She was born Eleanor Helen Pitts in 1918 in Brooklyn’s Swedish Hospital to Elsa and Frank Gladstone Pitts. She was the eldest of four offspring. Her siblings were a brother Frank and two sisters, Elsa Jane and Anna May. Her uncle Augustus F. Mack was one of the Mack Brothers of Mack Truck fame.

Eleanor’s father began working for Mack Brothers at the age of fourteen. The company built trucks and other vehicles for all sorts of businesses. Produce and meat vendors, theater production companies and even the travel industry used Mack trucks. The Mack brothers built sightseeing tour busses for the travel industry.

At the time, before World War I, the Mafia operated the sightseeing business in the area. They ran tours to Coney Island, Sheepshead Bay, New York City, and other tourist destinations. Eleanor recalls that although there was no such thing as “installment payments” in those days, the sightseeing buses were paid off over time with a payment every Monday. On Sundays, her father would take the family out to these tourist destinations to observe the volume of business. It always made her mother nervous.

Her uncle Gus’s (Augustus F. Mack) family first came to San Diego, California in the 1890’s where they became involved in real estate and, in the early 1900’s, purchased 5,000 acres of land. Plans for development of the property were halted when the United States entered World War I and the federal government used all of the property for military purposes, including the establishment of Camp Kearny.

Augustus F. Mack left the family business for a brief period in the 1890’s to join the gold rush to Alaska, where he spent two years as a miner and prospector.  During that time, he collected beautiful Indian blankets, some of which he gave to Eleanor’s mother.