Homer News file photo Former Homer News staff and owners sit in the old offices on Pioneer Avenue. From left to right are Howard Simons, Tod Simons, Joel Gay, (women in turtleneck?? ask Hal), Tom Gibboney and Hal Spence.

Today, we celebrate the big four-five with the Homer Chamber of Commerce Annual Awards mixer starting at 5 p.m. at our offices at 3482 Landings Street.

Homer News' history parallels the town and the borough's history. In December 1963, voters approved forming the Kenai Peninsula Borough -- a move that gave steam to incorporating Homer as a civic body. In 1963, Homer got its news from the Cook Inlet Courier, founded in 1959 by Jim and Marie McDowell. Its motto: "The only newspaper in the world that gives a damn about Homer, Alaska." Editor Jim McDowell was libertarian and pro-development, but not a big booster of incorporation.

On Jan. 7, 1964, Hal and Marion Thorn started the Homer News. Like its predecessor, the first issue of the 1964 Homer News was mimeographed, and distributed with a press run of 600 copies. Someone forgot it was a new year, though, and the paper had its first typo: "January 7, 1963."

With its motto, "Aims for Progress," the paper became a booster for incorporation. It took its name from an earlier incarnation, run by H.W. and W.M Hegdahl in the early 1950s.

"We want to see our town grow, and we believe it should be wise if we had a first-class city -- for we should prepare for future development," the Thorns wrote in an editorial.

On April 1, 1964 -- no foolin' -- the second lead story on the front page of the Homer News reported the city's birth: "City approved!" On March 10, voters by a 258 to 141 margin had approved incorporation. An Anchorage Superior Court certified the election on April 1.

The bigger news, of course, was "Quake Hits Homer!!" about the effects on March 27 of the Great Alaska Earthquake. The Thorns chronicled the event: boats sucked out to sea from the harbor, a tidal wave covering the end of the Homer Spit, the shore by the Salty Dawg collapsing 10 feet and high tide making the road to the Spit impassable.

At the Homer News, "Editor Thorn made a grab for the mimeograph machine, which came down on top of him. Thorn cushioned the fall, making this week's issue possible. Meanwhile, Girl Friday, Sandy Allen, saved the News building by holding the center support firmly to keep it from falling over."

In 1969, the Thorns sold the Homer News to an employee, Gertrude Lucille Billings. Billings was hired four years earlier as the paper's "Girl Friday," according to the masthead of issues from that time frame. After working her way up the ranks, Billings bought the paper and took the editorial reins in 1969. By 1974, it had changed its name to the Homer Weekly News.

Within a few years, Billings had sold the paper to Larry and Linda Gjosund. They in turn sold the Homer News in 1974 to Gary Williams, who went on to become mayor.

During Williams' ownership, he renamed the Homer Weekly News to the Homer News. Williams had grown up in Homer, and wanted to return the name to the paper he remembered as a boy. The paper took on a more professional appearance as a tabloid size paper. The 1970s also brought a succession of college-trained journalists who reshaped the paper, starting with Managing Editor Tom Kizzia in 1975.

Kizzia, now writing for the Anchorage Daily News, wasn't just the managing editor: he was the whole newsroom. Kizzia had come up to Homer to visit some Hampshire College friends, Ken Castner and Nancy Lord -- now the Alaska State Writer -- who had been working at the Homer News.

"Ken and Nancy said 'You should stay here and work here at the local weekly.' Gary was happy to have someone take over and run the paper, and he would sell ads and write editorials," Kizzia said.

Williams, now Kenai Peninsula Borough Coastal District Program Coordinator, remembered another big change.

"We stopped printing verbatim the City Council minutes," he said.

Kizzia had been editor of the Hampshire College newspaper, and for a while a group of alumni from the Amherst, Mass., college dominated the Homer News, including Castner, Lord, Mei Mei Evans and Chip Brown. Brown succeeded Kizzia, and when he left, he and Kizzia suggested another Hampshire College newspaper editor, Joe Wills, then working in Alaska.

"Tom was a great talent, is a great talent. They were fascinating people to me," Williams said of the Hampshire College group -- with one drawback. "They were fairly glib and not quite as sensitive to small-town politics as I was. I was walking that fine line."

The history of the Homer News offices is a history of old Homer buildings. In 1975, the Homer News had its offices in the old building at the corner of Pioneer Avenue and Kachemak Way where Fireweed Gallery now is. It later moved into an old building where The Fringe is, and then into the Cafe Cups building -- what used to the Homer Women's Club on Bunnell Avenue next to Duggan's Waterfront Pub, a building later moved up the hill. In 1987, after 17 years on Pioneer Avenue, the Homer News moved to its current offices on the south shore of Beluga Lake.

In his first issue, Kizzia introduced a standard for front-page design: "Insisting that every story on the front page have its own headline and not just its title typed out," Kizzia said.

"And no headlines that said 'Happy Halloween,'" Williams added.

