Anthony J. Siciliano was born in Chicago on Nov. 9, 1942, to Joseph and Mary (Parise). His maternal grandparents emigrated from Sicily, and his paternal grandparents from Naples and Calabria. The extended family lived in the predominantly Italian neighborhood surrounding Taylor and Halsted streets.

World War II raged on, and shortly after Siciliano was born, his father deployed to the South Pacific, where he built air strips and roads as a member of the U.S. Army’s 1896th Engineer Battalion. Siciliano remembers his grandparents pushing him in a stroller through the neighborhood.