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GREENSBORO — We all need to hear our share of stories. Red Russell, along with Jeff and Laurie Clark, gifted me with a few.

Back in February 2007, the Clarks — husband and wife, natives of Louisiana — told me how they turned their backyard storage shed into a juke joint that testified, James Brown loud, to the place they loved: New Orleans.

Then, a few weeks ago, Red Russell — retired lawyer, Chicago native, longtime baseball fan — told me how, at age 13, he met two baseball legends: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. And Red had a picture as proof.

Red could tell it. He’d talk in that hoarse rasp of a voice, lean forward in his favorite chair and tell about the spring day so long ago when he mailed in 100 baseball-card gum wrappers and met Gehrig, his “grand guy.”

The Clarks could tell it, too. In their backyard, behind their big Wild Magnolia Café sign, they can point to any picture, any shirt, any sign in their tiny juke joint and spin a story that feels so funny, personal and real.

Well, folks, it’s time to say goodbye.

The Clarks, along with their two children, Peyton and Emma, are moving this weekend to New Orleans, where they will restart their lives with new jobs, a new school and a new outlook on the city they hold in their heart.

They left New Orleans seven years ago before Hurricane Katrina. They’re going back to a city that feels oh, so different, after the big storm.

Laurie, the juke-joint architect, admits she’s almost afraid of what she’ll find. And she’s heard the question more than once.

“Why y’all coming back?’’

First, it’s practical. Jeff got offered his old sales job with his old security company in New Orleans. And Laurie, an attorney, landed a job with a law firm in New Orleans, and will return to private practice to work for a boss nicknamed “The Roach.”

But there’s something else, too. Everything fell into place.

The Clarks sold their house in Greensboro’s Kirkwood neighborhood in three weeks, and the new owners want to keep the Wild Magnolia Café sign, the old neon-lit totem of The Corner, the party intersection of Walker and Elam. The Clarks got the sign from a good friend.

But did the juke joint help? Maybe.

For good luck, the Clarks did put inside the juke joint a tiny plastic statue of St. Joseph, the patron saint of real estate. It’ll become another good story for the Clarks.

But their backyard juke joint? It’s gone.

Laurie wanted to haul it on a trailer. But Jeff said no. So, they’ll tuck it into boxes, take it with them and recreate it in a city that writer James Lee Burke calls “a song in your heart that never dies.”

The Clarks will begin again. But Red can’t. He was 87. He had high blood pressure, diabetes and a pacemaker to help his heart. He died Saturday at Moses Cone Hospital. And I hate it.

After Red told me his story, his health went south, and he spent his final days in the Palliative Care Unit at Moses Cone Hospital in room 4525.

He taped my column — his story — to a closet door in his room. He couldn’t talk. But Pat, his wife of 50 years, did. And she told the story to whoever asked about Red’s big day in May 1934 in Chicago’s Comiskey Park.

Red’s family and friends will bury him Saturday at Guilford Memorial Park. A bagpiper will play Red’s favorite song, “Danny Boy,” and you can bet friends and family will talk about Red’s day with Gehrig. And for good reason.

Red kept a laminated photo of him and Gehrig in his billfold so he could tell any interested baseball fan his big story about his big day.

That includes me. When I went back to videotape him, he struggled. He fought to breathe. Yet he wanted to tell his story one more time.

It seemed he had to hold on. His wife said so. A friend of his did, too.

“You bet your (expletive) he did,” Dave Colin told me Wednesday. “It was a big moment, man. I would remember that moment forever.’’

Red did. And now, so will we.

The power of a juke joint. The power of baseball. The power of story.

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