REALITY AV BLACK HISTORY LESSON OF THE DAY
Maya Angelou was the first Black female cable car conductor in San Francisco.
Maya Angelou is best known as a Pulitzer Prize winning author, but before she began writing, she worked a string of odd jobs in her youth. When Angelou first went to apply for a job as a cable car conductor, they refused to give her an application. Undeterred, Angelou sat outside of the office every day for two weeks until they finally allowed her to apply for the position.
Much to her distress, when Angelou read over the application paperwork, she realized she was neither old enough for the job, nor did she have the desired experience and recommendations she was required to list. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou describes how she combined fact and fiction in order to complete the application, and “on a blissful day” she was hired as the first Black female cable car conductor in San Francisco.
Before Wally Amos established his “Famous Amos” brand of chocolate chip cookies, he was a talent agent.
At William Morris Agency, Wally Amos worked with talented musical groups such as The Supremes and Simon & Garfunkel. In fact, Amos initially funded Famous Amos Cookie Company with the help of celebrity friends from the talent agency, Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy.
Amos at one point lost control of his beloved cookie company, and even lost the rights to use his name and physical likeness. A decade later, Keebler—the company that took over Famous Amos—reached out to him in the hopes that he would resume promoting the product. “It’s a full circle kind of thing,” Amos told The New York Times. A decade after losing the company, he was back to “bragging about Famous Amos, like a proud father showing off his now-grown first-born.”
