She was employed as a bookkeeper and interior decorator when her husband, ring announcer Frank Shain, invited her to join him at a Golden Gloves amateur boxing fight in the 1960s.
Though she had originally been reluctant "to watch two men beating each other up in the ring", she "totally fell in love with boxing" saying "it was such a precise science" and started attending fights regularly with her husband.
She started judging amateur fights and in March 1975 became one of the first female professional boxing judges licensed by the New York State Athletic Commission, following in the footsteps of Carol Polis, who received her license several months earlier.
[1] This made her the first woman to be a boxing judge for a heavyweight championship bout, which felt to her "like when an opera singer sings at the Met".
[1] A resident of Fort Lee, New Jersey, Shain died at age 81 on August 19, 1999, of cancer at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center.