It’s National Newspaper Week. Feature writer Gordon Cotton, also a historian, author and former director of the Old Court House Museum, prepared a five-part series on his more than 50-year association with newspapers. It continues through Friday.

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Charlie Faulk was on the phone. It was in the fall of 1965 and I had just begun teaching at the new county school, Warren Central. Faulk wanted to know if I could help out on Saturday nights in the newsroom at the Post until he could find someone on a permanent basis.

I said yes, and thus began a longtime relationship with the newspaper, with the Cashmans who owned it, and the Vicksburg Evening Post family.

Charlie Faulk was no stranger to me. He was a kinsman, and the folks around the Yokena-Jeff Davis-Redbone area were justifiably proud of one of their own who had gone to town and made a name for himself in the Fourth Estate, as journalism is called.

The key to Charlie Faulk’s success was not necessarily talent with words, which he certainly had, but most likely his respect for people who came to him from all walks of life. He always had time for them, was always genuinely concerned with their life’s problems.

He also had an eternal smile, a happy greeting and a sense of humor. One day Dot Steen, who was my co-conspirator in the newsroom, was giving me a lecture about my girlfriend, what a great wife she would be, etc. Dot used all the arguments, concluding with, “Besides, married men live longer than single men,” and Faulk interjected, “No they don’t. It just seems that way.”

On another occasion Faulk, then managing editor, was seated beside my desk when my phone rang. It was a lady who often suggested stories for me to write, and invariably they were subjects that someone else had already penned. I had explained that to her. Well, on this occasion she thought she had a subject I would be interested in. Did I mention that the lady had a loud voice? That I didn’t need a speaker phone for others to hear her? Or that she was an old maid with a very pronounced way of speaking and kind of smacked her lips at the end of a sentence? Anyway, she told me who she was, smacked her lips, and said loudly, “Gordon, I have something that no one has ever touched.”

I thought we would have to pick Faulk up off the floor because he laughed so heartily.

I think I can attribute my budding interest in journalism to Faulk’s first cousin, Miss Dorothy Hullum, who was my third- and fourth- grade teacher at Jeff Davis.

In geography class we took an imaginary trip to South America, and Miss Dorothy assigned me the task of writing an article each day for our shipboard newspaper. I still have the book she gave me, “Donald Duck Sees South America.”

My first real money for writing was $5 from the Dixie Roto Magazine in New Orleans for an article on the history of Redbone Methodist Church. A few years later Progressive Farmer magazine paid me $20 for a terribly dull story about the Jeff Davis Community Center. Charlie Faulk took the photos for me and encouraged me to do more writing.

When I was a senior at Jett, I won an essay contest and Mississippi State dangled the possibility of a scholarship in front of me. I don’t know why — my grades weren’t very good — my transcript looked like I was going to major in math, especially Algebra, for I took it several times. Besides, for some unknown reason I thought I wanted to go to Ole Miss. I visited the Oxford campus, made my room deposit and then the offer of a lifetime came.

This time the phone didn’t ring: Mary Cain came in person to suggest I go to school in Summit at Southwest Mississippi Junior College and work for her in the afternoons at her weekly, The Summit Sun.

Mrs. Cain had run for governor, the first lady in Mississippi to do so, and my parents had actively supported her candidacy. Thus the friendship began.

I was in a quandary. What should I do? I went to Charlie Faulk for advice. That’s when the newspaper building was on the Crawford Street hill below Washington Street.

Faulk listened. He and Mary Cain were friends, and he had known her for years through the Mississippi Press Association. His advice was to the point: “You’ll learn more from Mary Cain in one summer than you will at Ole Miss in four years.”