Former borough Mayor Juanita Helms, who died Saturday, was the sort of down-to-earth, straightforward person we often think of as a “real Alaskan.”

Helms wasn’t a born politician, but she wanted to be involved and make this community a better place. That meant running for office. She was elected to the borough assembly in 1980 and then as borough mayor in 1985, offices where she served effectively and openly.

Helms also saw a unique opportunity to do something different for Fairbanks when she helped form a sister city relationship with Yakutsk, in what is now the Sakha Republic of Russia. At that time, the early 1990s, the Soviet Union was being transformed by “glasnost” and political upheaval. The country didn’t last much longer as a “union.” Helms jumped into this uncertain bit of international diplomacy with curiosity and good cheer, and Russian culture became a lifelong interest for her.

Helms was a hit in Russia in part because she was at ease with people from all walks of life and political perspectives. While she tended to support Democratic candidates, she was never particularly partisan, as was reflected in her correspondence with the Daily News-Miner during the past year.

When the national media were dissecting the minutiae of former Gov. Sarah Palin’s personal life, following Palin’s vice-presidential nomination on the Republican ticket, Helms wrote a letter to the editor bemoaning the feeding frenzy. “Stop making this a media circus. Simply start reporting issues. Substance. Information is what we need, not ‘As the World Turns,’” Helms wrote. She also defended Palin’s approach to the natural gas pipeline, a sentiment colored by the widely shared suspicion of the North Slope producers’ intentions. “If the TransCanada proposal is rejected, Big Oil is again in total control of our resources,” she wrote last year.

Helms wasn’t a Palin fan to the end. She wrote a letter about how the former governor seemed to be “doing all she can to divide our country” during the campaign.

But in that first letter, scolding the media for its excesses, Helms offered some advice that reflected perfectly the person that so many Fairbanksans and Alaskans knew: “I want the facts, unvarnished, unspun,” she wrote. “I am not interested in your political views. I have my own, thank you. I simply want the facts. Go back to work.”

Those were some worthy words of guidance.