The night West Philly’s Arlington Henderson faced the legendary pitcher Satchel Paige

The call came so late in the day that Arlington Henderson didn’t have time to tell his parents. Satchel Paige would be throwing three innings for a barnstorming team that night at Connie Mack Stadium, and the Philadelphia Stars wanted Henderson behind the plate.

By then, Mother’s Day 1955, Henderson was in his prime — 27 years old, with 180 pounds packed onto his 5-foot-8 frame, powerful enough to hit in the heart of the order for Philadelphia’s premier Black baseball team. On paper, Leroy “Satchel” Paige was more than 20 years his senior, a Negro Leagues legend who two years before had been let go from the St. Louis Browns. He’d pitch again in the majors at age 59, a record to this day.

As Henderson, now 96, recalls that exhibition game, Paige was full of bluster as he stepped up to the plate to hit against the Stars’ fastballer Charlie Drummond.

“What are you gonna do, big catcher, when I burn this rascal?” Paige asked with a smile.

Henderson replied, “You couldn’t hit the ball laying down,” and, as promised, the next pitch came in high and tight. But the ageless Paige managed to push the ball down the third base line, a textbook bunt that moved the runners along.

“He could play,” Henderson said.

And so could brothers Arlington “Ollie” Henderson and Lou “Hindu” Henderson, 88. They sat one day two weeks ago in Ollie’s rowhouse in West Philadelphia, and shared the sorts of stories one is likely to hear next month in a Birmingham, Ala., hotel lobby as Major League Baseball honors the Black men who played professional baseball in the era of Jim Crow.

The majors have invited 150 former players of the Negro Leagues to watch the San Francisco Giants play the St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field, the oldest professional ballpark in baseball and the former home of the Birmingham Black Barons. Former Phillies slugger Ryan Howard hand-delivered eight of the invitations. A dozen ballplayers have died since the notices went out in February, said Layton Revel, founder of the Center for Negro League Baseball Research. The city of Birmingham is renovating the 1910 site for the June 20 event, “A Tribute to the Negro Leagues.”

The Hendersons will be there. Reluctantly, says Arlington.

“What’s it gonna be like?” he asked. ”My son is tying my legs. I am going to go. But I don’t want to go.”

He had an opportunity to play down South in the late 1940s when the New York Giants organization wanted him to join their minor-league team in the South Atlantic League — or Sally League, as it was called. Someone said that “they have too many of them there,” in his still-bitter memory.

“But that wasn’t quite the term they used,” his son Kevin added. So instead, Henderson went to Canada and played on teams from Quebec to Saskatchewan.

Lou Henderson had his own brush with greatness.

It was 1958, and his team — a semipro version of the Philadelphia Stars who were no longer in the Negro Leagues — had just finished playing a night game in Bismarck, N.D., when a young man pulled up next to the team bus, carrying a guitar.

“I caught you just in time,” the man said, clambering aboard, and singing a song. The music surprised Henderson. “I said ‘This is a Black country singer. He doesn’t sound bad.’”

It was years later when Henderson realized that baritone was Charley Pride, then a member of the Memphis Red Sox, who not a decade later would make his debut at the Grand Ole Opry.

Lou Henderson arrived at his brother’s Larchwood Avenue rowhouse with a manila envelope full of press clippings, promotional photos, and notes of dates and names that he didn’t want to forget. Tall and dressed all in black, the retired post office supervisor towered over his older brother, who wore a white golfer’s jacket and tweed cap. Arlington, a retired welder and widower like Lou, says his job now is golf, played three times a week. Longevity runs in the Hendersons. Their mother, Anna, lived until 114 — the oldest Philadelphian, according to a Daily News obituary, and then the sixth-oldest person on the planet.

Most of Arlington’s mementos have been long misplaced — two letters of interest from the New York Giants, Philadelphia Tribune clippings, a story in the Montreal Gazette about his two-run homer in a 1952 playoff game in the Laurentide League, a story that botched his first name (the scribe called him Mike).

He cherishes a laminated poster from that year, when he played on the Lachute Tigers, and he offered a story for every face:

“Walter Hardy, he played in the Negro Leagues … Pat Scantlebury, he played in the majors for Cincinnati. … And that guy,” he said, pointing to himself. “He never went anywhere.”

There’s no account to be found in the Philadelphia papers of the Mother’s Day game that Arlington remembers playing, not even in Malcolm Poindexter Jr.’s column that ran in the Philadelphia Tribune, which regularly mentioned Paige and sometimes chronicled Henderson.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, say a pair of Paige experts.

Larry Tye, author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, said records of Black baseball in that era are notoriously incomplete, and coverage in the press was spotty.

“Yes, he pitched for three innings in game after game in the latter part of his career,” Tye said. ”That was partly because, as an older dad, he needed the dough to feed his six young kids. It was because that was the way he kept his aging arm in shape — by exercising it nightly, but never to the point of strain.

“And it’s because fans and owners asked, knowing watching Satchel pitch was something they’d tell their kids and grandkids about, since nobody ever would repeat what he’d done — entering the majors at 42, and helping pitch the Indians to a World Series, then setting a record that’ll never be broken by pitching his last three innings for the Kansas City A’s against the Red Sox at the unthinkable age of 59.”

Mark Armour, a baseball historian and board president of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, is building a record of every game Paige played, but he has not yet gotten to 1955. “I don’t think the fact there isn’t documentation doesn’t mean it’s not true,” he said. “The facts that we know are true is that Arlington told you this story. That’s your truth.”

Arlington Henderson got up twice that game against the crafty old pitcher famed for being so certain he’d strike out the side that he’d bring his outfielders in.

First time at bat, Henderson grounded out.

He’d get one more shot.

In the third inning, Henderson connected, sending the ball deeper before it disappeared into an outfielder’s glove.

“It was almost nothing,” he said of that encounter nearly 70 years ago. “I didn’t get his picture or an autograph. I would liked to have hit a homer.”

But before he knew it, Paige was gone, flying somewhere else they were paying him to feed his family and draw a crowd.