I am ancient enough to remember when The Day's library took up a lot of real estate in the newsroom — aisles of metal filing cabinets filled with decades' worth of clippings of individual newspaper stories, organized in yellow envelopes by subject matter and date.  

Also in the library kingdom was an even older reference system with index cards, once dutifully filled out line by line, by typewriter, pointing toward the date, page and column placement of every single story, from car accidents and bridge club luncheons to obituaries, published by The Day through the early 20th Century.

A high-tech feature of the old library was a microfilm reader that could zoom you past the more recent history in the clip files back to The Day's earliest stories.

When I arrived as a young reporter, Clare Peckham was The Day's librarian, gatekeeper to the newspaper's vast archives, chronicler of the news of the day as it slipped inexorably into the past, edition by edition, story by story.

You couldn't Google things from your phone, then.

She presided over her newsroom realm, search engine of the times, wearing a pair of cotton gloves to keep the ink off her hands, a giant pair of scissors to dissect each day's paper into a series of clippings, and a typewriter to label the envelopes where each story would end up.

Peckham, who retired in 1994 at age 65, died at home in Stonington last week, the end of an era for me.

I will miss her as a friend, a no-nonsense, unsentimental, sharp-witted and keen observer of the world who loved and devoured newspapers for the stories they tell. She was kind and generous and devoted to things and people she loved.

I also treasure memories of her newsroom library as the dinosaur it has become, from an era of tactile news, when keeping up with the world around you often meant, quite literally, getting your hands dirty with smudged ink.

Peckham kept pace with the unfolding digital world and had an email account.

But the newspapers she continued to read every day landed on her front doorstep, not on her iPad.

Almost every reporter will tell you that it is hard to write a breaking news story without knowing what came before. Sometimes, the background and trajectory of a new story is easy, because you read or even wrote the ones that came before.

But if it is your first venture into a topic, learning the historical arc of the story is step one of reporting.

This all occurs in today's newsrooms with desktop searches. In the old newsroom of The Day, reporting legwork usually began at Peckham's desk.

I think Peckham became mentor to and friends with so many young reporters at The Day over the years because she was so good at what she did. Her journalism students at The Day ended up in some of the best newsrooms in America — in New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago. She stayed in touch with many of them as their careers blossomed.

She would often wave her scissors down one of the aisles of filing cabinets, citing the quirky codes to the drawers of story envelopes. For a breaking story about a submarine fire, for instance, you might be directed to U.S. Navy: Submarines: Accidents. Some folders were thin, some fat with clippings.

Sometimes, a reporter working on developing political stories or scandals would find one of the yellow clip files on their desk, a not-so-subtle tip to an important turn somewhere in the history of the story.

I think I learned as much from Peckham the librarian as almost any news editor. Many veterans of this newsroom will tell you the same thing.

I am most encouraged to understand that the tools of Peckham's trade largely are gone — few young reporters today venture into the library where her old files are stored — but her spirit is alive and well.

Her appreciation of good journalism, a story well told, accurate, informative, a notch in a continuum of history, lives on. There is just less paper.

If I could file her obituary today, I might try this on the yellow envelope: The Day: Newsroom: Greats.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct