Kathleen King Is the Subject of ‘Cookie Queen,’ a New Picture Book

Kathleen King, founder of Kathleen’s Cookies and later, Tate’s Bake Shop Cookies is something of a local legend, having gotten her start as a kid in these parts by selling homemade cookies from a roadside stand at her family’s North Sea Farms.

But King is much more than a local cookie legend these days, and now, you can find Tate’s Cookies (which are named for her father) sold in stores around the world. While the green and white packaging is familiar to millions, the story of King’s inauspicious beginnings is probably less well known by cookie lovers from farther afield.

But all that is about to change with “Cookie Queen: How One Girl Started Tate’s Bake Shop,” a new picture book written by King and Lowey Bundy Sichol, and illustrated by Ramona Kaulitzki. Published by Random House Books for Young Readers and released on July 18, the book tells the story of how 11-year-old Kathleen King used determination, fortitude and the highest quality ingredients she could get her hands on to make the world’s best chocolate chip cookie.

This Sunday, Kathleen King and Lowey Bundy Sichol will be at Tate’s Bake Shop in Southampton Village to sign copies of “Cookie Queen.” In a recent phone interview, King explained that creating a picture book was not something on her to do list, at least, not until Sichol contacted her.

“Lowey is actually a children’s book author and she approached me to do a book together,” said King. “She was the pro and it’s me as the story. I provided photos and corrections.”

“For me, I’m hoping it sparks children. I was 11 when I started selling cookies,” she added. “I know kids whose parents won’t even let them hold a knife.”

In expounding on the inception of her business, King notes that her motive in baking cookies as a child was a simple one — income.

“Back then, it was all about money because we didn’t have much,” said King, the youngest of four children. “My father said I had to make cookies and sell them at the farm stand because I had to buy my own school clothes. On the farm, as soon as you can walk you’re working on the farm.

“My sister and her friend used to bake bread, cookies, brownies and other things, but when they turned 14, they wanted a real job where they could meet boys, so off they went,” recalled King. “I was the last of the children, and they were like OK, make cookies.

King said she worked 10 hours a day, seven days a week (with later hours in the summer), baking as many cookies as she possibly could in the family’s kitchen oven and selling them at the farm stand.

“I was always a bit of perfectionist and food snob. My mother would buy the ingredients and bring home a different sugar or chocolate chip that was on sale, and I’d say, ‘No I don’t like that!’” King recalled. “The book shows me growing up and making the deal with my father to make cookies, and it ends with me selling them at the farm stand at age 11.”

And every bit of it is true.

“Whatever I made, I sold,” King said. “I could’ve sold more. That was a time out here when were things were so much more simple. There was not as much competition, you could do things really simple, bake cookies, put them in a bag, hand draw a little sign and put them on a farm stand.”

“It was a way to make money and buy my clothes for school,” she added. “I obviously bought my school clothes and paid for college too.”

In terms of college, though King initially wanted to attend the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, she couldn’t afford it, so she attended a SUNY school instead where she studied restaurant management.

“Had I gone to the CIA, I would’ve had more opportunities instead of making a bee line as a one hit wonder, but I’m sticking to cookies,” said King, who opened her first store in Southampton in 1980.

While King is the subject of this new book, which is geared toward readers in grades 1 to 3, she readily admits she is not a writer, and she credits Sichol for coming up with the idea.

With an MBA from Dartmouth and a knack for explaining complicated business concepts clearly and concisely, after working in the corporate world, Sichol shifted gears when she became a mother and carved out a niche by working with professors on MBA case studies.

Then a few years ago, Sichol hit on an idea for a children’s books series — why not turn stories of corporate successes into books for young readers? In her series, titled “From an idea to….” Lowey filled in the blanks with various companies and the people who founded them, from Disney and Legos to Nike and Google, sharing with readers the origin story of some of the most famous brands in the world.

Still, she felt something was missing.

“I was on book tours and visiting schools and it bugged me that every book focused on a company with a male founder,” said Sichol. “I had talked to my previous publisher and said ‘I’m talking to thousands of children and half of them are girls.’ I started looking for a great female entrepreneurship story, and in my searching I came across Kathleen and this light bulb went off.

“I knew the cookies,” she said. “So I asked if I could interview her for a chapter book.”

King agreed, and in a series of phone calls shared her story with Sichol who, after having written most of the book, was asked by a publisher if it could be turned into a picture book for a younger age group instead. That limitation meant scaling down the information she had gathered and zeroing in on just a small portion of King’s life story.

“I focused on her at age 11, making cookies at the farm stand, and thought that was the best snippet of her life to be a picture book,” said Sichol. “They said, ‘We would love Kathleen to be a part of it.’ So I asked if she would like to coauthor the book.”

Initially, King was reluctant to sign on to the project, confessing to Sichol that she’s not a writer. But Sichol reassured her by saying she just needed King to be a team member on the project.

“It was really wonderful. I’d present drafts, she’d pick up on details that needed to be in there, so we got that right,” said Sichol. “The illustrator, Ramona Kaulitzki, started sending in drafts, Kathleen weighed in, tweaking illustrations we’d ask if the cat was the right color or was the house drawn the right way? What did the farm stand look like?”

Though she’s written several chapter books, it turns out that, like King, this is Sichol’s first picture book too. She finds King to be the perfect entrepreneurship story for kids ages 4 to 8.

“Every child has baked cookies, whether with their sister, mom or grandma,” Sichol said, “but this girl created a crazy business out of this and here’s how she did it — she wanted to make the best cookies in the world.”

In addition to the picture book version of King’s story on the farm as told in “Cookie Queen,” Sichol has taken King’s fuller story from their interviews and included it in a chapter book for older children titled “Idea Makers: 15 fearless female entrepreneurs” published by Chicago Review Press.

“Each chapter is a short story on a different female entrepreneur,” Sichol explained. “It’s a very diverse group in terms of backgrounds and industries. It’s for the junior high crowd, but again, I could only write 10 pages on Kathleen, so I had to cut out a lot.

“I’m always looking to write inspirational stories for kids, showing them that entrepreneurs look like anything,” Sichol added. “I want everyone to see someone they can relate to, whether through passion, skin color or economic background.”

For King, seeing her life as a youngster on the family farm now illustrated in full color for the whole world strikes a chord of nostalgia about those simpler times growing up in North Sea.

“It was fun going back and looking at the illustrations,” said King. “When I got the book, I was kind of teary thinking about my father, Tate. I wish he could see this.”

Kathleen King and Lowey Bundy Sichol will be at Tate’s Bake Shop, 43 North Sea Road, Southampton, at 11 a.m. on Sunday, August 6, to sign copies of “Cookie Queen: How One Girl Started Tate’s Bake Shop.”