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It turned out the men were scouting the area for an advertising campaign for the Prince Spaghetti Company. And in the young assistant, who had emigrated from Italy three years earlier, they found the star of their TV commercial. The announcement would become a phenomenon; his star, a Boston icon.
“Anthony! Anthony! ”
Mr Martignetti died in his sleep on Saturday night, according to his older brother, Andy. He was 63 years old and suffered from severe sleep apnea, although an official cause of death has not been determined.
He will be remembered forever as the little boy who ran to his mother’s house through the narrow streets of the North End in the “Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day” commercial, which ran nationwide for nearly 14 years.
Mr. Martignetti never said a word in his role and never made much money from the experience – he bought a new set of hockey goalie pads – but it became the landmark in his life, an event that he cherished and protected for five decades.
“I always understood that it was bigger than me, that I had a responsibility to preserve what this advertisement meant for people,” Martignetti said last year, when I wrote to his subject for the third time. “I knew if I got in trouble, little Anthony from the spaghetti ad would be all over the paper.
I had first met Mr. Martignetti a decade earlier, when I reunited with him for a feature film “where are they now” for the 40th anniversary of the commercial. He gave me a tour of the North End and showed me the sites of the advertisement, including the window in Powers Court from which the woman who played her mother had called her name.
But what struck me was the care he took in being “Anthony!” It was as if he had been handed a delicate souvenir in a display case, and his only job was never to break it.
And he didn’t. But Prince did. In 2013, the company restarted advertising, but hired another actor to play the great Anthony. They refused to play Anthony’s son as the little boy, despite having auditioned, and his name was Anthony Martignetti Jr.
After a quick outrage – further reinforcing how much the original was loved – Prince quickly pulled it out of the air.
But it wasn’t until last year, when I profiled him again, this time for the ad’s 50th anniversary, that I really got to know him. He took me on a tour of the North End again one evening and posed for a few photos at Powers Court, then I met him at his tiny apartment in West Roxbury early in the morning so I could spend the day with him at Dedham District Court, where he was an associate judicial officer.
Before he left for work, he showed me a hundred pictures of Anthony Jr. (who was then 16 and lives with his mother in New Jersey), then ran next door to see his parents. They are 90 years old and he kissed his mother and put medicine drops in his father’s eyes.
At the courthouse it was clear that his colleagues loved him, and as he greeted people entering the courthouse – his main job was to run the security checkpoint at the gate – which I did. Heard and Seen was so simple, but that was the very reason her life had changed five decades ago.
Anthony Martignetti was a nice person. That’s all there was to do. He was kind to everyone, including those who were clearly shocked to receive a warm welcome upon arriving in this cold place of a courtroom.
A few days later I was having trouble writing the story – could it really be that simple? – so I called his wife, Ruth, whom he had married two years before, and asked her about it. She was from the Dominican Republic and never saw the peak of advertising, only its consequences.
“When we first started dating, I would see strangers freaking out and hugging him, and I was like ‘Why are you letting them do this? They don’t know you, ”she told me.
“But Anthony always said, ‘They’ve known me for a long time.'”
In addition to his wife, son, mother, father and brother Andy of Dedham, Mr Martignetti leaves another brother, Angelo, of Lynn, and a sister, Michelle Knorring of Buzzard’s Bay, according to PE Murray – FJ Higgins, George F. Doherty & Sons Funeral Home.
Billy Baker can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on twitter @billy_baker.
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