Carolyn Koestel was born in November 1946 in Mandeville, Louisiana, to Laurence Paul Algeo and Beatrix Glass. She grew up in Mandeville, Miami and Atlanta. In the ‘60s, she worked for civil rights in the South with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After a cross was burned on their lawn, her mother sent her off to continue her education in Colorado.
She had a daughter, Anne, in 1968 in San Francisco. When Anne was a toddler, she and Anne went to Munich, where she and a few friends bought a used