Gaetano Barbieri's family is much like many others on Long Island who traded their Brooklyn roots for suburban life. By the time Barbieri was a teenager, he and his family had left their President Street home and settled in Seaford, and Barbieri would graduate from Island Trees High School in 1958.

Barbieri went on to earn both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from college — the first in his family to do so — and make his mark at jobs he held in Nassau and Suffolk over the decades, including teaching high school English in Bay Shore.