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GREENSBORO - Red keeps the small, laminated black-and-white photo in his billfold.

When he finds a sports fan - and that could be anywhere - he'll pull out his photo and recreate a time when baseball seemed more innocent and larger than life.

It was May 1934, inside Chicago's Comiskey Park. Red mailed in 100 baseball-card gum wrappers that cost a penny apiece and scored the chance to meet Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees' legendary first baseman.

Red was 13, a seventh-grader at Resurrection Grammar School. Gehrig was 31, into the spring of his 17-year career and a promising season when he belted 49 home runs, brought in 165 RBIs and hit .363.

Sister Monica gave Red the green-light to go. So, Red missed school, put on his Sunday best - brown suit, brown knickers, brown socks, white shirt - and took the 45-minute, 3-cent train ride toward 35th Street.

Red wanted a photo. He found a memory.

He's rolled it out for decades, telling it in exacting detail, complete with the inflections of gruff accents and boyhood lingo from long ago. And yes, Red - Bob Russell, retired lawyer, longtime baseball fan - tells the story well.

Babe Ruth and all.

"So, Johnny Murphy - he's a relief pitcher for the Yankees - spots me. He's an Irish fella, I look Irish myself with my red hair, and he walks toward me, extends his arm and says, 'Hey, Red, would you like to meet the Babe?'

"Well, I'm just smiling. I had a baseball that I got for 100 gum wrappers, and Murphy takes me into the dugout. Babe's back is to us, Johnny Murphy taps him on the shoulder and says, 'Babe, I'd like for you to meet Red Russell.'

"Babe turned around and said, 'Hi-ya, Red!' He autographed the ball right between the seams. I had a ball full of autographs. Everyone in the dugout signed it, and when Murphy took me back to my seat, I was just so thrilled.

"I was sitting in the first row of box seats, on the first base side, with eight of us kids. They called us up one by one to get our picture taken with Lou Gehrig.

"It was only five minutes. But he was so warm and generous and friendly and real. He urged me to go to college. He had gone to college. Went to Columbia. That's why they called him 'Columbia Lou.' He told me, 'You've got a long way to go, but you should go to college.'

"I can't believe he died seven years after that picture was taken. Look at that muscular body. God, he was the picture of health. But oh, gee, what a phenomenal feeling. He was a first-class gentleman, a grand guy."

The ball full of autographs didn't make it through a spring.

Red lived on Chicago's west side, five minutes from a park. And that ball, with the Babe's signature between the seams, got used in a pickup game with Red and his friends.

And as Red says, the autographs were "knocked off to smithereens."

"Oh, it just freaks my heart," Red says today.

Red is now 87. He gets around on a walker, takes eight pills a day and talks in a hoarse rasp. He has high blood pressure and diabetes, and after doctors put in a pacemaker, Red underwent a quadruple heart bypass eight years ago to keep him alive.

On Monday afternoon, Red was taken to Moses Cone Hospital by ambulance for observation, according to Pat Russell, his wife of 50 years.

He had a rough weekend. Yet, despite his health difficulties, he talked once again about his five minutes with the "grand guy."

"I just love that picture,'' Red said.

You wonder where baseball has gone with its revolving-door accusations of steroids.

But eyeball Red's picture, even for a few seconds. You see a boy in his sharp knickers gripping a baseball and grinning big beside a dimple-faced man in the scratchy wool uniform of New York.

That's where baseball's been. And that was a wonderful place.

Just ask Red. He'll tell you.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com