Former Managing Editor Joel Gay -- not a Hampshire College graduate, but he came up to Alaska with Chip Brown -- started working at the Homer News in 1978 as a janitor, mail bundler and typesetter. Like many staffers, he alternated stints at the news with commercial fishing and other jobs.

The big change Gay remembers is changing the look of the paper from a glued-back edition printed by Jim Clymer to a standard newsprint tabloid.

"That was a big leap, a makeover -- the whole thing," Gay said.

Soon came color photographs, and then in 2002, an online edition.

"Those were all really big things," Gay said. "The heart of the matter is, the Homer News is, was and continues to be this weekly community voice."

One of the biggest changes came in 1978 when Williams sold the Homer News to a group that included Howard Simons and his wife Tod, and Marty and Nancy Cohen. With them was Tom Gibboney, who assumed the role of editor and worked toward part-ownership in a "sweat-equity" deal.

Simons had been managing editor of the Washington Post, and while there, he personally directed the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of the Watergate burglary and subsequent White House cover-up. He also served as director of the Neiman Fellowship program at Harvard University, a prestigious mid-career educational program for working journalists. Simons' claim to fame in popular culture was creating the cover name of the Watergate source, Deep Throat.

Gibboney came to Homer from his job as managing editor of the Anchorage Daily News, where he was involved with that paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the Alaska Teamsters Union.

Editors like Simons picked up small papers like the Homer News the way some people bought classic cars, Gay said.

"It was just a bauble for those guys," he said. "Simons got the most amazing one of all."

Gay said working with a Washington Post editor like Simons was the coolest thing.

"This guy would come in from D.C. for three days. We were all these young reporters, and we were at the feet of the master," he said.

If asked for advice, though, Simons deferred.

"He said, 'I expect you will never come to Washington and tell me how to run my paper, and I won't come here and tell you how to run yours,'" Gay said.

NOMAR owner Kate Mitchell remembered some of the challenges of starting a new business 30 years ago and trying to develop an advertising campaign. In 1978, her shop ran out of an old school bus on Kachemak Drive. She put an ad in the Homer News and asked Gibboney to use a drawing of a bus.

"What's he put in there but a hippie van?" Mitchell said. "I wanted to be taken seriously. A hippie van? How dare he?" she said.

But the paper provides a community service the town appreciates, she said.

"Bringing both sides of the story, where the city council is meeting, making sure people have the information on how people can participate," Mitchell said. "The News used to be the only way -- gathering that information and putting it back into the community in a way that people are invited to participate."

The Homer News helped a generation of reporters and editors get their start. Brown later worked at the Washington Post and has written several nonfiction books. Former managing editor Bob Ortega went on to the Wall Street Journal and now teaches journalism in Toronto. Joe Wills became a columnist for the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee. Annabelle Lund later wrote for the Juneau Empire. Gay, former managing editors Steve Reinhart and T.C. Mitchell, and reporters Charles Wohlforth and Liz Ruskin all went on to the Anchorage Daily News. Former reporter Andromeda Romano-Lax published a novel, "The Spanish Bow."

In 2000, Morris Communications Corp., based in Augusta, Ga., bought the Homer News. Morris, a privately owned media company with holdings nationwide, also owns the Peninsula Clarion, the Juneau Empire, Alaska Magazine, the Alaska Journal of Commerce, the Alaska Equipment Trader and the Milepost travel guide.

Despite all the changes, Williams said the Homer News hasn't changed in one respect.

"The Homer News to me has pretty much maintained the same character -- focusing on the same things when we incarnated it," he said. "I give Tom Kizzia huge credit for this, making it a hometown newspaper. As Howard Simons points out, we tried to shine a little light in the darker corners."

Like all modern print papers, the Homer News faces competition from the Web and other media. Gay, now living in his hometown of Albuquerque, N.M., knows first hand how difficult journalism has become, having lost a job when the Albuquerque Tribune folded. He's now media director for the New Mexico Wildlife Federation.

Gay said he's hopeful that newspapers can survive, particularly small-town weeklies.

"Weekly papers -- they're providing a product and a service that people are willing to pay for, not a ton, but 50 cents or a buck a week," he said.

"The more local you are, the more essential you're going to be," Kizzia said.

"I have great hope small-town local papers will continue to thrive," Williams said. "That was really the foundation of the Homer News success. It started to show people who they were, where they lived."

As the Homer News and the city of Homer celebrate 45 years, Mitchell said both can be proud of the accomplishments they've made. Homer has grown to a modern community with paved roads, sewer and water -- something not to be taken for granted 45 years ago. And the Homer News?

"It's the real deal, a real business," Mitchell said. "From a mimeograph machine to -- look how far you've come."

No matter what the future brings to Homer, and what changes come to the Homer News, perhaps the paper can survive as long as it remembers its mission: reporting what happens in a small town in Alaska at the end of the road.

Or, as Gay put it:

"The Homer News: That's always been its calling, its place in the world: The voice of a really interesting little town, a really interesting corner of the world," he said.

Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.