Every other week in the early 1960s, a handful of employees toiled away in a converted motel room to piece together the Gaithersburg Gazette, filling half of its 16 pages with advertisements and the other half with news about business openings, church sermon topics and the Kiwanis and other clubs. In the three years that followed its 1959 launch, the newspaper carved its niche as a conduit for Gaithersburg's civic and commercial communities.

Where founder Earle Hightower and second owner Nat Blum proved The Gazette to be a viable financial venture, the 30 years that followed established its journalistic base and cemented its position as a primary source for news in most of Montgomery County, which was in the midst of rapid, uneasy growth.

The company's second era started with John Panagos, an advertising veteran of the Washington Daily News who had watched The Gazette grow from its first 1,000-copy run to nearly 10,000 copies and saw the inherent promise of the Gaithersburg depicted in its pages: a town starting to shake loose its agrarian roots as developers, retailers and bankers chased the bounty, and federal relocations turned Gaithersburg into the "Science Capital of the World."

With 15 years at the Washington Daily News and experience in broadcasting, Panagos was the first Gazette owner able to name the news as his primary trade.

Over 17 years, he made the paper a weekly and boosted its circulation to 35,000, much of that growth buoyed by a classified advertising section — "the bread and butter of the paper."

When Panagos bought the newspaper, his daughter Kathy was in elementary school. She remembers her father working hard in many a smoke-filled room at the Holiday Motel on South Frederick Avenue, where it was based.

That toll eventually became too much to bear, she said, and he reluctantly sold The Gazette in December 1979 — almost 20 years to the day since its launch — to the co-publisher of a Northern Virginia newspaper.

"He was ready to retire; he was getting kind of burnt-out," said Kathy Armstrong, who now lives in Germantown. "... It was a difficult transition for us giving up The Gazette. It was part of the family."

Davis Lee Kennedy, who had community papers in Virginia, bought the company during a recession and sold it in the next recession 13 years later.

In between, Kennedy made good on his vision to turn it into a network of newspapers spanning the county. By the end of his time at the helm, circulation grew from less than 40,000 to more than 200,000.

"I thought, ‘Any paper that has that strong classifieds had to be able to do better,'" said Kennedy, who now publishes The Current newspapers in Washington, D.C.

Just as Hightower launched at the start of Gaithersburg's explosion, Kennedy's timing was fortuitously tied to the high-tech transformation from Shady Grove to Germantown.

Growing influence

Montgomery's population grew as much in the 1980s as it did in the 1950s and 1960s combined.

By 1984, Metrorail's Red Line stretched to Shady Grove. Interstate 270 was widened to handle commercial and housing growth. "New Urbanist" planners dreamed up The Kentlands, a mixed-use community that would make better and more efficient use of land. A bounty of federal contracts— from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Department of Energy — fed biotech's burgeoning private sector, helping spur the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center into one of the country's pre-eminent locales for scientific research.

Demand skyrocketed for office space and for corollary retail and service industries. The county's 200,000 homes in 1980 ballooned to nearly 300,000 in 1990, and their owners had more money to spend than ever: The median household income nearly quadrupled to $60,000 from 1970 to 1990.

"It was the coming of age for the 270 corridor, when it became known as the high-technology corridor that it is today," said Jon A. Gerson, who between 1984 and 1990 was executive director of what was then called the Gaithersburg and Upper Montgomery Chamber of Commerce.

Within two years of buying The Gazette, Kennedy switched from selling subscriptions, with a per-copy fee, to free home delivery, saturating entire neighborhoods to promise advertisers what he called "total market coverage."

A year later, he bought the Courier newspapers in Damascus, Olney and Mount Airy, and by 1988 had launched Gazettes in Montgomery Village, Germantown, Rockville and Potomac.

As it grew and expanded, The Gazette came to hold greater political sway.

Kennedy attributes that largely to The Gazette's voter's guide, a special section drawn from three-hour interviews with every candidate for local office.

