But more recently, he says, being an Italian immigrant brought trouble. Last month he filed suit alleging that his boss at a Massachusetts-based grocery chain had taunted him with ethnic slurs for years. "I grew up with this stuff, people chasing me and calling me names," says Martignetti, whose family immigrated to Boston from Avellino, Italy, when he was 9. "Thirty years I later, this guy is still calling me names? Give me a break!"
Since 1988, Martignetti has worked at a Boston distribution center for Stop & Shop supermarkets, handling a variety of jobs from loading trucks to running milk-packaging equipment. "He was always happy-go-lucky," says Peter Eaton, 45, a former coworker. "He got along with everybody."
Everyone, says Martignetti, except plant manager Mike Anderson, who, he claims, has baited him relentlessly, calling him "spaghetti bender," "meatball" and "guinea." Recalls Martignetti: "I would say, 'Don't talk to me that way.' You let it slide once or twice, but enough is enough." In his suit, Martignetti—armed with affidavits from six former coworkers—charges in Suffolk County superior court that Anderson has harassed him since 1993. Anderson has declined comment on the case, and Stop & Shop said in a statement it had investigated the charges and "found them not to be credible."
But some of Anderson's colleagues say otherwise. "I can't remember [Anderson] ever calling him Anthony," says Shawn Kraft, 37, a former plant supervisor. "Every time he addressed him, he called him a 'guinea.' Nobody should be called a name, especially by your boss." After failing to get results through company channels, Martignetti went to court. "These are ethnic slurs based on hate," says his lawyer Herb Holtz. "It's such a sad irony. The thing that places him in this position is the very thing we know him for."
It was pure chance that led Martignetti to the famous TV spot. After moving from Italy to Boston in 1966, his parents—Ralph, 72, a machine operator, and Carmela, 70, a homemaker—settled in the predominantly Italian North End with Anthony and his three older siblings. That was where he was walking one day in the summer of 1969 when the producers of the commercial stopped him to ask for directions. "They definitely looked like they weren't from the neighborhood," he recalls. Within days his parents had signed a contract for Anthony to appear in the ad, which featured a cast of amateurs including the neighborhood woman—not his mother—who called him to dinner. "It was like The Blair Witch Project," he recalls. "They practically did it for nothing."
In fact, Martignetti earned a total of approximately $25,000 from the ad—which won a 1970 Clio award—and became a permanent part of the neighborhood folklore. To this day he is still able to get a table in crowded North End restaurants once the maitre d' finds out just who he is. "Everybody likes him," says Eaton. "He is a lovable character."
Though he briefly considered an acting career, Martignetti needed to earn money. So when he graduated from a Cambridge, Mass., Catholic high school in 1977, he went to work at Polaroid on the assembly line, then later as a machinist, before his family opened a small market in suburban Dedham in 1983. After it closed in 1987, he found work at Stop 8c Shop, where he earns more than $15 an hour. Now living next door to his parents in Boston's West Roxbury section, Martignetti still savors his spaghetti. "I swear to God," he says, "I eat pasta at least six days a week." Next year he plans to marry preschool teacher Tara Connelly, 30, who says that she hopes to have as many as five children. "Prince should have more sales," Martignetti says, smiling. And he'll pass along to his kids some Old World wisdom that still applies in the New. "If you've got nothin' good to say," says Martignetti, "don't say nothin' at all."
Thomas Fields-Meyer
Tom Duffy in Boston
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- Tom Duffy.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
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