“Actually, they carried me across the wire when I was 6 weeks old,” she said in a 2017 interview with a Sarasota TV station. “My father rode the bicycle and my mother sat on his shoulders, holding me and introducing me to the public.” She spent her younger years traveling the country as her father's troupe performed in the Ringling Bros. circus. She had a brother, Mario, and a sister, Jenny — all performed in the act. She began appearing in the family's show in 1947, but not on the high wire at first, according to her biography on the family's website. In 1951, her father told her she could join the high-wire act if she could do a headstand on top of the family's seven-person pyramid. She was able to join the high-wire act later that year.