Amedeo and Louise Obici

Page 10 | February 28, 2020

Amedeo and

Louise Obici

At top, a nod to Louise and Amedeo Obici inside Sentara Obici Hospital; above and background image, the exterior of the hospital; opposite page, a portrait of the Obicis (courtesy “Peninsula in Passage”).

BY ALEX PERRY

Staff Writer

The Obici name is deeply entrenched in Suffolk history, and it’s fair to say that the man himself has shaped the development of this city as a whole.

Amedeo Obici was just 11 years old when he immigrated from Oderzo, Italy to America in 1889. His father died when he was 7, and his maternal uncle, Vittorio Sartor, invited young Amedeo to come live with him in Scranton, Pa.

He spent his formative years with his uncle in Scranton, where he worked as a hotel waiter and later as a fruit-stand vendor, according to “Suffolk: A Celebration of History,” by Kermit Hobbs and William A. Paquette.

“Intelligent, enterprising, and ambitious, Amedeo Obici soon grew tired of arranging fruit displays,” the book states. “Intrigued by a man eating roasted peanuts, he decided to peddle peanuts, himself, in nearby Wilkes-Barre, (Pa).”

The Suffolk News-Herald declared Suffolk “the greatest peanut market in the world” as early as 1907, and the entrepreneur with the greatest impact on Suffolk was Obici, Hobbs and Paquette said in their book.

By 1906, Obici and his brother-inlaw, Mario Peruzzi, had earned enough money from peanut sales to go into partnership. In 1906 they founded the Planters Peanut Company in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and in 1913 Obici built his first mass-processing plant in Suffolk, according to planters.com.

According to “Suffolk: A Celebration of History,” the name “Planters” was thought up in a “back-room discussion” by Obici and Peruzzi.

“A catchy name was needed and Obici liked Peruzzi’s word Planters, ‘one who plants peanuts,’” the book states.

Obici was widely recognized as a

marketing genius. Obici created nationwide advertising campaigns, and placed ads in the “Saturday Evening Post” that advertised “the five-cent lunch,” which was just peanuts and Coca-Cola. He also opened his own Planters retail stores to sell company products.

Then there was the Suffolk contest that he sponsored, which led to the creation of the celebrated “Mr. Peanut.” A local teenager named Antonio Gentile submitted an animated peanut for the contest. Obici gave him $5, and a Wilkes-Barre artist later added the iconic cane, hat and monocle to the design, according to Suffolk: A Celebration of History.

“Obici liked the idea of an ‘aristocratic’ peanut. The tuxedo was a symbol of class,” the book states.

Obici and his wife, Louise, were generous enough to endow hospitals, donate to charities and provide well for Planters employees with their financial success.

An article in the Suffolk-Nansemond Historical Society collection describes Louise as a “quiet, cultured and generous woman,” with a fondness for flowers, music and entertaining.

According to “Suffolk: A Celebration of History,” she held an annual Weigela Festival on the grounds of Bay Point Farms, the 263-acre estate on the Nansemond River where she and her husband lived.

The festival was named for a flowering shrub grown on the property that she loved, and the public could tour the estate during the festival, for a small fee that was donated to charity.

The Obicis were childless and had no heirs or family members who possessed “the interest or the aptitude” to run the Planters enterprise, “Suffolk: A Celebration of History” states.

Instead, Obici left his estate in trust to a hospital that was yet to be built — the Louise Obici Memorial Hospi

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tal. This hospital opened in Suffolk in 1951, four years after Amedeo Obici’s death in 1947.

It was undertaken as a memorial to Obici’s wife after her death in 1938, and that memorial continues to serve the Suffolk community today.

“Amedeo Obici decided to build a hospital in Suffolk as a lasting legacy to her,” according to the website for the Obici Healthcare Foundation. “The hospital would also continue his philanthropy in the community by providing Suffolk’s citizens with local, quality healthcare.”

The Obici Foundation was officially established in 1985 to oversee the funds Amedeo Obici left after his death. The foundation funded hospital renovations, equipment projects and community outreach to improve health care for “medically indigent” individuals in the late 1980s and 1990s. The foundation also

helped to build the new hospital building in 2002, located on Godwin Boulevard, which became Sentara Obici Hospital after the Sentara Healthcare merger in 2006.

Sam Glasscock served on the Louise Obici Memorial Hospital Board of Directors from 1966 to 2006, and for more than a decade on the Obici Healthcare Foundation. He was also instrumental in facilitating the merger with Sentara Healthcare.

According to Glasscock, that merger helped carry on the mission of both the foundation and Obici himself: to provide local, quality health care for all Suffolk residents in need.

“I just feel very good about the future of (health care delivery) in this area, and it would not have been possible without Mr. Obici’s care and forethought, and his concern about people in the area,” Glasscock said.

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