A lawyer and civil servant, Mabel’s German connection came through her father’s family. She was the only child of Myrtle Eaton and David William Walker, whose roots were in Pennsylvania. Born in a sod house in Woodsdale, Kansas, her family moved frequently, as did so many during those years, in search of economic security. Her parents took both teaching and newspaper editing jobs, and she learned to read by setting type. At the age of thirteen she entered school for the first time but later got expelled from Park College for questioning the doctrine of Virgin Birth. When she was seventeen, she passed the exam which qualified her for teaching school and she accepted her first position in Buckley, Michigan. She married the school principal, Arthur F. Willebrandt and they moved to Phoenix, Arizona to cure his tuberculosis. Here she finished her B.A. and continued to teach school. Together with her husband and mother-in-law, they moved to Los Angeles where she became a young school principal. Her hopes were to attend medical school, but since she was the family bread winner, she settled for going to law school which had night classes she could attend. Her husband went to law school full-time during the day and they both earned their degrees. Mabel was admitted to the bar in 1915 and when she realized that the family dynamics were not changing in terms of economic responsibility, she left her husband in 1916; their divorce was not finalized until 1924.
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