Linda Ann (Pineda) Ball was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1943. Her mother, Ella Santos, was born in Hungary in 1912, into a mixed family. Her maternal grandmother was Hungarian and her maternal grandfather was Filipino. Her father, Luciano Pineda, was also born in the Philippines, in 1908. She attended PS 112 Grammar School for two years and Santa Maria Catholic School for two years in the Bronx. After losing both parents to illness in 1952, Ball and her brother moved to the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn to live with their mother's godmother, Marion del Rosario (who was of mixed Filipino/German descent) and her husband Herman (a Filipino). There she attended PS 12, Montauk Junior High School (JHS 223), and Bay Ridge High School. After school she worked as a secretary for New York State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz, and then as a secretary in the Patent Department of the Union Carbide Corporation. She married Louis Tochet and then relocated to Chicago, Illinois. They had two children, Noelle (born in 1965) and Peter (born in 1966). She and Louis divorced in 1983, and she then married Robert Ball in 1987, who had four children from a previous marriage: John, Jeffrey, Judy, and Jim. After his retirement in 1990, they moved to Sarasota, Florida.