Helton Insurance president retires

Jan. 10--Helton Insurance Agency Inc. President W.C. Helton has spent more than 37 years mitigating risk and helping insurance customers navigate the market from his Calhoun office on Main Street.

But last month, he put his sellers license in retirement and remains with the company in an advisory role, putting its future in what he called the deserving hands of his son Van Helton, who is vice president.

W.C. Helton, who still gets up early every morning for coffee with old friends and comes to the office to help out in whatever ways he can, says the idea of a dormant retirement is a scary thought.

W.C. Helton, who turns 70 next month, has led far from a dull life. The football star, who graduated from Daviess County High School in 1964, was offered a full-ride scholarship to the University of Miami in Florida to play football. After he was redshirted his freshman year, he transferred to Western Kentucky University on another full-ride scholarship and played center-back. But after selling life insurance and working in a paper mill for some time in Hawesville, Helton started a career with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, solving bank robberies and busting prison escapees.

His career led him from Florida to New York City, and he nabbed some of the country's biggest public enemies everywhere in between. Now, sitting in his spacious office in Calhoun, the modest man chuckles over exciting undercover encounters with jewel thieves and daring arrests with cocky killers.

He joined the FBI in the years following John F. Kennedy's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in 1970. The bureau hired hundreds of special agents to help enforce the new law aimed at stopping some of the nation's largest crime rings.

Helton said he had been considering law school and had performed well on admissions tests, but he knew he could do well with the FBI without so much schooling, so when an agent friend of his in Bowling Green offered him the opportunity, he jumped at it.

Tests, physicals and four months of training in Washington, D.C., led him to his first assignment back in Sunshine State. Helton said he worked in the Miami FBI Field Office Criminal Squad for 10 months before he was transferred to St. Petersburg for the same assignment.

In the early '70s, bank robberies were fairly common, Helton said, especially in high output cities on the Gulf Coast such as St. Petersburg. His squad was investigating sometimes more than four robberies a week. He and his partners would interview tellers, look over crime scenes and try to track down the thieves. They were pretty good at it, too. Helton said his squad probably solved 85 to 90 percent of the robberies on which they worked.

Over his eight and a half years there, he said, he worked drug and kidnapping cases too, before one of his final cases took him into an undercover sting operation buying heavy work equipment from thieves and petty criminals looking to cash in on insurance claims.

"At that time, Florida had a lot of problems with stolen heavy equipment like tractor trailers," he said. "So, in conjunction with the Florida Highway Patrol, we set up a sting operation where myself and my partner were buying stolen merchandise. A lot of times, for example, a guy with a tractor trailer rig would get way behind on his payments and he'd come to us and say, 'Hey, here are the keys. It'll be sitting at this stoplight. How much will you give me for it?' We'd give him $4,000 or $5,000 on it and then he'd turn it in on insurance."

When a prison escapee pulled a massive jewel heist in Virginia, the FBI called on Helton to keep his cover and try to buy the jewels back and arrest the suspect. When Helton got there, he said he discovered the thief had already sold the jewels.

"As we talked, he asked me what I was doing in Florida, and I told him we were buying stolen vehicles," he said. "He asked me, 'Well, how about a couple of brand-new Ford pickup trucks?' and I said, 'We'll take 'em.' So, he and his buddies stole two trucks and I got them to drive them back to Florida. As soon as we got to the Florida line, they all got arrested."

Another prison escapee from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, killed two state police there while on the run. He fled to Florida, but kept in touch with an FBI agent in Wisconsin who was trying to track him down. Helton said the escapee would call the special agent and taunt him, so the crime squad used phone tracing technology to track down where the phone calls were made to go in for an arrest.

"I grabbed him standing in a phone booth," Helton said. "He was still on the phone. He tried to pull a .38-caliber out of his back pocket while I was rushing him, and I guess I grabbed his hands and squeezed so hard that he dropped it."

Those kinds of high-profile arrests earned Helton incentive letters with congratulations from multiple FBI directors, including one of the final ever signed by J. Edgar Hoover himself.

Helton met his wife, who was an insurance agent in St. Petersburg, and when the FBI transferred him to New York City, he said he realized the lifestyle and money couldn't support his growing family, so he turned in his resignation letter and came back home.

With the family experience in tow, and success stories from several old college friends, Helton said he decided to buy an insurance office in Calhoun, which grew to be Helton Insurance today. The agency, he said, will insure almost anything, and over the years, he's tried to battle a negative perception about the insurance business.

"A lot of people think insurance is just a necessary evil," he said. "But we are protecting somebody's livelihood. People say you're gambling if you don't buy insurance. There's no gamble to buying insurance. You either transfer the risk to the insurance company or you hold onto it yourself."

So instead of trying to sell insurers on certain plans or give customers sales menus like a short-order cook, he said he and his staff approach sales from an education perspective. They analyze the risks and advise customers on what kinds of insurance will suit their needs and give them the most protection, he said.

More so than anyone else, Helton said he has tried to teach that philosophy to his son Van, who is taking over the daily operations. Van Helton said it's impossible to fill his father's storied shoes, but he plans to continue to grow the company. Since coming on board, Helton said Van has helped expand agency partners, which gives Helton's customers more insurance options.

"One of the things that Dad has taught me is that if you're going to do anything big in life, give it your best," Van Helton said, "and always remember the people who helped you. I was born and raised in this community, and as much as they've helped us, now we're trying to give back to them."

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