Phyllis Karp displays her Reds collection at her Main Auction Gallery on Fourth Street. (Steven M. Herppich photo) | ZOOM |

        Opening Day. A good day to get it down from the shelf.

        If you are a baseball fan, you know what it is. And where it is. On a shelf. In a closet. Proudly displayed on the mantelpiece.

        It might be a baseball, yellowed with age. Forty-some years ago, you hung over the railing outside the Redlegs clubhouse and Ted Kluszewski, with biceps as big as your waist, scribbled his name on it and hoisted it up to you, saying “Here ya go, kiddo.” Kiddo? He called me Kiddo. I must be Klu's best friend!

        Or it might be a black-and-white photograph you dig out of a shoebox. From the day you walked out on the grass at Crosley Field, a Brownie camera around your neck, taking pictures of your heroes on Photo Day. There he is, Frank Robinson, looking slightly bored, with a For-crying-out-loud, kid-just-take-the-picture look on his face. But it's Robby, and you were there. You took the picture.

        Baseball, which returns today after its annual hibernation, is like that. The people who love it, who treat it like a religion, keep things that remind them of it. Sacred objects. Memorabilia. Talismans, big and small, meant to keep the memories alive.

        There are people who make a trade out of the sacred objects, like medieval peddlers who wandered the countryside selling saints' bones and pieces of the True Cross.It is business, big business.

        But even those people have a special place in their hearts for some particular item, some personal reminder of baseball past that they would never part with, no matter what the price.

        You do, too, probably. A piece of baseball that you will keep forever. If your house was on fire, once the spouse and kids were safe and Fido cleared from the scene, you'd charge headlong into the smoke to bring it out in one piece.

        Or maybe it's something you once had and lost. Something your mother threw away when you went off to college, thinking you were too grown up for baseball things.

        Mom had it all wrong. Baseball fans never grow up.

        Not even when the Gregorian calendar says you're 82 years old, as it does for Phyllis Karp.

        When Mrs. Karp looks at the display of Reds memorabilia she lays out in the windows of her Main Auction Galleries on Main Street each year before Opening Day, she's 10 years old again, riding the Fairmount trolley with her sister to see a ball game at Redland Field.

Favorite memories
        Of the thousands of pieces of memorabilia she has collected over the past 72 years, that picture of the Fairmount trolley that ran by the ballpark at Findlay and Western is her favorite.

        One day last week, she was inside the gallery showing a visitor some of her other favorites — her own ticket stubs from the 1961 World Series, a ticket from a 1916 Reds game, a “Ladies Day” program from Crosley Field — when she spotted a little boy in a Ken Griffey Jr. jersey on the sidewalk outside, staring in at her collection.

        It was 8-year-old Michael Morris of Blue Ash, and he was there on his day off from school with his mother, Lori, and his two little sisters.

        “You like my collection?” Mrs. Karp asked, as the boy nodded, a big smile on his face.

        His mother said he is building a model of old Crosley Field as a school project. Michael, Mrs. Morris said, “just loves baseball.”

        “Crosley? You came to the right place... I can tell you all about Crosley,” Mrs. Karp said, and that she did — telling the boy about the sights, the sounds, the smells of a ballpark torn down about 20 years before he was born.

        Woodrow Wilson was president when Mrs. Karp was born. Michael caught the tail end of George Bush in the White House. But as the two of them talked baseball on a sidewalk on Fourth Street on a sunny spring day it was as if they were separated at birth.

        Like Mrs. Karp, Michael has his keepsakes, too.

        “My favorite thing I have is my Sean Casey ball,” he said proudly. “He signed it for me. It's the best.”

Starting young
        Michael doesn't know it, but he has a baseball soul mate across the river in Newport — 7-year-old Kas Fausz, a first-grader who lives, eats and breathes for Reds shortstop Pokey Reese.

        Kas and his dad go to baseball card shows and Redsfest and stand in line for Pokey autographs, because the boy can not get enough of his favorite player.

        “I've always liked him,” Kaz said. “I liked him before he was good.”

        Kaz and Michael, you can bet on it, will hang on to their baseball memories — those autographed balls and baseball cards — for a lifetime, and they may well wind up in the hands of their grandchildren.

        Some, though, aren't as lucky. Some people's sacred objects are gone for good.

        But sometimes, how they became lost makes for a good family story.

        Rae Lynn Beck of Lebanon has one such story. Her great-grandfather, Louis Gellenbeck, was a Cincinnati police officer. On June 21, 1921, he happened to be stationed on the corner outside the left field wall of Redland Field when Reds' outfielder Pat Duncan hit the first home run to go completely out of the park.

        Duncan's blast hit Officer Gellenbeck on the leg. He picked the ball up and later got it autographed by Duncan.

        “It was his most prized possession,” Mrs. Beck said. “He wrapped it in a silk American flag and put it in a box. The only other thing in the box was a perfumed handkerchief, and nobody ever had the nerve to ask him what that was about.

        “He'd pull (the ball) out of the box and show it around at family occasions and tell everybody all about it,” she said. “He loved that ball.”

        When the police officer died in the late 1930s, he passed it on to his son, Eddie Gellenbeck, who kept it at his house in Lower Price Hill.

        Then, Mrs. Beck said, one day in the late 1940s, two of her cousins were at her Uncle Eddie's house and “they decided they needed a ball to play with. So they grabbed the Pat Duncan ball and took it to a vacant lot on State Street and batted it around. Of course, they lost it.”

        The boys got in some trouble for taking the precious ball, she said, and still get kidded about it.

        “The ball's gone,” she said, “but it's still part of the family lore.”

Not forgotten
        Chris Nelms knows, too, what it's like to have treasures lost. Mr. Nelms was a player in the Reds farm system in the 1970s and now runs a baseball program for inner-city youth.

        But, in the 1960s, he was one of the West End kids who hung around Crosley Field, sneaking in the ballpark sometimes, getting to know the players.

        “Man, I had great stuff,” Mr. Nelms recalled. “A Willie Mays home run ball, his 550th, I think. I caught it. Cracked bats from all the stars. Mays, Cepeda, Stargell.

        “The day Roberto Clemente played his last game at Crosley, he walked by me and flipped me his wrist band,” Mr. Nelms said. “He knew me, used to call me "L'il Man.'

        “But all that stuff's gone now. We'd take those bats and put nails in them and play with them. We didn't know there was any value to them,” Mr. Nelms said.

        “The stuff's all gone,” he said, “but I'll always have the memories.”

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