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.

Hugh Morton’s photographs drew tourists to the Grandfather Mountain peaks his family owned. Photography courtesy of hugh morton photographs and films #p0081, North Carolina Collection, wilson library, unc Chapel Hill

Shortly after being discharged from the Army in 1971, Harris Prevost turned on the television early one afternoon and came across an interview with Hugh Morton. As the legendary photographer and owner of Grandfather Mountain spoke, determination grew in Harris: I want to work for that man.

Harris got his own interview and was hired as an accountant for the Grandfather Country Club. He eventually persuaded “Mr. Morton,” as Harris, now 78, still refers to his late boss, to allow him to take over marketing. Morton was no pushover, though. He’d remind Harris now and then that the young man still had to prove himself. “You’re on probation,” Morton would often say. For the next 20 years, Harris essentially ran the attraction that is Grandfather Mountain.

“Running the mountain” is a paltry phrase for the challenges and responsibilities that his job entailed — what he describes as “doing whatever needed to be done year-round.”

Take the December when Harris oversaw the filming of a Cadillac commercial shot on the Grandfather Mountain switchbacks. “The Hollywood team wanted the roads to look icy, so we brought in water from Linville,” Harris says. “One of the professional drivers had rollers embedded into his shoes so he could get out of the car and look as though he was sliding.” Not that everything went, well, smoothly: “They brought three Cadillacs and went home with one,” he recalls. Harris also worked with a talent scout for the scene in the 1994 film Forrest Gump in which Tom Hanks runs up Grandfather Mountain — and, by the way, that was Hanks’s brother in the sequence, not the actor himself.

Between 1974 and 1986, hang glider pilots were allowed to leap off the mountain, but, “understandably, they wouldn’t jump if the conditions weren’t right,” Harris says. Visitors would stay all day, clogging the parking lot, as flights were postponed, rescheduled, and postponed again, during which time it was Harris’s job to notify — and then cancel, and then re-notify — media outlets.

And Harris worked with the engineers who designed the current swinging bridge, but “I wanted it to swing more,” he says. Weeks after it was built, however, winds damaged the new bridge, so reinforcements that limited its movement were added. “For some reason,” Harris says, grinning, “our maintenance people didn’t like hanging from the bridge to work on it.” After all, winds have blown well over 100 miles per hour on the mile-high structure.

At one point, Harris served as Morton’s representative on 19 boards and executive committees because Morton was a doer. “He hated meetings,” Harris says. Despite the heavy workload, Harris still holds the utmost respect for Morton. “There’s just so much to admire about the man,” he says. “His unselfishness. His incredible motivation.”

For many years, Morton continued to remind him, jokingly, that “you’re still on probation.” But hats off to Harris, a member of the Order of the Long Leaf Pine and an Our State reader, for always finding solutions.