CityView Magazine

Publisher’s Note Simply Helen New Jersey – by herself. She stayed six months and was transferred in 1938 to Fayetteville, not knowing a person in town. She never left. Mother was the youngest of eight that came through the Depression very poor. She was a survivor. She never met a stranger, and that was the reason she adapted to Fayetteville so well. Two of the first people she met were Bill and Hanna Holt (parents of Billy, Charlie and Henry Holt). They introduced her to all their friends and she babysat for them when they took long trips. The Holt brothers remember her well. After the war, in the 1950s, my par- M y mother, Helen Waren, died on my father’s birthday, Nov. 1 (All Saints Day). At the visitation a few days later, a family friend suggested that someone should write a book about her and call it “Helen.” Everyone in the room could write a chapter. Yes, my mother was a character. She loved to laugh, loved people, loved animals and always gave a helping hand, but get in her way, and she was a terror. Try to imagine your daughter leaving home at 18 and taking a job in New Jersey. My mother graduated from high school in Wake Forest in 1937 and did not want to be a day student at the college there. So she took a job with Western Union and went to work in 12|Winter 2008/2009 ents and some friends started the first successful insurance premium finance company and called it IFCO. Mother operated it in our home for a couple of years, and then Dad quit his job and took the helm when they moved it to an office in Haymount. It became one of the largest premium finance companies in the country and was sold to a national firm in the early 1970s. When they start- ed the business, local investors said they wanted in the deal if Helen was running it. She was doing all this and raising two young sons at the same time. Mother started playing golf 20 years before my dad and she was quite good, winning the ladies handicap champi- onship at Highland Country Club and finishing second many times in the club championship. She was one of the driving forces behind a statewide junior golf tournament held in Fayetteville for many years in the 1960s. A prominent doctor living in Charlotte told me a few years ago what he remembered most about the junior tournament was Helen Waren. People who lived on Pilot Avenue in Haymount knew her as the mayor of Pi- lot Avenue. She protected her neighbor- hood, sometimes like a general would his troops. Helen was a take-charge person. Sometimes, that attitude would offend people, but that was simply Helen. A few years ago, when my father was dying in a local assisted-living facility, Mother had complained for days about his room being too hot and nothing was being done about it. The director remem- bers well the day Mother stormed into a meeting she was having with the owner and demanding something be done. The room was cooled that afternoon. This generation is much different than the one Mother came from. She de- manded to live at home by herself. She believed in helping others, but also in helping yourself. This generation needs to be pampered. We tried to get her to move to an assisted-living home. She would not hear of it. She always said, “I am going to die in my house.” She got her wish. She went to sleep and woke up with the Lord. My brother and I loved her and will miss her dearly but we have great com- fort in knowing Mother’s relationship with Jesus Christ. She is with the Lord now but Fayetteville has lost another of the “greatest generation.”CV Marshall Waren, Publisher

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