Join current Denver Deputy Mayor Guillermo Vincente "Bill" Vidal as he speaks of overcoming his humble beginnings in a Colorado orphanage to become a proud and successful Cuban-American businessman. He'll discuss his first novel-memoir, Boxing for Cuba, "in which young boys become men in the shadow of revolution and turmoil."

Douglas County Libraries is offering a new series of business programs to complement its BizInfo suite of services. DCL will offer at least three programs each month targeting entrepreneurs and small business owners. Click on Read More below for topics, dates and locations.

The Castle Pines Business Book Club will meet at the Castle Pines Chamber of Commerce at 11:30 a.m. the first Thursday of each month. The Highlands Ranch Business Book Club meets the same day at noon at Tattered Cover Book Store in the Highlands Ranch Town Center.

Free GED Test Prep

6-8:30 p.m. Monday and Wednesday Nights Parker Library (excluding holidays)

• Instruction, assessments, & practice tests
• In partnership with Colorado Educational Outreach
• Ages 17+, no registration required.

"It was 20 years ago today
Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play."

I have now held my position as director of Douglas County's libraries for 20 years. It was a different world back then.

The population of Douglas County in 1990 was about 65,000. We checked out 368,492 items a year. Today, we have close to 300,000 people, and check out nearly 8 million items annually.

At the time that I was hired, we were a county department. We were also ranked as one of the worst libraries in the state by almost any measure. There was no library in Highlands Ranch. There were no children's departments, and very few story times. We were open five days a week. It looked like the next year, we were going to go down to four.