Helen Shediwy Scheetz was born in Elkhorn, Nebraska, in 1921. Her father was the son of as homemaking family from Vienna, Austria who immigrated to Chelsea, Iowa, in the late nineteenth century. There he met Dora Jensen, an immigrant from northern Germany. They married in 1903, and moved every few years while raising their children. Both worked variously as restaurant owners, shoe and harness repair workers, stockyard workers, dishwashers, and occasionally farmers.

They settled in DeSoto, Iowa in 1929 when their daughter Helen Shediwy was of school age. She attended school there, graduating in 1938 from DeSoto High School at the top of her class of eleven students. After graduating, she moved to Belle Plaine, Iowa where she worked for a relative who owned a Maid-Rite Diner. She also enrolled in a short business school course in comptometry while working. She met and married Charles Scheetz in 1942. Scheetz had been raised on a farm, but was an auto mechanic in Belle Plaine at the time. During World War II, he began working as an aeronautic mechanic and stayed in that field after the war.

Helen Scheetz worked part time throughout her married life as an office worker in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. They had no children, but enjoyed their home and garden, as well as traveling together. Charles Scheetz died of a heart attack in 1973 at age sixty-three, soon after retiring. Helen Scheetz also retired at that time. She lived alone on their acreage near Solon, Iowa until 1993. As she disliked driving, she belonged to few clubs, but enjoyed cooking, gardening, and reading. She traveled to Europe five times after retiring. In 1993, she moved to a retirement home in Iowa City, where she lived until her death in 2013.