Mary Meier; found answers to Ask the Globe questions

“In the days before computers, Mary was a human search engine,’’ said Tom Long of Hudson, N.H., a former Globe reporter and editor who once worked with her on the popular daily and Sunday column. “Whether it was tracking down a lost Social Security check or a delayed unemployment payment, she was always on the case. And her knowledge of trivia was boundless. She was an encyclopedia for people who couldn’t afford one.’’

The column was launched in 1966 in the Boston Evening Globe “devoted to getting answers, solving problems, and cutting red tape’’ in answer to the hundreds of queries readers left overnight on a recording machine. The column was discontinued in 1996 because of budgetary constraints.

Mrs. Meier, a published poet who retired from the Globe in 2001 after 40 years that included general assignment reporting and feature writing, died Sunday at Memorial Hospital in North Conway, N.H., of cancer and pneumonia. She was 75 and lived in Madison, N.H.

Her husband, Sepp, said she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004, and had a lumpectomy. “Mary said she would fight it tooth and nail, and she did,’’ he said.

For two years, she seemed to be winning, leading an active life, following “her two passions, newspapering and reading,’’ he said.

Even after her cancer returned and metastasized, she kept busy, said a daughter, Jessie Purdie of Stoughton. She was working her part-time job at the circulation desk of Madison Library the week before her death.

“Mary was just brilliant,’’ said assistant librarian Leonora Southwick. “She never complained about her health. She was not going to go down easy.’’

In 2007, the library put on a play Mrs. Meier wrote, titled, “Our Town, Madison,’’ based on a script her mother had written.

Mrs. Meier also kept up her newspaper skills, writing real estate articles for the Conway (N.H.) Daily Sun, and one of her works is in the 2010 Poets Guide to New Hampshire.

Her lyrical verse revealed the soul of a poet and her inner feelings: “Across the ocean of my life/There blows a wind/To skirt the shore./This womb is old/From me no more/Will spring/New limbs, new life./The loves are cold/That warmed my blood./And yet this wind/Brings other dreams -/New ships embarking -/I alight.’’

Mrs. Meier would write poetry whenever the spirit moved her, on paper napkins or envelopes, her husband said. One of her favorite places to write was at the Metropolitan Coffeehouse in North Conway. In recent years, he said, she would drive the 12 miles to the “Mets,’’ have her cappuccino, and write poetry.

Jake Luikens, a barista at the coffeehouse, said she had come in “once or twice a week for about three years and staying for an hour,’’ sipping cappuccino at a table by a window. “No one knew she was writing,’’ he said.

“Mary was private about her writing,’’ her husband said. “She wouldn’t even show it to me until it was finished.’’

For their 50th wedding anniversary observance in 2008, Mrs. Meier gave books of her poetry to guests.

She was born Mary Henry in New York City and spent her elementary school years in Connecticut. Her family moved to Japan during the American occupation after World War II because her father was a civilian financial adviser to the occupation forces. She attended high school in Tokyo, then graduated from Smith College with a degree in government in 1955. She spent part of her junior year at Smith in Paris.

She then enrolled in the London School of Economics, and in the summer of 1955 went to the Quaker camp in the Netherlands to help victims of massive flooding. There, she met Sepp, a German citizen, who invited her to a ski trip there at Christmas. She left the London School of Economics and took an office job with Radio Free Europe in Munich for three years.

The couple married in Munich in 1958 and moved to Boston after Sepp was accepted at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After a job in public relations, Mrs. Meier worked in the women’s department of the old Boston Record-American for three years. She started at the Globe in 1961.

Soon after she left the Globe, the couple moved permanently to the Madison home where Mrs. Meier’s parents had lived. Mrs. Meier became involved in civic affairs and was a member of the town’s Planning Board. Her colleagues said she knew all the right questions to ask.

In addition to her husband and daughter, Mrs. Meier leaves a son, Matthew of Yarmouth, Maine; another daughter, Francesca Priestman of Madison, N.H., and 10 grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. today in the Madison Church.