Her paternal grandparents—the Tomchins—were immigrant/refugees from Romania. They were on some leaking boat, headed for Ellis Island, when they swapped names with some other people, called Horowitz. Apparently, it was because Horowitz sounded more American.
Anyway, the rest of the Tomchins stayed back in old Europe (currently called 'New Europe') and they all got killed by some blokes with an 'ism.' (It was W.W.2., and you could kill just about anyone you wanted to, so long as you had some kind of an 'ism' or a 'rationale' or a note signed by someone big.)
The Tomchins who made it to America, I mean, the Horowitzes, set about rebuilding their lives—helping forge America and all that mildewy, family album type stuff.
It all went fine: they lived in N.Y. and they were all ethnic and shit, and they had a kid called Michael and...
Blah, blah, skip a bit.
..And then he married some babe called Cindy...
Cindy and Michael were hippies—full time hippies...
[ In case you don't know—'hippies' were people who wore a lot of denim, smoked grass, burnt money and said stuff like "make love, not war."]
Later on, after a bunch of protest marches, sit-ins, love-ins and smoke-outs, Cindy announced that she was 'with child'. Michael swallowed his spliff, and so could not speak for a while (at least, that was his story).
Then... nine months and four days later: it happened...
It was a cold and blustery day in a town called 'Winona'—Winona, Minnesota—when out popped a strange little creature whom they did name 'Winona'—after the town and some Indian goddess babe wot the town was named after in the first place.
Luckily, the new Winona was also a girl.
So, that was all fine.
Winona became a medium sized baby, then a small size tot, and.. Suddenly, they moved to a jungle in South America.
After a brief stay there—during which the young Winonoid was chased around her tent by a spider the size of an Apollo moonlander—the family moved back to the U.S.A.. More or less.
Actually, they went to live on a commune. In California...
The Tomchin-Horowitzes were, like their neighbors, posh hippies—they had running water, houses with roofs and other modern stuff like that.
But no electricity.
This absence of electricity was a crucial factor in the development of Winona's brain—because—without electricity there can be no T.V..
No T. V. ! Can you imagine?
So then Winona and the other hippie kids had to, like, read books and make up plays and do extra outdoor stuff—much more than wot normal kids have to.
By the way, there was a generator on that commune, so mom set up a movie house in the old barn. There was a real m,movie projector and everything. And that's how come Winona went all loopy over the movies; the screen was like a window on a world beyond..
[By the way, re Winona's addiction to Chewable Vitamin C.]