Margery Jane Foote, born in 1922, grew up on a sheep ranch in Sonoma County. Rancho Mallacomes is in Knights Valley, 8 miles north of Calistoga, California where her great grandfather chose to settle after driving cattle from Tennessee and Arkansas in the early 1850s.

She had two sisters and one brother. Her father ran sheep on the 3000 acre ranch and they grew all their own vegetables and fruit, and hay for the animals. After attending school in a one-room schoolhouse she went to Mills College in Oakland. Upon graduating from Mills with a history degree in 1945 she went off to New York City to "seek her fortune", as she used to say. There she met Bruce Meyer who was a medical student at Columbia University. They married in 1947.