Abby Connolly
Are you a fan of Mrs. Fields’ cookies? You know, those tasty individually wrapped cookies you can find at most school cafeterias?
What if I told you that the inventor of those cookies started her career on a baseball field?
The founder of Mrs. Fields is Debbi Fields, a woman who went from being a “ball girl” for her hometown baseball team to the founder of a hundred-million-dollar cookie brand.
Debbi was born in Oakland, California, in 1956. When she was a teenager in the 70s, she was hired by the Oakland Athletics, Oakland’s Major League baseball team, to be a “ball girl.”
Ball girls were in charge of retrieving foul balls during baseball games. Debbi used the money she made as a ball girl to buy ingredients for her famous homemade cookies.
Soon, Debbi became well known on the team after she began giving the umpires a “milk and cookies break,” feeding them her delicious cookies.
After graduating from high school in 1974, she attended a community college for two years. Around this time, she met Randall Keith Fields, the founder of the Fields Investment Group. The two married in 1976, which is how Debbi became “Mrs. Fields.”
Debbi and Randall opened the first Mrs. Fields cookie store called Mrs. Fields’ Chocolate Chippery in Palo Alto, California, in 1977, selling freshly baked batches of her homemade cookies.
She was only 20 years old. The store became quite popular and it didn’t take long for her to be able to expand, putting up cookie-selling stalls in shopping malls and airports.
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