The "Iron Mountain Baby" Skips Town

Called the Iron Mountain Baby, William Helms acquired his unusual moniker after he was thrown from a train along the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern Railroad near Irondale in eastern Missouri in 1902 when he was just a few days old. The unidentified infant was found by 67-year-old William Helms, nursed back to health, and taken in by the Helms family. His biological parentage remained a mystery, and he took the name of his foster family, who later adopted him.

Young Helms went to a rural school near Hopewell, where he grew up, and then moved to Salem, Missouri, to attend high school and worked as a reporter for the Salem News to help pay his way through school. Bitten by the newspaper/printing bug, Helms moved to Springfield in the mid 1920s to attend the teachers' college there and worked in a print shop in Springfield while going to school.

Around the end of 1926 or beginning of 1927, Helms moved to West Plains and worked as a printer there for a few weeks. He was soon back in Springfield, where he gave an interview to a Kansas City newspaper in mid-January 1927. In additional to discussing other topics, he said he had been hounded all his life by unwanted notoriety related to the sensational story of his infancy. He admitted that he had often wondered who his biological parents were and had even tried for a long time to find them, but he said he no longer cared and that Mr. Helms and his wife were his real parents. Helms expressed a desire to one day buy "a little printing business" of his own.

Helms's second sojourn in Springfield proved brief, as he left town around the end of January 1927 to take a printing job in Tulsa, Oklahoma. By late March of the same year, however, he was once again back in Springfield.

It may have been during this trip back to Missouri that Helms realized his dream of owning a "little printing business" of his own because sometime in the first half of 1927 he purchased a newspaper at Fair Grove, a small town 15 miles north of Springfield. What's known for sure is that Helms was fairly well established as editor and publisher of the Fair Grove Journal by August of 1927, when his position in Fair Grove was noted in Springfield newspapers.

In Fair Grove, Helms boarded with the Yandell family, and he took out a loan from the Fair Grove Bank to purchase the newspaper business He made the acquaintance of bank cashier J. I. Grant and other prominent citizens of the community and took an active part in civic affairs. He also participated in church activities, including as a leader in the Epworth League (a Methodist group for young adults) and was well liked in the town. In April of 1928, Helms visited Springfield with Cashier Grant and two other prominent Fair Grove citizens, as noted by the Springfield Leader.

On November 3, 1928, Helms up and left Fair Grove without giving notice to anyone. He left owing the Yandells $101 for board and owing the bank $511 for the mortgage it held on the newspaper plant. Several half-completed jobs were stacked about the printing office. His "sudden departure," said the Springfield Daily News, "comes not only as a surprise but as a shock to the entire community."

Where Helms had gone and why was a complete mystery until Cashier Grant received a letter from the absconder on November 14. Dated November 12 and posted at Eufaula, Oklahoma, Helms told Bryant to take back the printing plant as payment of the $511 debt because he "never expected to see Fair Grove again." He also gave instructions for the return of some "boiler plate" type to a Kansas City syndicate.

In late November, the Yandells also received a letter from Helms, postmarked Houston, Texas, promising to pay the debt he owed them for room and board.

Rumors circulated as to what caused Helms to leave Fair Grove so suddenly and as to what his future plans might be. One Springfield acquaintance said Helms had told him he was going to South America. Other friends said Helms had a girlfriend in St. Louis and that they were planning to get married but that he had recently received a letter from her saying she'd changed her mind. This heartbreak, his friends speculated, had caused Helms to "give up his efforts at making a success." Still others suggested that Helms had quit Fair Grove so suddenly simply because he was frustrated that he'd been unable to live up to the high expectations of success he held when he first moved there and purchased the newspaper.

The suggestion of a St. Louis connection seemingly had some validity, because Helms did later marry a young woman in the St. Louis area, but whether she was the same one his Springfield friends had mentioned is not known. The couple subsequently moved to Texas, where they had one child. William Helms, the Iron Mountain Baby, died in Texas in 1953 and was brought back to Missouri and buried in a cemetery not far from the place where he'd been thrown from a train over fifty years earlier.

Rdy 1928