Greason, 98, is one of baseball’s “forgotten heroes,” according to the Center for Negro League Baseball Research. Seventy-five years ago, he shut down the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro American League’s championship series and then earned the Black Barons’ only win in the final Negro World Series, which the Black Barons lost to the Homestead Grays.

Jeffrey Mejia, 20, is Berkeley’s starting point guard and a co-captain, who as a teenager lived in a Bronx homeless shelter for about a year with his mother and sister. “Feeling like I didn’t have a home — I was really ashamed and didn’t want to tell anybody,” he said.

Once a month, Kundla rides by bus with fellow residents to a church downtown for bingo and lunch organized by the League of Catholic Women…Kundla keeps his own winnings, green notes called Bingo Bucks, in a billfold in the cupboard under his TV, which he redeems every Friday for Hershey bars.

John Risher drove north on Route 29, a briefcase resting in the car’s back seat. Through sunglasses, Risher, who is 106 years old, surveyed the highway, which sliced between trees of yellow, orange and red — and whose branches hung over the road, forming a tunnel of autumn colors.

During baseball season, Ardizoia sits by the bay window, on the second floor overlooking a quiet street, and watches the Giants play. He keeps a pocket schedule within reach, and crosses off dates to indicate another game gone by. But when there is nothing good on TV or when friends are not around, he gets lonely.

A bony, 73-year-old Dominican pitcher stood atop a mound at the northern edge of Manhattan, tossing curveballs and sliders to the rhythm of salsa music. In the batter’s box, a portly man with a white goatee, gnawing on a wad of tobacco, awaited the pitcher’s long, exaggerated delivery. As the innings wore on, no one seemed discouraged that the fastballs lacked giddyap, that the wooden bats were devoid of pop or that the base runners, whose bellies protruded from their red-and-blue uniforms, were slow and unsteady afoot

At the dead end of a private, wooded road about 20 miles north of Chicago sits a two-story house belonging to Gene Melchiorre, a short, pigeon-toed grandfather of 15 known by his many friends as Squeaky.

Raised within the Ashanti tribe, Mr. Addo was always taught that improving the lives of one’s elders is of the highest virtue. “They remind me of my grandmothers and aunties back home,” he said.

Late one recent night on Bible Street in Cos Cob, Conn., in the carpeted basement apartment of a gray bungalow, Mike Sandlock, 97, had a dream that he was in Yankee Stadium.