His name was Anthony Martignetti, and when he was 12 years old in 1969, he appeared in a now-iconic TV commercial for Prince spaghetti, playing a version of himself: an Italian immigrant boy running home for dinner in Boston’s North End.
The ad, which ran for 14 years, was the beginning and end of Martignetti’s acting career, and he lived out his life in relative anonymity.
But when he passed away at age 63, that childhood brush with fame earned him a measure of immortality: a news obituary in the New York Times.
That obit, and more than 1,600 others, was penned by Sam Roberts ’68. The Arts & Sciences alum, a government major, and former Daily Sun managing editor has been on the paper’s obituary desk for more than a decade.
Now, he has written a memoir about his beat, cheekily titled Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State Univ./Space Systems Loral/Peter Rubin
An artist's-concept illustration depicting the spacecraft of NASA's Psyche mission near the mission's target, the metal asteroid Psyche. Psyche Mission PI Lindy Elkins-Tanton will speak at Cornell Sept. 11.
