SAGUACHE — The public is invited to a book signing and free program at the Saguache County Museum on Sunday, June 25th at 1:30 p.m. 

Tracy Beach is an author who was raised in Salida. She has written “My Life As A Whore,” the biography of Madam Laura Evens 1871-1953. Laura called Salida home for 53 years. Tracy was “determined to give this wonderful woman her final wish, a biography of her amazing life.” Also, she is in the process of revising “The Tunnels Under Our Feet: Colorado’s Forgotten Hollow Sidewalks.” 

The program will be about Laura Evens, who “wasn’t any ordinary soiled dove from the days of Colorado’s Wild West. Raised by a Grand Cyclops of the KKK from the Mobile, Alabama, branch, she wasn’t about to let anything stand in the way of what she wanted. She wanted to be rich.

From…a gun fight to help save her business, her failed attempts to prevent her friends from poisoning themselves, selling bootleg booze for her supplier who lay dying on her couch, hiding battered women and children from distraught husbands suffering the effects of the Depression, to identifying the corpse of a friend beaten to death by a lover – all the while achieving her goal of owning an entire red light district”, in Salida “which stayed open until December 1949…which was longer than any other in Colorado, due largely to the unusual qualities of its owner.”

Beach and her 18 year-old daughter will dress in vintage clothing for their presentation. They will tell stories that did not make it into the book. Some stories may be “a little naughty.” There will be a slide show (vintage 1972 projector) with NO nude pictures, and they will present artifacts.

Beach will sign her book, “My Life As A Whore,” and include a really cool brass brothel token with each sale. 

Laura Evens said, “I’m not a lady of the lamp light, I’m not a soiled dove…I’m a whore. Call me what I am.”

The program is free. Refreshments are served. Donations are accepted.