Gaithersburg Mayor Sidney A. Katz, who has held elected office in Gaithersburg for 30 years, still winces to think of those interviews.

Katz recalls the first time the paper mentioned him by name: the city planning commission's debate in 1976 over how wide to make parking spaces. Katz, who had just joined the commission at age 26, wanted parking spaces set at six inches wider than did others on the commission. In the ensuing Gazette, editors took Katz's position to task — and the city adopted a narrower width.

"I'll always remember that — it was a very eye-opening experience that they could change the size of a parking space," Katz said. "... The Washington Post was always a very important newspaper for us, and then there was the Sentinel, and they had some other papers, but The Gazette was really — that was the hometown paper. Your real source was The Gazette."

Growing pains

Growth had pushed and pulled at the county's long-held social fabric, filtering prosperity into new and increasingly diverse pools — a trend reflected in the chamber's own growth.

Nearly half of the 300 members added between 1984 and 1990 were from Germantown, Clarksburg and Damascus, recalled Gerson, who is now a lobbyist for the Montgomery County Education Association, the county's teachers' union.

More and more, home-based and woman-owned businesses ventured into the county's business scene. And the chamber named its first minority president. Where one in 20 county residents in 1970 was a racial or ethnic minority, nearly one in four was in 1990.

The growth brought its attenuate strains — zoning disputes and hotly contested development plans; cul-de-sac communities sprawled out into the upcounty; dust-ups over school construction, student busing and redrawing school district lines; the especially tense struggle over how to handle Gaithersburg's sudden explosion of homeless people; more urban levels of crime.

All of it provided endless fodder to fill The Gazette's pages.

In 13 years, Kennedy expanded The Gazette from one edition to 14, which reached one-quarter-of-a-million homes and businesses in Montgomery.

"There's no doubt that The Gazette rode the tide of growth in Montgomery County," said Jack Murphy, an editor hired by Kennedy. "But I think that The Gazette understood growth needed to be properly managed; that it couldn't just be explosive growth, because explosive growth was hard for us to keep up with."

Before the decade was out, The Gazette neared 200,000 circulation and had a $2 million payroll.

The Gazette was typically 150 pages or more, two or three dozen of those pages filled with classified ads. The page growth outpaced contractors' printing capacity. At one point, the editions printed in four different places.

More advertisements meant more room for extremely local coverage. Tapping those economies of scale, the newspaper deployed a fleet of reporters who related the latest from county government, the school system, the courthouse, and even Annapolis.

Keeping the "total marketing" promise to advertisers meant delivering to tens of thousands more homes.

The Gazette's sheer size demanded that Kennedy reorganize. In 1988, he designated a business manager and brought on Murphy as the first executive editor.

Coming from a Rust Belt Ohio years into recession, Montgomery County was "the world turned upside down."

Murphy, who had been at Cleveland's The Plain Dealer newspaper, remembered one of the first Gazette articles he read was over the County Council's debate on taming growth in the Germantown master plan.

"They were arguing about how much to limit the number of jobs," said Murphy, who left The Gazette in 2006 to become executive director of the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association, an industry group. "We never saw stories about how much they should limit the number of jobs in Ohio. They were happy to have every job they could get their hands on."

Montgomery was not long immune from the recession. The Gazette's advertising revenue soon fell off by about half, making growth prospects at the time all the more tenuous.

In 1992, Kennedy sold 80 percent of The Gazette to The Washington Post Company, which afforded the chance to buy the Silver Spring Record and the Burtonsville Free-Press, further expanding The Gazette's community news footprint.

Little more than a year later, Kennedy sold his remaining stake to The Post and tendered his resignation. Kennedy said he and The Post reached terms not to speak poorly of each other, which he said was standard.

"When the recession hit, I decided to take it," Kennedy said, declining to disclose the offer from The Post.

Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly spelled Koko Wittenburg's name.