Peninsula In Passage

Obici’s future was bright. He worked in a cigar factory by day, went to school at night and learned English in three months. For the rest of his life, however, he would continue to pronounce his name with an Italian inflection “Ah-may-day-o O-bee-chee.” At 13 Obici moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and worked at a fruit stand. He honed his English, business skills and innate marketing talents. Obici, short and stocky, had an energetic personality and a driving desire to become a successful businessman. Four years later he was managing a popular saloon and saved enough money to bring his mother, brother and two sisters to Wilkes-Barre. Obici jumped into local politics and met Mario Peruzzi, the tall, blond young man who would become his best friend, business partner and, ultimately his brother-in-law, when he married Elisabetta Obici. Obici left the saloon and bought his own fruit stand. Discovering that peanuts had a longer shelf life and better profits than fruit, he specialized in them. He opened a restaurant that served oyster stew – and peanuts. He bought the building housing the restaurant after talking the bank into financing the entire price. He bought peanut roasting machinery and marketed bags of roasted peanuts, buying half a dozen horse drawn carts to sell roasted peanuts around the Lackawanna Valley. By 1907, at the age of 30, he, with Peruzzi, formed the Planters Peanut Company and was one of the biggest peanut sellers in Pennsylvania. Peanuts sold “in the shell” were primarily an outdoor snack - fine for ball games and fairs. But Obici targeted an indoor market and developed machinery that would shell, skin and roast peanuts. Obici preferred the big, white Virginia peanuts to the smaller, cheaper Spanish nuts, and sold them in two-ounce clear glassine bags so customers could see they were buying quality. After years of buying peanuts directly from peanut cleaning houses in Suffolk, Obici decided to move the operation there from Wilkes-Barre and set up his own cleaning operation. It would not be easy. In a biography he commissioned in 1943 Obici says “Unfortunately, I was not a Horatio Alger. . . What success I have had has been the result of a long, wary, hard pull up a narrow, bumpy road with many thorny bushes crowding both sides to remind me that the path was and would continue to be thorny.” Applying for a loan from the Farmers Bank of Nansemond in 1916 to move his business, Obici had to overcome his Italian – and Northern – roots, his relative lack of wealth and his intention to compete with existing cleaning houses. But the loan was approved and Obici later would sit on the board of that same bank. “It is mentally stimulating to conduct a business,” Obici said, admitting that he met competition head on and appreciated its value. “When you don’t have competition you get lazy and you lose ground.” When underhanded competition forced his company to near bankruptcy, Obici borrowed half a million dollars from a New York bank and cornered the peanut market to survive. On the way to becoming “The Peanut King” Obici took care of his employees, black and white, and quietly worked to enhance the community around him.

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