In 1934, Joseph Gatto was born to an Italian immigrant father and an Italian American mother, Maria Antonia “Mary” Cortese, whose family had settled in Pueblo in 1898, three years before her birth. The families lived alongside many others from their native villages in Sicily and Calabria, happily and gratefully calling one of the tiny, non-descript homes of Pueblo’s Goat Hill neighborhood "home."

In that humble but proud environment, where the odor of coal dust served as the calling card for an industry that provided a living for immigrants like his father, Gatto learned the meaning of family and faith, and the value of a hard day's work in the pursuit of the American Dream.