Cross & Crescent

When President Barack Obama chose his campaign headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa, little did Tom Magnani (Truman State 1989) know how much that would change his life and his business, Baby Boomers Cafe.

The restaurant usually sold less than 300 chocolate chunk cookies each week — sometimes giving away leftovers on Friday afternoons — to selling about 18,000 during Christmas week 2008.

The cookie could become as popular as when Mrs. Fields took hers to a national audience — and all because the President’s daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, took a liking to them when they visited the Iowa campaign headquarters last year.

Because of the surge in cookie sales, Magnani and his business partner, Rodney Maxfield, had to re-think their entire business.

They decided to spin off the cookie business to handle the volume of orders they were getting from both in-store sales and orders through a Baby Boomers Cookie website they launched.

Baby Boomers Cafe has become a destination spot in Iowa, and everyone who comes into the restaurant wants an autograph and their picture taken with Magnani and Maxfield.

The cookies sell for $9 a dozen in the diner and for $11 a dozen, plus shipping, online.

Lambda Chi

“We never really ever thought something like this would happen…and this came along and threw us into the national and international headlines.”

When Magnani enrolled in college the mid-1980s, Truman State was called Northeast Missouri State.

“When I was in the Fraternity, one of the fondest memories of it was being a founding father because we got our charter in the spring of ’86 and I joined in fall of ’85,” he says. “I was a founding father of the chapter. It was a pretty exciting time for us.”

He enjoyed being a part of a growing and successful chapter and he held the offices of chapter vice president and chapter secretary.

“When I left in 1990, the chapter had grown and started to make waves on the campus towards becoming a bigger and better chapter,” he says.

His experiences being in a chapter and holding chapter offices have helped him with his business and restaurant experiences.

“Getting along with people, dealing with different personalities…In the chapter I had to deal with everything and I think that helps later in life in just dealing with problems and issues,” Magnani says.

“We never really ever thought something like this would happen. We bought a restaurant four years ago and were planning on running it for a while and seeing where that went. And then this came along and threw us into the national and international headlines.”

As for the future, Magnani says that besides franchising the cookie operation they also hope to have a standing order from the White House.