Local author Orville Helm, 92, poses for a portrait while holding his autobiographical collection of stories titled, “Nine Decades of Memories,” on Monday morning in Centralia. The book is for sale through major retailers like Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, and Barnes and Noble as well as an assortment of brink-and-mortar bookstores.
When Orville Helm set out to become a first-time author at the supple age of 90, it wasn’t the writing that proved to be the most difficult, it was the typing.
After relenting to the persuasion of his children Helm, now 92, began jotting down a colorful life’s worth of tales in a classic spiral notebook. The stories soon began to flow, and before he knew it, Helm had what amounted to a good book’s worth of words. When it came time to send the manuscript to the publisher though, Helm encountered his first roadblock.
“They said no matter how good you write, they don’t publish hand-written books,” recalled Helm.
Like most things in his life, however, Helm, of Onalaska, refused to let a bad break or a tough draw keep him down.
Thanks to that persistence, Helm’s autobiographical collection titled, “Nine Decades of Memories,” is for sale through major retailers like Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and Barnes and Noble, as well as an assortment of bookstores.
Helm reiterated that it was the insistence of his children that led him to finally put his memories to paper, saying, “I used to tell them little stories about this and about that and they said, ‘Dad why don’t you write these down so we can read it later?’”
So Helm did just that.
After encountering that original handwritten road block, Helm hired a typist to translate his hieroglyphics into digital files that would be eligible for publishing consideration. After many hours on the phone deciphering the handwritten equivalent of typos, the spiral notebook was ready to be a glossy covered book.
“Memories don’t come to you in any kind of order. You just have do your best to remember them the way they happened,” explained Helm, who relied on the sharp memory bank of his mind for his material. Helm noted that a person might not always remember something exactly as it happened originally and that’s okay, but there can be no conscious self-editing because, “Then it becomes a piece of fiction. There is no fiction in here.”
Helm added that despite his frenzied writing he wasn’t able to fit everything in the book that he considers memorable. “I’m still thinking of things that I could have written in there,” said the fledgling author.
So far, Helm has been receiving lots of positive feedback, including at least one response that “actually brought tears to my eyes,” he said.
Originall from Minnesota, Helm readily admits that he is a novice to the world of book writing. “I don’t even know anything about this. I’m just a dumb farm kid,” demurred Helm.
Although he may be selling himself quite a bit short on his considerable intelligence, Helm certainly does have farming in his blood, and tales from the farm crop up again and again throughout his book.
“A lot of it has to do with what you had to do in that country to survive,” said Helm who called his home patch of Minnesota the coldest region in the continental United States. “You always had to have at least a winter’s supply on hand because you may not be able to get to town. And that happened more than once,” remembered Helm.
Growing up on the family farm, Helm learned his way around a cow and a wrench. He put the latter to use in the Navy during World War II before returning home and again taking up farming. A catastrophic fire eventually put Helm out of business, and so he took up the memorable vocation of artificial insemination of dairy cows. After trying his hand at bovine fertility, Helm took his Navy experience with him and Helm went back to college and came out certified to teach vocational agriculture, which he did for a time, and then he went back to dairy farming. Helm wrapped up his career as a high school teacher in Rainier and Yelm, spreading the good word of vocational agriculture studies 1977-85.
“Like the old saying goes, ‘You can take the kid off the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the kid,” noted Helm with a laugh.
In all that time though, he never considered writing a book. “It never ever occurred to me,” said Helm. “I knew I wrote pretty good and I wrote some for the student paper and got good marks but I never ever thought I’d write a book.”
Helm clearly understands the concepts of good storytelling, and he made sure to keep the pace of the book pumping with short chapters told in rich dialect. “There’s a few things in there that will make your eyes water and there’s a few that’ll make you laugh,” said Helm.
One of Helm’s favorite stories from his book dates back to his days on the family farm in Minnesota where he and his siblings would hunt skunks on horseback in order to sell their hides down the river to St. Louis. When pay for the pelts arrived in the mail, the family would use the money to purchase new clothes from a mail-order catalogue. Helm says he got skunk sprayed, “every time,” but it was simply what had to be done. Helm added that a top notch skunk hide could fetch $2.75 while the bottom rung coat would be worth about 75 cents. “If it was less than that they didn’t want it,” added Helm.
Today, Helm’s extended family is scattered all over the country. He and his wife were married for 62 years before she died. He has five children, three of whom wrote their own chapter for the book. Those children have blessed Helm with 14 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren.
Helm says that his kids are pleased that he put his nine decades of memories into book form. “They’re really happy I did it,” noted Helm.
Perhaps Helm’s most touching feedback came from his grandson, who said, “As I read it, in my mind it was like you were sitting there telling me in your voice,” recalled Helm as a bit of dust got in his eye. “That’s the greatest feedback you can receive.”
Looking back on the daunting process of trying to distill a long life into a digestible volume for readers Helm compared the task to harvesting a large farm field, explaining, “You’ve got a 400 acre field here and you start with a ten-foot binder and you don’t think you’ll ever get done. But you always do.”
“Nine Decades of Memories” is available for purchase at major book retailers and costs $12.95. For additional information contact page publishing by phone at 1-866-315-2708 or online at www.pagepublishing.com.
