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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.