For nine years straight, Dee Cotton would leave his work at The Print Shop every day at lunchtime to eat with his parents, who lived in an assisted living home. Cotton ate and visited with Dwain and Ellen Cotton many times before they entered a nursing home, but once they were there he never missed a meal.

For Cotton, who died Tuesday, it was but a simple gesture of love. For those who knew him, however, it was so much more.

“That’s just the kind of person he was. He went to the nursing home every day for nine years. He did it every single day,” Cotton’s wife Michelle said. “Even after they passed, he would still go up there a lot of times and still have lunch with some of the other people in the nursing home.”

Cotton will be laid to rest in a burial service at Riles Funeral Home Thursday, which will serve as a fitting culmination to his life in Vicksburg. The 1975 Warren Central graduate operated The Print Shop on Manor Drive for 17 years and was able to see the sweeping changes in the printing industry the past two decades firsthand.

“It was a small business at first and it just gradually got bigger … He loved his business. He loved his customers,” Cotton’s sister Carrie Hodges said.

“Even after the printing world changed, he did love it. It did change a lot over the years because of the technology, but he used to love having ink under his fingernails so to speak.”

Hodges was three years older than her brother, yet his do-it-all, caring attitude made him feel more like an older brother.

“He was the one I made do everything for me. I might have been older in years but he really was like my big brother,” she said. “He would always do things for me and I always felt like he was the older brother even though I was older.”

Cotton will be remembered in Vicksburg partly because of his printing business, but according to his family, his memory will last in the relationships he fostered throughout his 57 years in Warren County.

“He lived large because he loved people, whether they were young or old. He was just a people person,” Michelle Cotton said.

“He was a very simple man. He loved to help people. He went out of his way to help anybody and everybody. He had a great passion for his family and his business.”