A timeline of Helms' life

The early years

Oct. 18, 1921: Born in Monroe.

1938-39: Attends Wingate College for one year.

1939-40: Transfers to Wake Forest College, near Raleigh.

1939-41: Works part time as a proofreader for The News & Observer. When offered a full-time job at the paper, Helms quits college and never returns. At The N&O, he meets his future wife, Dorothy Coble, who edits the Women’s Page. He advances from proofreader to sports writer to news reporter. He then switches to The Raleigh Times — the N&O’s afternoon counterpart — to become assistant city editor.

1941-1945: Joins the Navy and spends the war in North Carolina as a recruiter.

1942: Marries Dorothy Coble.

1945: Returns to The Raleigh Times as city editor but soon leaves to work for a radio station in Roanoke Rapids.

1948: Hired by A.J. Fletcher, owner of WRAL, to report for the radio.

A conservative voice

1950: Serves as informal adviser to Willis Smith, the conservative Raleigh attorney who edged liberal Frank Porter Graham, former president of the University of North Carolina, in a U.S. Senate race marked by race-baiting and red-baiting. Helms then serves on Smith’s Senate staff.

1953: Returns to Raleigh to become executive director of the N.C. Bankers Association. He begins writing a column in The Tarheel Banker. He often attacks public school integration efforts: “Sooner or later, America will learn that there is nothing sacred about a public school system as such. There is the private enterprise way — with private enterprise as the keystone in education, political sociologists would forever be unable to dictate terms and procedures to the people of America regarding their schools. Unless our Negro citizens submit more easily than we predict they will, North Carolina does not have the simple choice between segregated schools and integrated schools. Our only choice is between integrated public schools and free-choice private schools. … The decision will have been made by a very small minority of people who are hell-bent on forced integration.”

1957: Elected to the first of two terms on the Raleigh City Council.

1960-1972: WRAL-TV taps Helms to deliver editorials on the nightly news. This makes Helms one of the first TV editorial commentators in the country. In his second broadcast, Helms makes one of his early attacks against the news media. There would be many more: “There is substantial evidence to indicate that many North Carolinians are becoming increasingly distrustful of the major daily newspapers they read, and that respect for the integrity of the newspaper profession may be on the wane. The surest death for freedom of the press lies down the road of unfairness, partiality, and bias …” He also speaks out against alleged communist influence at UNC-Chapel Hill: “Let us not be deceived: Where they are able, the Communists impose their ideology by force and terror. Where they cannot do this, they seek to destroy freedom through subversion, through espionage, through poisoning the intellectual climate and the educational system.” And the civil rights movement: “ ‘The civil rights movement,’ so-called … has been largely a political charade from the outset. The wonder is that so many Americans, white and black alike, have found it so difficult to see the humbug in the cry of ‘Freedom Now!’ … Negro militants have taken over … Bus drivers are being murdered, shopkeepers are being shot and robbed, newsmen are being assaulted, stores are being burned, women are being raped. It is, all in all, a splendid demonstration of ‘non-violence.’”