Winters, California is a small agricultural town of about 7,000 people, some 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. It’s the kind of small town that leaves a stamp on people who grow up there, many of whom look for a way to stay or return if they possibly can. If you fall in love with someone from Winters, be forewarned that you’ll probably end up settling in Winters. I heard that story from several young spouses who married into Winters families, and who live there happily now, raising their young families.

Winters farmers grow grapes and tend orchards of stone fruits, nuts, and olives. You can tell a native by the pronunciation of the word “almond”:  “amun,” which rhymes with “famine.” The joke goes that you have to shake the almond trees so hard to get the nuts to fall, that you shake the “L” right out of the “amun.” Winters is attracting tourists now with its award-winning, locally-produced wine, its own microbrews and locally-made cheese, and its old and new restaurants and renovated main street.

There is a new library in town, built in 2009, located right next to the town’s high school and the community swimming pool. The Winters library is ahead of many others in its natural collaboration with the high school. When the library opened, it was designated as a joint-use facility. On school days, the school librarians actually staff the public library in the early morning hours so that students can use the library before its regular opening hours.

Since we were in town on a very warm day, I stole away to the community pool to swim some laps. The entry fee for outsiders like me was one dollar. Afterwards, I stopped by the library and found a gaggle of 10-year-old boys huddled over computers, probably playing video games. I wasn't surprised to see them. Like in many other towns we’ve visited on our American Futures project, libraries serve as a gathering place for kids after school and during the summers, often for the summer reading programs or after school homework help, or get-ready-to-read programs for the littlest ones.

One thing I wondered about as I visited libraries over the past months, (see here and here, for example) was whether librarians might feel like babysitters, or if having so many footloose kids hanging around might make them resentful in some way. I’ve learned to stop asking that question. One after another, library directors described to me how they see their mission as serving the community, and attracting kids after school and during summertime is an opportunity not an obligation. In Winters, the young librarian told me that the only issue about having kids hang out at the library was when parents would call in too often with distracting requests to see if their child was there, or to pass on messages, or just to check up on them.

Rebecca Fridae, a teacher in the Winters schools and one of the active members of the Friends of the Library (also here), brought together several Friends for coffee one morning in the bustling Putah Creek Cafe. They told about their array of projects and events, quickly reeling off such a long list that I nearly ran out of pages in my notebook.

There are concerts at the gazebo in the park, movie nights, armchair traveler’s tales, a trivia quiz event, literacy training, and ESL tutoring. And for the little ones there are story times, a family festival at Christmas, and a Dia de los Ninos. There’s a Shakespeare workshop for the teenagers. One year, the library organized three evenings of historical presentations about the town, called “Coming to Winters,” featuring the arrival of the Spanish in 1918, the “Okie” migrations in the 1930s, and the Mexican immigration after that. Many of the town residents, which is now about 52 percent Hispanic, identify with one or another of these migrations.