| Explore the life and times of Jesse Helms from his childhood through his 60-year career as a journalist and United State senator.
1941
Helms becomes associate city editor for the conservative Raleigh Times, where he becomes the youngest reporter to win the annual North Carolina Press Association award for enterprising reporting.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, Helms volunteers for the Navy but is rejected because of a hearing loss from a childhood illness.
1942
Helms is accepted into the Naval Reserve as a recruiter and sent to basic training in San Diego.
In October, Helms returns to North Carolina to marry Dorothy Coble of Raleigh, the News & Observer’s society page editor and only female staff reporter. Dorothy shares Jesse’s strict Southern Baptist upbringing. Her father, a successful shoe salesman named Jacob Coble, is a fierce opponent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and a fan of ultra-conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr. “He had the greatest influence of all in terms of my getting involved in politics,” Helms said of Coble.
1942-45
Helms serves as a Navy recruiter during the War, visiting local newspapers and small radio stations in eastern North Carolina to submit announcements and recordings. This sparks his lifelong fascination with broadcast media.
1945
After the war, Helms returns to the Raleigh Times as city editor. Dorothy gives birth to the couple's first daughter, Jane.
1946
Helms becomes program director and news editor of radio station WCBT in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.
1948
Shortly after opening radio station WRAL in Raleigh, conservative attorney and businessman A.J. Fletcher hires Helms as the station’s news director. More commentator than reporter, Helms carries a large, wire recorder to news conferences, city council meetings, fires and wrecks, gathering clips for his daily broadcast called “The News of Raleigh.”
At the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond leads a walkout of “Dixiecrats,” conservative Southern Democrats who reject Democratic President Harry Truman’s civil rights proposals, including an anti-lynching law, a fair employment practices commission, desegregation of the armed forces and elimination of the poll tax.
1949
Jesse and Dorothy Helms have their second daughter, Nancy.
U.S. Senator J. Melville Broughton of North Carolina, who had been A.J. Fletcher’s longtime business partner, dies in office. North Carolina Governor Kerr Scott appoints UNC’s liberal president, Frank Porter Graham, to fill the vacant seat. (All are Democrats.)
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