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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Mary Cain was a beautiful lady, but beneath that coiffure of curls and swirls and behind those dark eyes she had a mind like a steel trap, and she could cut through the chaff to the wheat. The trees never obscured her vision of the forest.

Summit, Miss., was a new world to me. I lived in the Cains’ home for a while, then in a dorm at Southwest Junior College. Like most teenagers in town, I was soon calling the Cains Uncle John and Aunt Mary. They had no children, but they helped countless others, including me.

I knew nothing about printing, and this was still the era of hot metal, before the days of offset, which real printers compared to mimeographing. The little print shop on Robb Street was filled with the sounds of the bump-brrrump of the hand-fed press, the whir and clicks and clanging of the Linotype machine and the clunks and buzzes of other machinery.

Add to that the smells of barrels of ink, of gasoline used to clean up, of smelting metal to be used to pour pigs (which were bars of alloy) to be used in the Linotype to produce more type, to print the paper, to be melted down, to start the process all over.

I was initiated when Aunt Mary showed me type lice. (You look really close at the type in the chase, or form; its kind of loose, then she quickly tightened it and a bit of gasoline squirted out and onto my face. That was routine to introduce novices to the trade.) Then she gave me a book to read, “Ink On My Hands” by Clayton Rand, the premise being that once you get printers ink on your hands it also gets into your veins — and it’s a lifetime malady, or blessing.

Aunt Mary was best known outside Summit as the lady who wouldn’t pay her self-employed Social Security tax of about $41, and when the government put a padlock on her newspaper, she cut it off with a hacksaw and went back to publishing. She had years earlier thwarted an effort by the Federal government to subsidize struggling newspapers. She saw it as an attempt by Big Brother to dictate what could be printed and she aroused the ire of enough editors all over the country that Roosevelt’s boys backed off. Aunt Mary was also a brilliant speaker with fire in her eyes and voice. She seldom used notes.

But there were other sides to her. She was an accomplished musician and poet, a gracious hostess, and Sunday school teacher. She had a great sense of humor, though sometimes her punch lines were delivered with an acid tongue.

Her newspaper was The Summit Sun, a tabloid weekly that first went to press April 2, 1936 — Aunt Mary had waited a day so people wouldn’t think it was an April Fools Day joke. It was a unique paper for it had sections for society, sports, community news and even comics. She used courtesy titles for everyone regardless of race, a rarity at the time.

The Sun was put to bed (went to press) on Wednesday nights. It was a social highlight of the week for a number of local teens who worked folding, labeling, sorting and then delivering the papers to the post office, all against a background of loud rhythm and blues 45 rpm records. Production would stop when Uncle John came by with burgers and malts for everyone, and then it was back to putting out the paper to the music of Little Richard and others.

My job was pressman, hand-feeding large sheets of paper into an old Lee Press, its big cylinder making a bump and thump as it went around and the chase containing the pages slid back and forth. There was a foot lever that the pressman used, coordinating the hand and foot actions. If I messed up — and I never was too well coordinated anyway — I had to stop everything, extract bits and pieces of paper from the machinery, wash the platten with gasoline, and resume printing. One night when I was having more trouble than usual Aunt Mary called me Joshua because, she said, “You’re making the Sun stand still.”

I had the chance to travel the state with her on several speaking tours and met the big names in Mississippi politics, men like Fielding Wright and Hugh White. Despite her political differences with them, I was impressed at their friendship.

In addition to learning the printing trade, Aunt Mary took time to teach me some aspects of writing, fine-tuning a talent I possibly had. I mentioned her wit, however, and these are a few of the comments I heard her make:

• When Bill Waller was elected governor over Charlie Sullivan: “Every four years Mississippians take an IQ test — and fail.”

• On the John Kennedy postage stamp: “I thought it wouldn’t stick, but I was spitting on the wrong side.”

• On the new quarters minted when Lyndon Johnson was president; they had no silver content: “Just like Lyndon — worthless.”

• Concerning someone she obviously disliked: “When you first meet Bob, you won’t like him, but once you get to know him, you’ll hate him.”

• When someone suggested that a mutual acquaintance had an inferiority complex, she said, “That’s no complex — he’s just inferior.”

Mary Cain stuck to her principles, never compromising, and at her death in her 80s was still working — and had not applied for a Social Security number.

Charlie Faulk was right. I learned a lot from that wonderful lady.