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On Christmas Eve, 1912, a Monroe boy, Jesse Alexander Helms, married a distant cousin, Ethel Helms. The couple settled, naturally, in Monroe (pop. 3,000 then, 12,700 now). It was a town with five churches, four Republicans, one pool hall and one whorehouse. Helms was a gigantic (6 ft. 5 in.) man who, for a $25 weekly wage, served as both police chief and fire chief. He and Ethel had a prim clapboard house three doors down from the police station. Their second child was born on Oct. 18, 1921. They named him Jesse Alexander Jr.
Jesse was five years younger than Brother Wriston (now 64 and a retired Woolworth store manager) and eight years older than Sister Mary Elizabeth (now 52 and a Monroe housewife). The family led a cozy, righteous life that makes sampler platitudes seem profound. The father, remembers a friend, "was courteous but firm as a rock. People knew he meant business. Young Jesse didn't argue with him." On Wednesday night the Helmses were always at First Baptist Church prayer meeting, and on Sunday morning at services. Fundamentalism perked all over North Carolina after World War I. Churchgoers quickened their step. Jesse's friend Gilmer Clontz remembers: "Everybody went to church. That was the social activity."
Helms reveres life in the long-gone frame house and the simple bliss it afforded. "You did things at home," he recalls. "There was never a day in my life that my mother was not at home when I got there. I spent time with my father. He had a fifth-grade education. He was the wisest man I've ever known."
When not at home or church or school (where the children, all of them white, prayed daily), Helms seems to have lived one gamboling, summery pastorale. Along with Wriston, Gilmer, Bill Hinson and sometimes a black child or two, Jesse would trek down to Richardson Creek to whoop and splash around. Was the sun always shining? Was the air always spiced by yellow pine and morning glories? There were even two movie theaters, the Strand and the Pastime. Helms and his pals, for a dime apiece, marveled in the dark at a serial parade of he-men and helpless heroines in peril.
Somewhere along the way there must have been normal childhood terrors and chills. But in Helms' memory, any trauma is lost in the harmonious glow of oldtime, small-town pleasures. The only local recollection of something like misbehavior was a climb he made up the courthouse clock tower, which sits on George and Tillman Helms' original farmstead. But it was not a very hazardous feat. "We all did that back then," says Hinson. "There was a stepladder."
"Segregation was a way of life," says Ray House, now 76, Helms' high school principal. House adds: "Everybody played together—Jesse played with black kids too." (Helms said, a few years ago, that segregation was "not wrong for its time.") He was a gangling teen-ager whose schoolwork was only passably good except in math and English. "He had a big vocabulary for a country town," says Hinson. Clontz agrees: "He always used big words."
Jesse usually begged off when sides were chosen for a sand-lot ball game, and he had no girlfriend. But he played the violin and he excelled at the tuba. He practiced with the Monroe High School