Mildred Ruth Lent was born January 13, 1920 in Concord, Massachusetts, to John Bernard Lent and his wife Laura May Jamieson. She had 3 brothers and two sisters. In the 1940s she moved to Pasadena, California and worked as a secretary at Cal Tech, where she met and married Victor Hugo Benioff on 31 October 1953, in Los Angeles. They had a daughter in 1956. Mildred was very active in environmental politics. She died Sept 1, 2013 in Sant Rosa, California.