In the summer of 1969, a woman leaned out of a tenement window in Boston’s Italian North End and called, “Anthony! Anthony!” A 12-year-old boy who had immigrated from Italy three years earlier raced through the busy streets and burst into his apartment, where his loving family was setting dinner on the table. “Most days, Anthony takes his time going home,” the narrator says. But not today, because “Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day.”
The boy was Anthony Martignetti, a real North End kid, and the woman calling him was a neighbor, Mary Fiumara. Neither was a professional actor. Martignetti was discovered when three men asking for directions to Commercial Street turned out to be scouting the neighborhood for a Prince ad. Part of the commercial’s charm was that authenticity.
For reasons no one could have predicted, this TV commercial for a Boston pasta company became a symbol of Italian American pride and part of the fabric of American culture. It ran for 13 years. No matter where your family came from, if you grew up in the Northeast Corridor in the 1970s, you probably remember little Anthony.
The one-minute commercial captured the shared childhood experience of city children playing outside until they heard their names called down the block. Irish, Polish, Jewish, Black, and Hispanic working-class families in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh could recognize their own neighborhoods in that footage.
And while we Italian Americans believe we invented the family dinner and, on some level, the mamma, most people grow up with nostalgic memories of large family meals centered around traditional food. Although Anthony was Italian, a similar scene played out in the surrounding ethnic neighborhoods, with kielbasa, matzo ball soup, or Irish pot roast and potatoes on the dinner table.
For Italian American kids, it was comforting to see our neighborhoods and our families on TV. In our house, Sunday was pasta night, but Wednesday was Prince Spaghetti Theater night, when we would all watch the movie sponsored by Prince Spaghetti. Of course, the commercial ran multiple times during the evening.
It was also one of the few positive portrayals of Italian Americans on television. Unlike many other groups that file lawsuits or get triggered by stereotypes, Italian Americans generally have a love-hate relationship with Hollywood’s images of mafia, pistols, pasta, “fuhgeddaboudit,” and “gabagool.” With exceptions such as the movie Moonstruck, mob-themed portrayals dominate.
Another stereotype, less common today but familiar for decades, was the Italian American young man portrayed as a ladies’ man: impossibly good-looking but dumb. This image recurred from John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever to Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back, Kotter, Joey Tribbiani on Friends, and pretty much any character ever played by Tony Danza. Even Fonzie, the most iconic Italian American figure of the 1970s, was a girl magnet who, despite being the epitome of cool, didn’t finish high school.
Little Anthony gave the rest of the country a rare look into what our lives were really like, and we were grateful. Part of the reason Prince Spaghetti knew how to portray an ethnic family was that the company itself was an immigrant success story.
In 1912, three men from the same village in Sicily opened a small spaghetti shop at 92 Prince Street in the North End. Gaetano LaMarca ran the administration, Giuseppe Seminara handled sales, and Michele Cantella made the pasta. The business outgrew its storefront and moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1939, where its plant became the biggest pasta mill in the country. A sign at the city line welcomed visitors to “Spaghettiville.” The Pellegrino family owned Prince until 1987, when it was sold to Borden.
The Prince story repeated itself across America because the New World offered immigrants the freedom to build and the rule of law to protect what they built. Ettore Boiardi arrived in 1914 from Piacenza, worked his way up in New York kitchens, and in 1928 launched the company that put Chef Boyardee on shelves nationwide. Amedeo Obici left Oderzo at age 11, sold roasted peanuts in Pennsylvania, and in 1906 founded Planters with fellow Italian immigrant Mario Peruzzi.
Domenico Ghirardelli, born in Rapallo, came to California during the Gold Rush and opened his San Francisco chocolate business in 1852. It remains in operation today. The Jacuzzi brothers, from Casarsa in northern Italy, worked in California orange groves while speaking only basic English before opening a Berkeley machine shop in 1915. Their surname became synonymous with whirlpool baths.
The children of immigrants carried the story forward. Amadeo Peter Giannini, born in San Jose to Italian immigrant parents, opened the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in 1904 to lend to immigrants whom larger banks refused to serve. Renamed Bank of America in 1930, it was the largest bank in the world by 1945.
For Italian Americans, Columbus Day is a celebration of pride and heritage, an occasion to honor these accomplishments and commemorate our history. New York’s Columbus Day Parade is the world’s largest celebration of Italian American culture and heritage. It is a day to mark that climb from tenement to boardroom and remember what it cost.
The Italian American connection to Columbus Day was born in violence. On March 14, 1891, a mob stormed the Orleans Parish Prison and murdered 11 Italian prisoners held in connection with the killing of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy. It was the largest mass lynching in U.S. history.
In April 1892, the United States paid Italy about $25,000 for the victims’ families. Three months later, on July 21, 1892, President Benjamin Harrison issued Proclamation 335, declaring October 21, 1892, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, a general holiday and calling Columbus “the pioneer of progress and enlightenment.”
Congress made the observance annual through a joint resolution of April 30, 1934, and in 1971 it moved to the second Monday in October. This year, President Trump signed the Columbus Day proclamation on October 7, setting the holiday for October 12.
The proclamation states that Columbus Day “holds special significance for our incredible Italian-American citizens,” and notes that a replica of Baltimore’s Columbus statue, which rioters tore down and threw into Baltimore Harbor on July 4, 2020, now stands on the White House grounds.
Little Anthony most likely didn’t realize it, but he was carrying all of this history, heritage, and culture on his shoulders as he raced home in 1969 to eat Prince Spaghetti.
The post On Columbus Day: Remembering Little Anthony Who Rushed Home for Prince Spaghetti Day appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
On Columbus Day: Remembering Little Anthony Who Rushed Home for Prince Spaghetti Day –
In the summer of 1969, a woman leaned out of a tenement window in Boston’s Italian North End and called, “Anthony!
The post On Columbus Day: Remembering Little Anthony Who Rushed Home for Prince Spaghetti Day appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
In the summer of 1969, a woman leaned out of a tenement window in Boston’s Italian North End and called, “Anthony!
The post On Columbus Day: Remembering Little Anthony Who Rushed Home for Prince Spaghetti Day appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.