Peninsula In Passage

He had no children but loved young people. When he awarded a prize to a young artist for creating the prototype for Mr. Peanut, he also sent the boy through college and medical school. Through the years Obici financed other promising but needy students, but his personal secretary, Harry J. Pettit, kept the gifts confidential. In 1927 he built a social club, the Planters Club, for his employees that became a community gathering spot. He established a hospital in Oderzo in memory of his mother, loaned his 190 foot yacht, the Alura, to the Navy during World War II, bought the News-Herald newspaper when it was in danger of failing, and helped build the Hotel Elliot in downtown Suffolk. He served on a host of boards locally, statewide, and nationally as well as the College of William and Mary Board of Visitors. He funded the Louse Obici Memorial Hospital as a tribute to his beloved wife who died in 1938 and at his death left much of his fortune to a trust to benefit the health and welfare of local residents. He loved to ride horses, watch baseball and boxing and play Bocce. He was obsessive about cleanliness and fine food but rarely ate more than one meal a day. He was a practical joker and rarely slept more than four hours a night. And he generally had a Parodi cigar, lit or not, clenched in his teeth. “He was right much of a businessman – he liked things right – and he used to look out for his employees,” Robert Hall Ballard remembers from his days as an 11-year-old errand boy delivering bills from the family hardware business to Planter’s daily. Obici recognized the boy and saw to it that Ballard could help himself to a bottle of chocolate milk anytime he was there. Craig Parker remembers hearing that Obici brought an Italian boxing champ to Driver to train for a fight with Joe Louis. Obici’s chauffeur would follow in car as the boxer ran. “Joe Louis wiped him out and we never heard more about him,” Parker says. Frank Cross remembers Obici insisting that he, as a young man about to go off to college, sit in on the secretive meetings starting in 1941 at the Cross home that led up to the opening of the Louise Obici Memorial Hospital. “My father asked me to leave but Obici said, “No, let him stay, he might learn something,” Cross says. Cross’s father, M. A. Cross, Whitney Godwin, Lewis Cathey, William Birdsong, Harry Pettit and later Jim Causey, would be the only ones besides Obici aware of the plans that, interrupted by World War II, would ultimately build the hospital. “Obici always said there would be “no paper,” nothing in writing,” Cross says. The committee’s work and Obici’s money led to the 1951 opening of the hospital, four years after his death. The hospital was said, at the time, according to Cross, to be most heavily endowed hospital south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Amedeo and Louise Obici were buried in crypts in the hospital. In 2002 when the new Sentara Obici hospital opened on Godwin Blvd. in Suffolk and old hospital razed, their remains were moved to an exterior wall of the new facility, overlooking a garden.

Left: Planters Club Right: Chuckatuck junior-senior prom at Planters Club

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