There is a signed baseball displayed in a curio case with oak framing and glass windows.

It sits behind a name plate, oak, too, with the name Russell D. Mellette engraved with black lettering on gold plating. There are also statues of dachshunds in the case.

Russell doesn't know whose signature is on the ball.

It looks like it starts with an "S." And Russell, a guy whose friends in his senior living quarters call him the human Google, does not know who signed the ball.

But his late wife, Grace, did. She was an Atlanta Braves fan, he said, so perhaps the signature belongs to Steve Avery or Sid Bream. Regardless, the ball was Grace's, so there it will sit, in her husband's curio case. The curio case, too, was Grace's.

Roughly two years widowed, 86-year-old Russell describes his late wife as fiercely independent. In the pictures that line his walls, Grace's cheekbones sit high on her face, leading one to glance at her glance. Her poignant stare, a stare that her husband loves in present tense. In the pictures around his residence at the Lexington County senior living facility, in her baseball kept secure in her curio case and in Russell's stories, Grace is kept in the present tense.

There's a framed picture of her where she's smiling extra big. She's posing with the University of South Carolina's first Black basketball player, L. Casey Manning Sr.

Russell's room is plastered in stuff like this. Paper versions of personal loves and published history. These photographs, newspaper snippets and posters serve two worlds for him. His personal and his professional.

Russell was a journalist whose career started sometime in the '50s. A South Carolina journalist with most of his bylines having appeared in The State newspaper, the Clarendon County-born Baptist was also a lobbyist for mental health and organ donation.

Not more than 5 feet tall and perhaps a couple of inches, Russell is a talker. A smiler. A storyteller.

And his stories are dynamic in that they shift from personal experience to public knowledge quickly. Russell speaks of state legislation and old friends in the same sentence, for example.

He shows how the line between personal and professional blurs when you're a journalist. The storyteller's story is told in their storytelling.

Stories of economic development, elections, boards, commissions, public safety and more are personal to Russell.

He grew up on a tobacco farm. And later published stories on tobacco farms.

He covered the S.C. Legislature for years after his own brother, Herbert Mellette Jr., of Turbeville, served on it. And the Honorable Miller H. Mellette, who represented Clarendon County in the House of Representatives for more than two decades, was Russell's father.

He exemplifies that journalists seldom only cover stories they lack personal ties to.

Politics reporters profile candidates listed on their own ballots.

Crime reporters recognize names in police blotters.

Education reporters have kids in the classroom.

War reporters dodge weapon fire, too.

Food reporters eat.

Today, Russell writes and welcomes visitors at any time at his Lexington County home. He says his mailing list is roughly 30, but a front desk representative where he lives says that when Russell goes to the mailbox, he fills it with what looks like more than 30 letters.

He writes to some journalists still in the business. That's how I met Russell.

In my first days as editor of the Lexington County Chronicle, I received my first of many, many letters from Russell.

Like the decorations around his home, Russell's letters are lathered in Mellette family moments, both good ones and bad, adjacent to South Carolina history.

In one he writes of his son's suicide. Then is quick to talk about his time lobbying for mental health.

Always quick to remember names, dates and small details of everyone he meets, Russell, seemingly out of character, doesn't know who signed Grace's baseball he keeps behind glass to this day.

What matters about the ball to him is that it was hers. It is hers, he says.

This story was also published in The Sumter Item, sister paper to the Chronicle.