If you can’t find a feature story at Meadowlark Senior Center, you’re not trying very hard.

Deborah Brogdon, the MSC director, seemingly knows a little about each and every one of the center’s guests, whether they’re there for lunch or an activity.

The latter was the case last Wednesday, when Brogdon opined that “Fred” might make a good story. Heck, she said, he used to work in the garment industry. Bingo — and that’s not the game he was there to play.

Frederick DeLeon, 80, didn’t mind sitting down to talk with a nosy reporter, even though a game of pool awaited him on the other side of the building.

“Yes,” DeLeon said, he had worked in the garment industry, where he began as a shipping clerk, working for a Manhattan firm that had yet to adopt the name Anne Klein. The firm was located on Seventh Avenue, near 36th Street.

As interesting as that job would become — DeLeon traveled to fashion shows at every major city in the U.S., and even abroad — he rubbed elbows with some people well known in American history.

All because he decided he no longer wanted to be a teacher, which he figured out after a couple of years at Oswego (N.Y.) State Teachers College.

You’ve probably heard of Marilyn Monroe. She was on a first name basis with DeLeon, who recalled driving her home in his boss’s Pontiac one day after she’d been at his place of business; she required designer clothes — because ”she was shaped differently,” is how he put it.

Monroe was upset from an earlier argument with her husband, Arthur Miller (DeLeon wishes her marriage to her previous hubby, Joe DiMaggio, had lasted longer; he’s a diehard Yankees fan), and as he drove her to her home on Sutton Place, “She said, ‘Fred, I’m going to get in the bathtub and drown myself.’”

Alarmed, he stopped at a nearby pay phone to call his boss, who told him not to worry, that she often got that upset.

“She was a beautiful woman; people didn’t take her seriously,” DeLeon said, recalling how men would seize every chance they had to bump into or grope Monroe, but spend more time talking to Miller.

“She was bright and funny and beautiful,” he said, doubting that she took her own life that August day in 1962.

DeLeon also got to know movie stars Shelley Winters and Loretta Young, who also shopped at Anne Klein.

DeLeon worked for Ben and Anne Klein for about 10 years and continued in a sales career until he retired in 1992. He and his wife Juanita decided to move to New Mexico in 1997, after 40 years in the business, following their mothers.

“I kept coming out here with my wife and I said, ‘What are we? Nuts?’ We bought a home here in 1983 and moved here in ’97. When I first came here it was Rio Rancho Estates — AMREP did a hell of a selling job.”

DeLeon knows quite a bit about a selling job.

“I got my job from getting on the phone and talking to people,” he said. “I made quite an advance from shipping clerk.”

He visits the Big Apple almost annually. His roots are there: He was born in Harlem and made some pocket change parking cars for baseball fans going to New York Giants games at the Polo Grounds. Later, he lived three blocks from Ebbetts Field. He remembers spending 50 cents for a seat in the Yankee Stadium bleachers, “where the real fans are.”

He also played some semi-pro basketball against Wilt Chamberlain and worked for Marques Haynes, of Harlem Globetrotters fame. DeLeon was more of a personal assistant to Haynes, who had his own business, and remembers being asked for his autograph on the court. He chuckles now, thinking about kids back then asking, “Who the hell is that?” after deciphering his signature.

In another brush with history, DeLeon was in Washington, D.C., when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech. It was barely a year after Monroe’s demise on the other side of the country.

“I was there. I walked away — I didn’t know how long it was going to be,” he said.

DeLeon said “New York City gets a bad rap,” and he can’t understand that.

“It’s a collection of people from all over the world. People come there to make a fortune or get recognized, whatever, then they go home.”

DeLeon doesn’t care if he’s not recognized when he ambles into the Meadowlark Senior Center.

“I come over here and shoot pool and play cards,” he said.