With a promise to bring readers “the news and values around the neighborhood” in each edition, The Reporter hit the streets of Dorchester for the first time forty years ago this week — Sept. 1983. In a special 40-page supplement inside this week’s edition, we look back at the origins of The Reporter and its evolution through the decades where:

• Bill Forry, who was 10 when his parents, Ed and Mary, launched The Reporter from their Lower Mills home, recalls the earliest days of the family-run enterprise, which is now one of the few of its kind left in the region.

• Bill Walczak recalls a changing Dorchester in 1983.

• Beginning in the early 1990s, kids in and around the Adams Village section of Dorchester have carried on the tradition of delivering The Reporter by hand to their neighbors each week.

• Cold off the press: Reporter-branded can marks the milestone.

• Chris Lovett chronicles the years before The Reporter, when the Forrys published annual “yearbooks” that celebrated this neighborhood and its people.

• The late, great Boston Globe journalist Jack Thomas’s classic Reporter story, first published in 2008, is retold.