The story behind the song.

Bertha Eaton was born in Bloomfield, Iowa on March 15, 1885, the eldest daughter of Enoch Henry and Susan Frances Walker Eaton. She read Shakespeare, Ivanhoe, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine by age thirteen, encouraged by family suppertable conversations and her mother’s nightly Bible readings.

She settled in Reno after falling ill on a train bound for California. She married three times. Her third and longest marriage, thirty years, was to Reno divorce attorney Fiore Raffetto, the man she had originally retained for legal counsel. They had one daughter, Frances Cornelia.

Raffetto became one of Reno’s most prolific civic voices. She conducted a “Poet’s Corner” column in the Nevada State Journal through the 1930s, served twenty-five years with the Reno branch of the National League of American Pen Women, and was named poet laureate of the Nevada Federation of Women’s Clubs. Her narrative poem “The Ballad of Katie Hoskins” was used as a text by Columbia University. Another composition, “The Spirit of Democracy,” was a concert march for band, broadcast nationally by the United States Marine Band.

She was a teacher, a soprano, a composer, a civic worker, and a Republican political activist. She was also, in her own description, a Nevadan by choice rather than birth. Her daughter put it this way in 1952: “In view of all the places my mother both visited and lived in for varying lengths of time, I have no doubt mother felt and meant it when she said ‘Home Means Nevada.’”

In the summer of 1932, the Nevada Native Daughters invited Raffetto to sing a Nevada song of her choice at their annual picnic at Bowers’ Mansion. She accepted gladly. She found many lovely Nevada songs in circulation, but none expressed her own admiration, esteem, and affection for the state. She recalled an unfinished song manuscript she had set aside years earlier. She decided to revise it and sing her own.

Then unexpected houseguests arrived. She marked her calendar wrong. Two weeks of fun passed. On the morning her guests were leaving, she read on her calendar that the picnic was the next day. Not one note had been written.

She flew to the piano before her friends’ car had turned the corner. She wrote without stopping from ten o’clock that Saturday morning until four o’clock the next morning. Eighteen hours. She slept briefly. That afternoon, she sat down at the old square piano on the front balcony of Bowers’ Mansion and sang “Home Means Nevada” from a lead pencil script.

When she rose from the piano, an elderly gentleman barred her exit. He propped his gold-headed ebony cane against the piano, removed his high topper, and said: “Honey, that’s the prettiest Nevada song that I have ever heard. It should be made the State Song of Nevada!” Then he placed his trembling hands on her shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks. He was Roswell K. Colcord, former Governor of Nevada.

She performed the song one hundred and eighty-seven times in the next three months. On February 6, 1933, the Nevada Legislature unanimously adopted “Home Means Nevada” as the official state song.

Bee The Difference launches as a Nevada-wide movement. The straight line, from pollinator health to a food-secure region, runs through every county in this state. Reno and Las Vegas. Carson City and Elko. Pahrump and Pioche.

Raffetto’s song is the place we anchor. Not because the geography in the lyrics covers all of Nevada, it doesn’t, but because what she did mirrors what this work tries to do. She loved the place. She wrote what she felt, plainly. She refused to charge money for something the state needed. She made something durable from a single long Saturday at the piano.

Built in Nevada. Growing into a global community.