I’m still waiting for lead editorial on Jesse Helms from the Winston-Salem Journal. In the meantime, however, I discovered this Scott Sexton column:

Another aspect of Helms that was sometimes overlooked amid his wrong-headed rants about art, race and AIDS is the fact that the man was courtly and polite.

He might not have been the intellectual equal of Sen. Sam Ervin, another legendary senator from North Carolina, but Helms could be nice in person.

I say that based on a short, chance encounter when I was a college student bumbling around a Senate office building in Washington in the late 1980s.

I was wearing a Carolina ball cap when I bumped into Helms in a hall. He spotted the logo, asked me where I was from and stopped for a minute after I told him that I lived in Greensboro. I left with his admonition that should I ever need help in Washington, not to hesitate to call his office.

Bobby McCroskey, a friend and former co-worker, can relate a similar story about running into a gracious Helms on a Senate subway car in the early 1990s.

Helms was not the ogre that either of us expected.

When I learned yesterday about his death, that’s the Helms I remembered first — a nationally known senator who easily could have blown off some goofy college kid and didn’t. Only afterward did I think about some of his more questionable acts and hateful words.

Love him or loathe him, we knew where Helms stood. He won a lot of votes, some of which might surprise you, by being that way.