What is known about June, drawn primarily from the biographical research that has accumulated around this story, is that she was ambitious in the direction of performance. She wanted to work in entertainment. She pursued that ambition in the way available to young women from working-class New Jersey families in the 1930s: she took a stage name — June Nilson — and she moved toward the world of clubs, stages, and venues where entertainment was produced.
This was a life with a particular geography. In the 1930s and into the 1940s, entertainment for working people meant nightclubs, dance halls, small theaters, vaudeville circuits, radio broadcasts, and the occasional film opportunity for those who could get to New York or Los Angeles and get noticed. June was reportedly a dancer and performer, part of a world that overlapped considerably with the world of showmen, bandleaders, club operators, and touring companies.
That world was also, by the standards of the respectable New Jersey Catholic community she came from, somewhat disreputable. Not criminal, not dangerous in a simple sense, but associated with late nights, irregular employment, mixed company, and freedoms that churchgoing families viewed with suspicion. A daughter who went into that world was a daughter who had chosen a particular kind of exposure to a particular kind of life.
Into that world, June encountered Donald Furcillo, who performed under the stage name Donald Rose and went by Don Furcillo-Rose in accounts of this story. Furcillo was born in 1909 in Monmouth County, New Jersey — a coincidence of geography that placed him in the same general shore-area world as the Nicholson family. He was Italian-American, about nine years older than June, and he was already married when he and June became involved.