MEMBER SPOTLIGHT | OCTOBER 2003

Helen Sims
AWC Legacy and HVWP Volunteer

Note: Helen Sims died October 25, 2006. More...

AWC and the HVWP have a natural and historic link. The concept and formation for volunteer writer’s aids and editors came from a Chicago chapter member. Charlotte McKenzie, our own chapter member, has narrated its history on our Web site. Visit www.kcwomcom.org/about/history/history2.htm to read the article.

Helen Sims was born with printer’s ink in her blood. The daughter of dual owners of a small-town newspaper in Moberly, Missouri, she spent her childhood amid printing presses, reporters and newspaper production in a series of small towns in Missouri and Oklahoma, where she finished high school. Armed with her diploma and a lot of determination, she headed for the University of Oklahoma and earned a journalism degree in 1936.

Helen began her career in personnel, where she utilized her journalism degree traveling for a major retail chain. Her professional life shifted when those travels brought her to The University of Kansas Medical Center. On the early cusp of the Information Age, Helen’s journalistic expertise generated a variety of materials that included a patient’s handbook and a newsletter for the Medical Center employees.

Her wealth of experience and productive innovations for both the medical and allied staff led to her appointment as Director of University Relations and Alumni Affairs, a position she held this until her retirement.

Over the course of her career Helen was a generous community volunteer, including service as president of AWC (1962-63). She was introduced to the Hospitalized Veteran’s Writing Project when the headquarters moved to Kansas City in the early 1970s. With that move, the mimeographed paper format was changed to a quarterly magazine. For more than a decade, Helen volunteered as Prose Editor.

Helen recalls her experiences: “Like all writing for publication, we worked toward a deadline.” The veterans’ writings were reviewed according to a stylebook designed specifically for the project. Their subjects covered the life spectrum, from childhood memories to the battlefield arena. Most of the accounts were filled with “facts that were covered in newspapers and in other news articles, but these articles were written from the firsthand experience of a soldier.”

Helen’s professional training helped her to maintain a detachment from the saddest of stories. She did notice, however, that as the veterans returned from the Vietnam War, they wrote with an increasing bitterness. Many wrote that there was “no point” to being there. Many of the submissions were not acceptable for publication because their accounts were lost in expletive-filled pages.

According to Helen, a poignant shift began to occur in the expression of the vets of that era when The Vietnam Wall was erected and dedicated in Washington, D.C., in 1982. There seemed to be a recovery of hope and a sense that “their efforts had been worthwhile.”

Like all juried efforts, Helen noted, “The difficult task would be to award a prize.” The prizes had been established as writing incentives, but many early recipients wrote that they never cashed their checks. Instead, they chose to frame them as a reminder of the value of their labor. Some who received the prize money cashed the checks, then sent in the money as a donation to help continue the work.

Helen summed up her HVWP efforts this way: “Volunteer work has to be gratifying work. I did the prose editing because of AWC and what it had meant to me.”

Updated 10/29/06