I loved Easter vacations in the late 1960s and early ’70s. My mom took my sister and me on an Amtrak train to her native Milwaukee, where we had a week of card playing, nonstop relatives and endless food.
We stayed with Grandpa and Grandma Dejnowski, who lived in an apartment in a working-class neighborhood. As a child, I was fascinated by their life, which was so different from my life in a house in a prosperous Minneapolis suburb.
Their apartment building was cool. My grandma’s best friend, Mrs. Stevenson, lived right across the
