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One hundred years ago, it started as a tiny community weekly called the Newport News. Since then, it’s been known as the Newport Harbor Pilot, the Orange Coast Daily Pilot, the Newport Beach-Costa Mesa Pilot and the Every-Other-Daily Pilot — although that last one was a nickname in the community when the paper dropped to three deliveries a week.

Through thick and thin, however, the Daily Pilot has been a mainstay of Newport-Mesa. The paper hit its centennial mark in 2007, and the staff honored the occasion by taking a look back at the paper’s rocky, but always colorful, history.

Bill Hendricks keeps a collection of Newport-Mesa history in the basement of the Sherman Library and Gardens in Corona del Mar. But there is one item the library director would love to have — one he’s tried unsuccessfully to locate for more than two decades.

That would be the first issue of the Newport News, the weekly paper that launched in 1907 and served as the earliest precursor to the Daily Pilot.

About a quarter-century ago, Hendricks said, the Newport Beach Public Library gave the Sherman archives a series of dusty books containing issues of the Newport News and the papers that followed it. Only a couple of volumes are missing from the series, and one spans the years from 1907 to 1911.

The Daily Pilot has not been known as the Daily Pilot for much of its history, but the slogan on the paper’s front page reads “Serving the Newport-Mesa community since 1907.” Thus, that first withered volume of the Newport News — if it exists at all, in some basement or attic — is the Holy Grail of Newport-Mesa journalism.

“Everybody I’ve talked to said it’s been missing for a long time,” Hendricks said.

The Daily Pilot — or the Newport News — started small 100 years ago, with weekly distribution and a single city of coverage. In the next few decades, different papers came to town, developed, merged and passed hands from owner to owner. On Sept. 4, 1961, the first issue of the Orange Coast Daily Pilot finally hit the newsstands.

It hasn’t been a smooth ride since, but through name changes, staff changes and even near-bankruptcy, the Daily Pilot has continued to deliver the news to Newport-Mesa doorsteps.

“The Daily Pilot became, through a lot of trial and tribulation, an example of what a community paper can be,” said former editor Steve Marble, who started as a reporter in 1980.

The Newport News’ publisher, M. H. Swain, started his enterprise with $700 in municipal funds. The true founder of the Daily Pilot, however, was Walter Burroughs, an entrepreneur who purchased the Costa Mesa Globe-Herald in 1948 and founded the Newport Harbor Pilot in the 1950s.

Burroughs, a South Dakota native, got his start at age 11 printing his own neighborhood paper and selling it for a penny. After graduating from the University of Washington’s journalism school in 1924, he served as the University of California’s graduate publications director and ran a lithography company and an advertising firm. He bought the rights to the name “Pilot” from a newspaper owner in Seal Beach.

Evelyn Hart, former mayor of Newport, remembered Burroughs as a dynamic publisher who worked hard to forge relationships with the community.

“He was always right there when he was with the Pilot,” she said. “Sometimes you can’t get in to see people, but he was never too busy to pick up that phone and chat or meet me for coffee somewhere.”

In 1962, Burroughs sold the Orange Coast Daily Pilot to the Times Mirror Co., though he remained on as publisher for two more years. The paper, which briefly shortened its name to the Daily Pilot, expanded in multiple ways, widening its coverage area from Seal Beach to San Clemente and publishing seven days a week instead of six.

Tom Gorman, a future editor for the Los Angeles Times and Las Vegas Sun, got his first reporting job for the Daily Pilot when he was a high school student in 1968. The gruff camaraderie of the newsroom, he said, hooked him on the profession.

“We could smoke in the offices back in those days, of course, and it was a constant annoyance to my parents that I’d go home at night smelling of cigar smoke,” Gorman said.

Gorman wasn’t the only alumnus of the Daily Pilot who went on to an illustrious career. Jackie Diamond Hyman, who worked as a reporter from 1973 to 1980, went on to publish dozens of horror and romance novels — including one about a community newsroom that doubles as a portal to hell. The crime novelist T. Jefferson Parker began work on his first book while serving on the Daily Pilot desk in the early 1980s.

Despite its reputation as a breeding ground for talented writers, the Daily Pilot hit upon hard times in the 1980s. The Times sold it in 1983 to a Connecticut-based company, which later passed it to another out-of-state firm. As the paper repeatedly changed hands, staff and readership dwindled.

The Daily Pilot got a shot of recognition in 1989 when Robert E. Page, a veteran of the Boston Herald and the Chicago Sun-Times, took over as publisher. Page, renowned for his volcanic temper as much as his keen news sense, sought to turn around the paper’s fortunes by bringing in new staff and sharpening local coverage.

“When we bought it, it was a dog,” said Page, who went on to run a group of newspapers in San Diego County. “The advertising had fallen off. Circulation had fallen off. We didn’t have a great staff, and the paper was losing money. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have bought it because of the shape it was in, but we gave it a good fight.”

Page’s tenure as publisher didn’t last long, and he left in 1991 after a bitter fight — and more than one lawsuit — with his partners. His colleagues had mixed feelings about his hard-driving style, but one who defended him was William Lobdell, who took over as editor in 1990 and now writes for the Los Angeles Times.

“I liked Bob a lot,” Lobdell said. “He was full of passion. He had a huge temper. He really cared whether we got things first and got things right. He was the shot in the arm the paper needed, so I’ll always be thankful for him.”

James Gressinger replaced Page as publisher and handed the reins two years later to Tom Johnson, who has held the post ever since. When Johnson arrived as associate publisher in 1991, though, things didn’t look auspicious — the paper had almost no advertisements, and the staff seemed disillusioned.

“I thought it was the worst career move I’d ever made,” Johnson said.

The Daily Pilot had nearly gone broke when, in June 1993, the Times Mirror Co. purchased it and began packaging it with the Times. Johnson, Marble and Lobdell narrowed the paper’s focus to Newport-Mesa news and launched the annual “DP 103” issue to celebrate the community’s movers and shakers. In 1994, the paper won 11 California Newspaper Publishers Assn. awards, including one for best community paper in the state.

Lobdell, who thought the paper was about to go under before the awards ceremony, initially took it as a last gasp.

“We were thinking, ‘Well, at least we went out with a bang,’” he said.

Sales began to pick up, however, so much so that Marble and Lobdell started a series of community papers, known as Our Times, throughout Southern California. Those papers folded when the Tribune Co. purchased the Times in 2000, but the Daily Pilot persevered.

This year, the paper that started on an entrepreneur’s $700 hit its first century mark. And it’s been the spirit of writers, editors and publishers, more than wealth or circulation, that’s carried it through rough times.

“We knew our exact mission, and we were going to do it better than anyone else,” said Marble, now the editor of the Times Orange County Edition. “If you were in Costa Mesa or Newport Beach, you were going to get that paper.”

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MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected].