For nine decades, Our State has made its way into homes across North Carolina, the United States, and the world. To celebrate, every month this year, we’re paying tribute to the readers who inspire us, offering a taste of our earliest recipes, and revisiting old stories with new insights. Follow along to find out how our past has shaped our present.

If you want to reach Bettie Bond, you’ll have to do so by landline. But Bettie comes and goes, so you might have to leave a message. She’s often out cheerleading for Boone, as she’s been doing since moving there in 1971, when her husband, John, became a biology professor at Appalachian State University.

After moving, her love for old buildings drew her focus to Boone itself. “This town was historic, but no one had done anything with its potential,” she says in the light-filled sunroom of the Bonds’ house in the city’s oldest planned neighborhood. “I knew we had people here who wanted to do something; they just didn’t know how.”

It’s clear that Bettie’s never had a bad day, or an idle one. At 81, she’s the current president of the Watauga County Historical Society, and she has a 50-year string of accomplishments, including a Lifetime Community Service Award from the Boone Rotary and a philanthropic leadership award for her work with the Watauga County Community Foundation. Bettie joined the history faculty at App State in 1973 — she has a master’s degree in Asian studies. In 1976, she received a Fulbright scholarship to go to India. And in 1984, she earned a doctorate in education.

But Bettie doesn’t want to talk about her achievements. She wants to talk about the recent restoration of the Appalachian Theatre, built in 1938 and nearly destroyed by a fire in 1950. “The sight lines are fabulous,” she says, “even from the back row.” Or her advocacy for the Junaluska community, one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in western North Carolina, where not much besides the church building remains. She can barely contain her excitement that Boone, which was once a crossroads called Councill’s Store, is getting another historical marker to commemorate that fact.

She’s involved with the expansion of the Watauga County Public Library and fundraising to broaden its technology component. Around 2010, when a man contacted Bettie about his collection of 200 old postcards of Boone, some made of metal and wood, some addressed merely to “Joe Smith who lives near so-and-so,” she eagerly accepted them and began the Digital Watauga project, though “I didn’t even know what ‘digitize’ meant,” she says.

She mourns the 2006 closing of the nearly two-decades-old Appalachian Cultural Museum at App State, with its overview of the Blue Ridge region’s history — “We were in Fodor’s!” she says. She continues to get occasional phone calls about its closure and the treasures that it once displayed: One came from a woman in Tennessee looking for an original draft of The Jack Tales.

Does this cancer survivor and Our State reader — whose home is filled with books, travel mementos, hanging gourds, and charming journals that she’s illustrated in watercolors — ever get tired, ever feel like maybe someone else should take over the projects? Although she will always be a cheerleader, she’s getting there. “I’m really motivated to start cultivating a new generation of philanthropists, advocates, and board members committed to the community,” she says. She claps her hands. It’s time for John’s (“Isn’t he the cutest thing?”) physical therapy boxing lesson, and Bettie Bond needs to get going.