Wally Amos, an indefatigable entrepreneur who in 1975 took a $25,000 loan from a few friends in Hollywood to start Famous Amos, one of the first brands to push high-quality cookies in its own stores and one of the world’s best-known names in baked goods, died on Tuesday at his home in Honolulu. He was 88.
His children Shawn and Sarah Amos said the cause was complications of dementia.
At a time when flavorless, preservative-packed cookies were about the only thing available to consumers not blessed with a baker in the family, Mr. Amos’s confections stood out. Derived from a recipe he had learned from his aunt, they used real ingredients, no coloring or chemicals added, and he kept them as close to handmade as possible, even as his company exploded into national distribution through the early 1980s.
What began with a single store in Los Angeles that made $300,000 in revenue its first year became by 1981 a $12 million company (about $42 million in today’s currency), with dozens of Famous Amos stores across the country and packaged products sold in supermarkets and department stores like Bloomingdale’s as well.
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Mr. Amos in Los Angeles in 2000 at the site of his first Famous Amos cookies outlet. The occasion was the dedication of a square named in his honor along Sunset Boulevard. Credit…Emilio Florez/Feature Photo Service
His cookies were small — bite-size, for most mouths — and came in three varieties: chocolate chip with peanut butter, chocolate chip with pecans, and butterscotch chips with pecan. All were handmade, at the store.
“You can’t compare a machine-made cookie with a handmade cookie,” Mr. Amos told MSNBC in 2007. “It’s like comparing a Rolls-Royce with a Volkswagen.”
The cookies were widely proclaimed delicious, but a big draw was Mr. Amos himself. An energetic, ever-smiling pitchman, known for his Panama hat and colorful Indian gauze shirts, he loved the hustle of building a brand, going on the road to promote it for weeks at a time. (Today both his hat and one of his shirts are held by the Smithsonian Institution.)
His first store, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, became an attraction in itself. The opening day drew thousands, and he would frequently get the city to shut down the block out front for a street party, which he made sure was stocked with celebrities.
Mr. Amos, a former talent agent, treated his cookies like another client — the door to the shop’s kitchen had a star on it, just like an actor’s trailer — and he understood the importance of building a personal brand decades before it became practically a requirement.
Within a few years he was a household name across much of the United States, appearing on the cover of Time and as a guest on the TV sitcoms “The Jeffersons” and “Taxi.” Much later, he would also appear on “The Office.”
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Mr. Amos in a scene from the sitcom “The Jeffersons” in 1980. A household name across much of America, he made several guest appearances on TV.Credit…CBS, via Getty Images
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Mr. Amos with Andy Kaufman on the comedy series “Taxi” in 1981.Credit…ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty Images
But, as was the case with many entrepreneurs, his passionate creativity was not matched by business acumen, and he struggled to keep up profits as the company expanded. He sold off equity stakes through the 1980s, and in 1988 he sold the remainder to a private equity firm, the Shansby Group, for $3 million (about $8 million today).
Mr. Amos stayed with the company for a year as a paid spokesman before leaving in frustration. By then he had developed a second career of sorts as an author and speaker, regaling readers and audiences with his rags-to-riches story and tips for entrepreneurial success.
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Mr. Amos and friends in 2005. A fervent advocate for childhood literacy, he would read to children every Saturday in a room adjacent to his cookie shop in Kailua. Credit…Dana Edmunds
He also became an advocate for childhood literacy. His mother had never learned to read, and neither had he until late in his childhood. He worked closely with the group Literacy Volunteers of America, and in 1987 he hosted his own public-access cable TV program, “Learn to Read.”
Years later, after he had gotten back into the cookie trade with a small shop near his home in Honolulu, he set aside an adjacent room stocked with children’s books. Every Saturday, he would take a seat in a rocking chair, surrounded by children, and read to them for hours.
Wallace Amos Jr. was born on July 1, 1936, in Tallahassee, Fla. His father worked for the local electric utility, and his mother, Ruby (Hall) Amos, was a domestic worker who later helped run Mr. Amos’s first store.
After his parents divorced when he was 12, Wally moved to Harlem to live with his aunt, a baking wiz named Della Bryant. Entranced by her skill with an oven, he set his mind on a culinary career. He attended the Food Trades Vocational High School in Manhattan and got an apprenticeship in the kitchen at the fashionable Essex House hotel.
But after finding himself repeatedly passed over for promotion in favor of white students, he dropped out of school and joined the Air Force. He spent most of a four-year stint in Hawaii.
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Mr. Amos in Manhattan in 1966. After his parents divorced, he moved to Harlem and enrolled at a New York culinary school.Credit…via Amos Family
Mr. Amos then returned to New York, took secretarial classes and eventually went to work in the mailroom at the William Morris talent agency. By 1961 he had worked his way up to the title of junior agent — the first Black person to hold that position at the agency and one of the first in the country.
In that job he arranged package tours for Motown acts, including Marvin Gaye and the Temptations. But again he found his career stymied by racism, and when the opportunity arose to move to Los Angeles to open his own agency, he took it.
For nearly a decade he scratched by, representing second-tier actors and musicians. To relieve stress, he found himself baking cookies at night, then sharing them at pitch meetings and film shoots.
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Credit…David Strick
Eventually, a friend suggested that he go into the baking business himself. With a $25,000 investment from Mr. Gaye, the singer Helen Reddy and a few others, he leased a building on Sunset Boulevard. Famous Amos was born.
Mr. Amos was always forthcoming about his struggles in growing his brand and about the decisions that led him to lose control of it.
“I’d lost the company really because I didn’t use to listen to people a lot because I was Famous Amos,” he told The Times in 1999. “The first couple of years after I left Famous Amos, I didn’t even make cookies anymore, and I used to always make cookies at home. I didn’t even want to talk about chocolate chip cookies, really. I shaved my beard and stopped wearing hats.”
In 1991, he launched a new cookie venture, Wally Amos Presents, but the owners of Famous Amos sued him for trademark infringement. Frustrated, he changed the company name to Uncle Noname. After two years of litigation, they agreed that he could use the name Uncle Wally as long as he didn’t sell cookies — so he sold muffins instead.
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Mr. Amos greeted shoppers at a supermarket in Harlem in 1999. By then he had lost his cookie enterprise and had started a new brand, Uncle Wally, which sold muffins. Credit…Jeffery A. Salter/The New York Times
The Uncle Wally brand was successful, if not quite the home run Famous Amos had been; it ended up appearing in some 5,000 retail outlets, though Mr. Amos eventually sold his portion.
He was married five times, most recently to Carol Williams, who survives him. Along with his son Shawn and his daughter Sarah, he is also survived by two other sons, Michael and Gregory; seven grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Mr. Amos developed more brands over the last two decades, including the Cookie Kahuna and Aunt Della’s, but none caught fire. In 2016, he appeared on the business reality TV series “Shark Tank,” offering a 20 percent stake in the Cookie Kahuna for $50,000 investment, but the panel of investors — the “sharks” — all passed.
Mr. Amos never seemed to mind that he had built and lost a famous brand. In the end, he was happy just making cookies.
“Being famous is highly — very, very, very highly — overrated,” he told Honolulu magazine in 2014. “I am fortunate that, through all the tribulations, all the ups and downs that I’ve experienced, I still make a cookie that tastes good.”
