WALLY Amos, who unfortunately seems only to be a cousin 5,000 miles removed, is a gentleman who clearly knows how the cookie crumbles.

Wally, it says on the side of this box, was in the entertainment business in America, baked biscuits with which to sweet-talk his clients and eventually "perfected the ultimate choc chip cookie". The biscuits went down well; Wally made it big with a three inch circumference. In 1975 - "with the backing of several Hollywood personalities" - he launched the Famous Amos Cookie Company in Atlanta. Within a generation, he has become to cookies what Col Sanders is to frying chicken and Jack Daniels to lazing about Tennessee.

Chris Willsden, back in Darlington from Texas, has returned with a big box of Oor Wally's finest, now in nine varieties and sold worldwide. The company also makes muffins, cinnamon rolls, brownie buttons and what have you. Gadfly wishes old Amos still greater success. A chip off the old block, of course.

THEN there was William Wrigley Jnr, salesman, who early in 1891 arrived in Chicago with $32, some patter and an awful lot of Wrigley's Scouring Soap. As an incentive, young Willie offered customers free baking powder. When the bonus proved more popular than the original, he cleaned up on baking powder instead and offered chewing gum - carrot and sticky? - as his free gift.

The rest is legend, the guy made a packet. Wrigley's Juicy Fruit and Spearmint flavours were both introduced in 1893. Today the company's mint fields cover 53 square miles, with worldwide factories, including Russia.

We ruminate on all this because Ralph Wilkinson, gaffer of the celebrated Number Twenty-2 ale house in Darlington, had recent cause to write to Wrigley's UK headquarters, in Plymouth. Gum-boiled boneheads, alas, are leaving their wretched reminders all over his award-winning premises - and most other places, too. "I've seen female staff at Teesside Airport on their hands and knees scraping gum from carpets not a month old," wrote Ralph. "Darlington town centre itself has streets paved with gum, not gold."

The company could start, he says, by abandoning advertising which promotes gum chewing as "cool". Maybe it could offer advice, financial assistance or cleaning materials to affected businesses.

He has now heard from Mrs J Hartop, the gum disposal programme manager. Next month, she says, Wrigley's is nationally launching a schools programme - with Tidy Britain - to encourage "good environmental practice". It is also backing a Scouts' badge "to promote good gum disposal". What's more, says Mrs Hartop, there are "encouraging developments" in research into more easily removable, even sweepable, gum.

Still stuck with the problem, however, Ralph Wilkinson may care to peruse William Wrigley's biography - "getting a foothold in the chewing gum business was not easy", it says.

Now, alas, it's the easiest thing in the world.

A Scout badge for chewing gumption? How many badges can a good scout now earn - a bob or two, perhaps, for the first youngster with the answer - and who in the North-East has the longest armful?

ADULTS only, e-mails have been flying across the Atlantic concerning the sort of ditty - often to the tune of the Gay Gordons - once unprintably popular in this company's Bishop Auckland office. We'd pondered that way a couple of weeks back.

Bill Taylor, long in Canada, cubbed in Bishop in the early 1970s. His parents, still there, celebrate their diamond wedding in December.

Bill could provide verse, if not chapter - we'd forgotten the one about My dog Tiny - but what was the song, daily immortalised by dear old Bill Oliver, about being out of the calaboose?

Bill was the Echo's Bishop Auckland photographer, a legend and a gentleman. Bill Taylor remembers the first verse, and chorus, of that one, too:

I'm in the lock-up 20 days, just 20 days ago

I met a judge, a kind old judge, who was feeling fine and so

He gave me just a year in jail, a sociable sort of gink

All on account of a gallon of beer, that I thought I could drink.

(Chorus) In 11 more months and ten more days I'll be out of the calaboose,

In 11 more months and ten more days they're going to turn me loose.

Apart from Bill Oliver, anyone else know who sang it?

A NOTE also arrives from Audrey, Bill's widow, still in Bishop Auckland. "I remember him singing Chase Me Charlie, but I fear the version involving Aunty Mary wasn't for publication." The good news is that Jill, their daughter, will be married at Escomb Saxon church this Sunday, reception at Durham Castle. Goodness knows who's taking the photographs, but he has an awfully hard act to follow.

STILL docked in Bradbury - once a Roman port, now a pretty hamlet off the A1(M) in Co Durham - we suggested last week that folk there, and in nearby Sedgefield, might take umbrage at a Teesside post code.

Vic Wood, Teesside lad, regards the TS suffix firmly as a code of honour. "I think, in truth, that some of the snooty folk of Sedgefield are concerned about being labelled 'Stockton-on-Tees'," he writes.

Vic experienced something similar at college near Stoke-on-Trent, when a "sweet young thing from Surrey or Sussex or some such place" was lamenting being marooned among the "drab, grey people" of the Potteries.

A local lass was among her audience. "If it wasn't for drab, grey people like my mam and dad," she replied, "your mater and pater would still be drinking their high tea out of enamel mugs."

To him, adds Vic, that said it all.

A MISSIVE, too, from Ray Pattison, clerk to the gloriously named Bradbury and the Isles parish council. Initially, it may be recalled, we'd discovered evidence of Roman occupation on the parish notice board.

Artefacts have been discovered within 200 yards of the village suggesting both a dock and an ancient bridge across a Viking trading route, says Ray. "We're not about creating a fantasy parish but in unearthing the rich history of an area," he adds. It's to be hoped we didn't suggest otherwise.

ROKEBY, Brignall and Easby Abbey Parish Council meets at the Morritt Arms Hotel at Greta Bridge - near Barnard Castle and the much-painted Meeting of the Waters - where we discover a curious agenda item.

"Councillors have to decide where to hold future meetings due to a matter concerning a council member," it says. "A vote may be needed - stay at present meeting place or try to find an alternative."

What on earth has been going on in Rokeby, Brignall and Easby Abbey? A little more on the agenda, with luck, next time.

THE column returns next Wednesday, 35 years to the day since first we blotted the inky trade's escutcheon and were banished to Bishop Auckland. Qwerty work but someone has to do it, these two old index fingers have subsequently been worked to the bone.

One of us burnished the family name, anyway. Where there's a Wal, there's a way.