Word: small-town
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...Newton fans. "Wayne Newton?" Frazzle asks. "I'd rather listen to the sound of wild boars being vivisected by a psychotic neurosurgeon." Might as well damn baseball as boring, or stock car racing as a waste of gasoline. Might as well drive off the interstate to search for authentic small-town restaurants, instead of stopping at McDonalds. Might as well laugh at the literalists and the fundamentalists and the millenialists and all those people who are storing canned goods in Montana caves. Might as well just stand up and announce. "I'm better than--or at least I'm different...
...familiar ground as well. Atlanta Bureau Chief Joseph Boyce set out to reconstruct Helms' early political background by interviewing the Senator's friends and associates in the North Carolina capital of Raleigh and in Helms' boyhood home of Monroe. Boyce was well suited to assess the small-town rhythms of Monroe, with its old courthouse dominating the square and its passion for politics; he was reared in the very similar town of Danville, Ill., seat of the legendary Speaker of the House Joe Cannon. Says Boyce: "Politics aside, I could understand why those who knew Helms...
...forehead, and the rest is snipped short. His black-rimmed glasses give him a slightly spooked, owlish demeanor. Helms walks with a relaxed spring, his bearing loose and eager if not quite vigorous. His appearance is scrupulously uneccentric, clean and blue-suit respectable, more like a civic-minded small-town bank president than a U.S. Senator...
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...
Helms spent the next seven years in a happy humdrum, working as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association. The job paid well, and it also introduced him to the state's corporate Establishment, which found Helms a right-thinking young apprentice. (A curious pattern: small-town boyhood, radio sports reporter, business p.r. man. Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms...