Our Story
Our Recipe, Our City and Our Building all came together over a century ago to create the story of one of the most unique cookie companies in the country.
01
Our Recipe
The Sturges family, Los Angeles
Just after World War I, Al Sturges and his brother-in-law, Walter Gulley, bought a little bakeshop in Los Angeles from “an old Scot, a few years removed from the Land o’ Cakes.” Among the recipes that came with the shop was a different kind of Scotch oatmeal cookie: crisp, crunchy and nut brown.
Al’s father, Alva A. Sturges, was a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who had come west from Lockport, New York. One day he stopped by the shop, tried a cookie, then another, and bought a couple of pounds to take home. Then he told the boys what he thought.
“You boys have a cookie here that everybody who likes cookies at all dreams about but seldom gets. You should stop all other production, concentrate on this cookie and the whole country will be wild about your product.”
A.A. “Dad” Sturges, as he told it in 1935
The boys didn’t like putting all their eggs in one basket. Dad didn’t much care. He went downtown, rented a vacant baking factory and told them: “This bakeshop will close tomorrow and the cookie plant will start operations.” He was putting up the money, so he called the tune. By March 1921 Dad’s Cookies was in business, named for the man who insisted on it.
Through the 1920s the Sturges family sold the right to bake their cookie city by city, from Oakland to Buffalo to Baltimore, until Dad’s was “Known from Coast to Coast.”
And by 1927, Dad’s came to St. Louis.
02
Our City
The Carpenters and the Renzes
Dad’s first St. Louis home was 959 Goodfellow Avenue in north city. In April 1927 Robert T. Sutton, who also ran the Detroit Dad’s, was advertising there for salesmen with cars to sell “a national product.”
Goodfellow was also home to Carpenter’s Ice Cream. J. Willard Carpenter had come up through the Larmore-Bowman-Carpenter company, which won the ice cream contract at the 1904 World’s Fair. Sometime in the 1930s Carpenter took over Dad’s and paired the cookie with his ice cream. When he opened a Carpenter’s in Webster Groves in 1937, the walls were covered in cartoons of everyone from George Washington to Popeye vouching for Dad’s cookies.
In 1938 Henry Renz, a baker a few miles south on Louisiana Avenue, bought the St. Louis franchise from Carpenter and moved Dad’s into his family’s bakery at Louisiana and Keokuk.
The ovens haven’t stopped since.
03
Our Building
Louisiana & Keokuk, since 1912
John J. Renz came to America from Germany as a teenager around 1884 and was baking in St. Louis by the 1890s. Around 1912 the family built a brick storefront at Louisiana and Keokuk: bakery downstairs, home upstairs. The original tile, cabinets and countertops are still here.
His son Henry Renz Sr. ran it as a family bakery and bought the Dad’s franchise from the Carpenters in 1938. Henry Jr., called Hank, graduated from SLU High, served in the Navy in World War II, then came home and took over from his father. With his wife Ruth Agnes, known across the city as “The Cookie Lady,” he ran the bakery for decades, and did the baking himself.
“My mom grew up next door to Dad’s. She always spoke of Mrs. Renz tying the bags with the string the old-fashioned way. Hank Renz was sweet on my mom back in their youth.”
Greg, whose mother grew up on Louisiana Avenue
In 1988, with no heir in the immediate family, Hank sold to his nephews, the Hastey brothers. Across the country the other Dad’s bakeries had been closing for the same reason, with no one left to carry them on. But in St. Louis, the recipe stayed in the family.
The Hastey brothers modernized it. They created the white-and-blue bags every St. Louisan knows, put Dad’s in more than 100 grocery stores, and started shipping nationwide.
In 2023 the bakery passed to the Huber brothers, who grew up eating these cookies at their grandmother’s house in Crestwood. They’re committed to carrying the recipe, the city and the building into the next hundred years.
The St. Louis timeline
- 1912The Renz family builds the bakery on Louisiana Ave.
- 1927Dad’s is baking at 959 Goodfellow in north city.
- 1938Henry Renz buys the franchise and moves it to Louisiana.
- 1950sHank Renz Jr. takes over the family bakery.
- 1988Hank’s nephews, the Hastey brothers, take the reins.
- 2023The Huber brothers carry it forward.
- 2027100 years of Dad’s in St. Louis.
Visit the bakery
3854 Louisiana Ave., St. Louis · Monday–Saturday, 9am–5pm