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Somewhere over the Eastern Seaboard in the early 1990s, a 9-year-old boy flying alone discovered the flight attendant call button.
He pressed it. A flight attendant appeared. He switched the light off. He pressed it again.
“I did it probably like 15 times,” Chris Donisi tells TODAY.com. When the plane landed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the captain came out, took back the little plastic wings he’d been given and told him he would never fly Delta again. His aunt Phyllis saw all of it, and she marched him to the car by his ear.
That was Donisi’s first real memory of Boston Logan International Airport. His next one will have a much bigger audience. Starting this month, roughly 43 million travelers a year will hear him welcoming them home.
On Nov. 5, the Massachusetts Port Authority named Donisi, 43, the first “Voice of Logan.” He is a pipefitter from East Arlington. The two-month contest drew nearly 6,000 audition videos and about 35,000 public votes. Massport’s chief executive, Rich Davey, broke the news live on Kiss 108’s “Billy & Lisa in the Morning.” He later introduced Donisi at a news conference at the airport as “a pipefitter with pipes.”
While Donisi is being paid for his voiceover work, he is keeping his day job.
‘Ma, all right’
Massport launched the contest in September. Entrants, all Massachusetts residents, read a short welcome script. The search became a local sensation. It inspired reader-submitted scripts, an open casting call in Terminal A and, on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, an audition from Ben Affleck.
Donisi almost didn’t enter. His mother, Helen Donisi, 70, found the opportunity and sent it to him. Weeks went by. With three or four days left before the deadline, she asked whether he’d recorded his video.
He hadn’t.
“She got mad and she told me, ‘Just do it, please do it,’” he says. “And I said, ‘Ma, all right, I’m gonna do a quick one.’” He went downstairs, did a couple of takes and hit send.
“It’s an I-told-you-so story,” he says.
When the eight finalists were narrowed to one, Donisi had no idea. He’d received an email about a media training session. He assumed he was logging on to a group Zoom with the other contestants.
Instead, he found Kiss 108 and Davey waiting for him. “It was a deer in headlights moment,” he says. “The emotions just flooded, and it was just all good things and just excitement, overwhelmed, but in a good way.”
What won him the job, of course, was the voice, and Donisi has thoughts on what makes it so Boston.
To most out-of-towners, a Boston accent is a Boston accent. Donisi hears it differently. Locals, he says, can often place a speaker down to the neighborhood or town just by listening.
“People, they’ll call you up. They say, ‘Hey, you from Somerville? Are you from Charlestown? You from Arlington?’” he says. “It’s almost like people can point out the accent to a specific town or area.”
He argues it isn’t really about the dropped R’s.
“It’s about the flow of the accent,” he says. “It really, really changes neighborhood to neighborhood. It’s just the way people kind of, you know, dance when they talk.”
The accent appears to be getting passed down. Donisi and his wife, Kristin, have two children: Freya, 3, and Odin, 2. Kristin is a nurse and is also from Arlington. Odin is still mostly at “dada.” Freya, he says, is “definitely grasping it.”
Some people are from Boston. Others seem to have been built by it. Donisi is firmly in the second camp, and his answers to a few quick-fire questions make the case.
The lightning round
Most Boston thing he’s ever done: riding the T all night as a kid.
Favorite team: The Bruins, “all day.” The Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics are loved, too, but “when it comes down to brass tacks,” the Donisis are hockey people.
Dunkin’ order: a medium regular with a Boston cream. Sometimes hash browns.
Go-to restaurant: Caffe Paradiso in the North End.
Celebrity he’d pick to introduce him over the loudspeaker: Ben Affleck. “After I saw him do the Voice of Logan thing,” he says, “that’d have to be him.”
What Boston means to him: “Boston is my heart for sure,” he says. “Boston made me who I am and how I work.” Over 43 years, he says, he has watched the city’s highs and lows and the way people rally around each other, “even with this competition.”
That includes his fellow finalists, whom he calls winners, too. The group has been texting since the news broke. They are trying to get together to celebrate.
Massport says Donisi will begin recording soon, so his messages can be playing by mid-November, in time for the holiday rush.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
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