A really colorful gent named Wally Amos died yesterday at his home in Honolulu at the age of 88. Wally was an entertainer, an agent, a TV star, an entrepreneur, a life coach, an author and a maker of some of the best damned chocolate chip cookies in the world. Maybe you know him better as "Famous Amos, King of Cookies."
It was while he was an agent — mostly for musical acts including Simon and Garfunkel — that he turned a hobby into a business. The hobby was making chocolate chip cookies which he freely dispensed to his friends and clients. Some of those friends and clients told him his cookies were too good not to be made commercially available and two of them — Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy — loaned him the bucks to open what was for a time a very successful business.
Like I said: "For a time." Eventually, due to some other business ventures, he had to sell the cookie company but the product continued to bear his name. In fact, because the firm that bought his business also bought his name, he couldn't use "Famous Amos" when, years later, he attempted to get back into that line of work. It was around then that our paths crossed for the first time. I have no idea how he found me but he found me and one day, he was in my living room outlining an idea he had…
He wanted to bring out a new line of chocolate chip cookies and at the same time, he wanted to get into the business of animated cartoons. He had some ideas for characters who would be mascots for his cookie line the way Tony the Tiger sells Frosted Flakes or Captain Crunch — is he still around? — sold Captain Crunch cereal. The show would sell the cookies and the cookies would sell the show. As I wrote here some time ago…
The project never went forward, at least with me involved…but one afternoon, we sat and swapped tales of our respective businesses. I told what I knew about how to make cartoons. He told me what he knew about how to make cookies. I sure got the better of that exchange.
The main thing I learned was that the recipe doesn't matter; that you can make great cookies with the recipe they print right on the bag of chocolate morsels you buy at the supermarket. The secrets are in, first of all, the quality of the ingredients you use…but mainly in how skillfully you combine them, how long you bake them, even in the way you just blend them together.
Which makes sense. You could give me the exact same paints that Edgar Degas used and the same brushes and the same canvas and even get similar fat ladies to pose for me…but that doesn't mean I could produce one of his paintings or anything a zillionth as wonderful. Great art is not about secret formulas and neither is great cooking, at least not completely.
You'd be amazed how often remembering that has been helpful in my life.
In later years, I ran into Wally Amos now and then — once, I recall, at a Licensing Show where I couldn't believe he recognized me from halfway across a very large hall. He was always cheerful, always doing something and always enthusiastic about whatever he was doing at the moment. At the Licensing Show, it was some sort of program to help illiterate adults become literate adults. A noble endeavor.
When I teach writing as I occasionally do, I've been known to tell my students what Famous Amos told me about how to make great cookies. I compare it to writing and I say, "You have all the same words available to you that your favorite writers had, just as Wally Amos had all the same ingredients and kitchen utensils as any other maker of cookies. It's what you do with them that matters." What Wally Amos did with his mattered.