Charles Butler Gordon was born in 1909 in Liberty, Miss., the Amite County town that also gave him his start on a 40-year newspaper career. As a teenager in Liberty, Gordon covered local sports for the Southern Herald.
Following graduation from high school he worked at various jobs in Jackson, Memphis and St. Louis, Mo., before returning to Liberty and the Southern Herald in the late 1930s.
He joined the staff of H. Ray Bonney’s McComb Daily Journal on Dec. 9, 1941, writing his first story about the death of a McComb native in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Gordon was a member of the McComb newspaper’s staff in 1945 when Bonney sold the paper to Oliver Emmerich.
For many of the years from 1945 until 1968 when he joined the Jackson Daily News as a political writer and columnist, Gordon was the chief reporter for the Enterprise-Journal — sometimes its only reporter. He also filled duties at various times as city editor and managing editor.
Through the years he covered crimes, trials, accidents of all kinds and wrote stories on regional lore and miscellany such as “Roxie Gold Hole” and “Osyka Diamond Mine,” which he considered his classics.
He became a renowned historian of McComb High School sports teams, particularly football, which he covered on a weekly basis. He was an early member of the Big Eight Sports Writers Association, the forerunner to today’s Mississippi Sports Writers Association.
During the turbulent 1960s, Gordon covered the civil rights struggle for the Enterprise-Journal. He often was called in the middle of the night by local authorities to come to the scene of a burned-out church or home. When the Ku Klux Klan planned a “top secret rally” one hot summer’s night in 1963, Gordon broke the story the day before in the Enterprise-Journal. On the day of the planned rally, a Klan member went to the newspaper office wanting to know “where’s Gordon?” The angry man was intercepted by fellow newspaper staffers.
The Enterprise-Journal was one of the state’s most honored newspapers during Gordon’s stay, often winning General Excellence awards. He won numerous personal awards in Mississippi Press Association and Mississippi-Louisiana AP contests.
He was hired by the Jackson Daily News in 1968 to cover the state capital and he wrote a column several times a week on politics and other state government topics. Gordon continued to contribute columns to the Jackson newspapers after his retirement in 1978 and was one of the first to appear in the “Perspective” section of the Sunday newspaper.
Although he never attended college, Gordon was considered a master of the English language. He filled his home with books and considered the day lost if he didn’t read most of a book.
Gordon disdained titles and balked when newspapers wanted to use the tag line “staff writer” rather than “reporter.” He often said he never aspired to be anything other than a newspaper reporter.
After his death in 1982, the Charles B. Gordon Journalism Scholarship was established in his honor at the University of Mississippi.
