,000 to start his own cookie business.
Sean Amos said he was the first Black agent in the business.
Sean and Sarah say it wasn’t until they became parents themselves that they realized how important chocolate chip cookies were to their family.
“When I made the cookies with my kids for the first time, I realized that this is actually a family thing,” Shawn said. “This is a gift he gave to us. It’s part of our tradition.”
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