Imogene "Jean" (Rainey) Carino was born in Bon Aqua, Tennessee in 1922. A descendent of early Scotch-Irish and English pioneers, she was one of ten children and assisted raising her younger siblings on the family farm. After graduating high school, she moved to Nashville and worked for the County Health Department while living in a women's boarding home. She met her husband, Theodore Carino, at a USO dance. Theodore was a Filipino-American who played in the Army Air Corps band. They married in 1946 and the couple moved to Emerson Place in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn where they lived with his parents. In New York she continued to work, first for Bonwit Teller and then for an ocean liner and shipping company in lower Manhattan. The couple moved to Queens, had one daughter (Patricia), and eventually bought a home in West Islip, Long Island, where they had two more children, Peter and Phillip. The family later moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she managed a department store bridal shop. The couple retired and moved to Florida in 1997.