By Steve Neavling
Jim Helminski was new to his job as a Secret Service agent when he was assigned to protect Queen Elizabeth II while she was in Kentucky in 1984.
It was a good learning lesson, he told Fox 56.
“Well you know it is one of your very first protectees, it is something that you begin to think about,” Helminski said. “You think about what you learn from that. You learn how to deal with people at that level and having the queen break you in is a pretty interesting thing to say.”
Helminski also protected the queen in 1986, giving him some personal time with the royal highness.
“What I ended up doing was driving her from place to place so I had some alone time with the queen, some very nice conversations with her,” Helminski said. “Went to each and every one of the venues that she went at so I got to watch her interact with us, common people.”
He recalled her sense of humor.
“She had a very queenly British sense of humor,” said Helminski. “I can recall driving down one of our Kentucky country roads and going past a group of bikers and all she could say was ‘that seems way too sweaty for me.’”
The queen died Friday at the age of 96.
