As a young librarian in the 1970s, Ronald Heezen visited a high school detention class. Most of the teens stared at him blankly, looked half asleep or doodled as he read aloud.
Later that afternoon, however, a young girl from the class — one who had been drawing the entire time — came into the public library and asked to borrow the book he had been reading.
Week after week, she returned and checked out more books.
Years later, Heezen, who was by then working at a different library, received a visitor: It was Regina, the girl from the detention class.
“I came here to thank you,” Heezen recalled Regina telling him. “It’s because of you I started reading. And because I started reading, I started doing pretty well in school. I’m no longer a detention-style student. I just got a full scholarship.”
This is the moment that keeps Heezen, executive director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, preaching the importance of public libraries. Much has changed since he became a librarian more than four decades ago — for one, the explosion of the Internet.
Read more from the Las Vegas Sun.
