Patricia Anne Acquaviva was born in January 1944 to an Italian-American family. Her parents, Pat Acquaviva and Terese Colonna Acquaviva, married in 1942. Her father, a private first class in the US army, was killed in action in March 1945 during the Allied advance from Paris to the Rhine, after which she and her mother moved in with her uncle and grandparents. Her mother, a teacher, remarried to James R. Helmintoller in 1951.