Service, devotion to family marked Carl Gatto’s life

PALMER — Kip Gatto remembers being out one night in Juneau visiting his dad, Carl.

“‘Well, let’s just go knock on the door and see if they’re home,’” he remembers his dad saying.

“And I was like, ‘do you do that with the governor’s mansion?’” Kip Gatto said Saturday at Lazy Mountain Bible Church during a service remembering his father’s life and service.

A longtime Mat-Su Valley legislator, Rep. Gatto died April 10 from the cancer he’d battled for a decade. At the time, he was still representing District 13 in the state House of Representatives.

Kip Gatto said he was actually relieved that night when the governor wasn’t home. He said he wasn’t exactly prepared for such an impromptu introduction.

He said he knew his father was a proud parent and devoted to public service.

“He was a fortunate man. Not everyone gets to live so fulfilled,” Kip Gatto said. “It’s just so hard to have him gone.”

As firefighters and fire trucks staged outside the church — as a reminder of both Gatto’s pre-legislative career in emergency services and his devotion to finding funding to make sure local departments had the equipment they needed — inside friends and family took turns sharing memories, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.

Sen. Charlie Huggins said he remembers working with Gatto in the Legislature, but spent a good deal of his time talking about another context in which he knew Gatto. Huggins was a basketball coach and Gatto’s son Gabe had the best jump shot he’d ever seen in a boy that age.

Huggins choked up at the end of his testimonial, talking about visiting Gatto in the hospital.

“He said, ‘I’ve been through some pain but I’m better,’” Huggins said. “Then he talked about what he loved and it was about Gabe and Cathy linking up in Europe and traveling.”

That theme — Gatto as a devoted family man — was woven throughout each of the testimonials.

Gov. Sean Parnell summed up that thread of Gatto’s life by borrowing a couple of oft-repeated lines from Gatto himself.

“‘First, I am a child of God. Second I am a husband. Third, I’m a dad and fourth I might be a legislator,’” Parnell recalled Gatto saying.

Rep. Bill Stoltze (R. Chugiak) recalled running for office alongside Gatto and rooming with him their first year in Juneau.

He shared a story about Gatto asking him to nudge him if he spoke too much on the house floor and later complaining of sore ribs from how often and how hard Stoltze had given him the message to wrap things up. Then he turned to the Gatto family.

“Public service was important to him but you were the epicenter of his life,” Stoltze said.

Near the end, Stoltze said, he had visited Gatto in the hospital and the two talked about anything but politics, until finally Stoltze said just had to ask what Gatto would like to see him work on funding in the state’s budget.

“He was savvy to the end,” Stoltze said. “He said, ‘Bill, just do what you know is right.’ So I had to fund just about everything for Palmer.”

Pastor Larry Kroon of Lazy Mountain Bible Church remembered a few other parts of Gatto’s life. He remembered training for various races with Gatto. On their training runs, Kroon said, Gatto seemed delighted to finally have the pastor to himself.

“He was always pestering me, and that’s the best way to put it, with theological questions,” Kroon said. “I finally said, ‘Carl, I don’t know.’”

He said he remembered talking to Carl near the end of his life, when it was apparent that the cancer would soon take him. Even then, Gatto was still talking about his vision for a better state and a better country, about faith, love and hope.

“That’s the Carl I always knew,” Kroon said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.