Helen Messer Berry was born in Hedrick, Iowa in 1916. She attended the Ottumwa Music Conservatory and Parsons College, where she became qualified to teach private music lessons and teach music in public schools. Messer married her husband, Burl Berry, in 1950. Burl Berry was a physical education teacher and track and field and football coach at Grinnell College and Iowa State University. They had two sons, Joe in 1948 and Jan in 1951. Berry contracted polio at the end of 1954, just before the Salk vaccine came out in 1955. She was hospitalized for the first six months of 1955 and spent a prolonged period in an iron lung. After recovering from polio, Berry required various assistive devices to be able to breathe. She struggled with certain disabilities for the rest of her life because of the illness, and she was a vocal advocate and supporter of the March of Dimes. When her husband received a Fulbright Scholarship to teach physical education in Iran, the Berry family lived in Iran from 1959 to 1960. On the way back to Iowa from Iran, Helen Berry passed away as a result of a malignant brain tumor.