Do you recall the time Charlie Hustle came to West Chester to play ball for charity?
At age 86, Bob McGuire, former director of public works and once amateur softball player, has countless memories from his 40-year career in public service – most of them home runs, maybe a few swings-and-misses – but one he’ll surely never forget is the time he faced the Hit King himself in the late 1970s.
“In the summertime [the Fire Department] had a softball team, and we played Mason and some of the other teams around,” Bob said. “One fall, after the baseball season was over, WLW had a group of celebrities and baseball players fundraising for the Ruth Lyons Christmas program. We played the WLW Good Guys on the field up here at St. John’s and I had the honors of pitching to Pete Rose.”
Bob said he was among the first employees hired to work for the Township in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He initially started at the hourly wage of $1.25, working his way up from jobs like volunteer firefighter and gravedigger at Brookside Cemetery, until eventually taking the top spot as head superintendent of the Community Services Department. Bob retired from West Chester Township in 2000.
The charity softball game happened on Thursday, Oct. 4, 1979 – less than one week after Pete Rose and his Philadelphia Phillies played their final MLB regular season game of that year. At the time he visited our humble town of approximately 23,000 residents, Rose was arguably one of the biggest sports celebrities in the world.
Philadelphia had just signed Cincinnati’s native son away from the Queen City, inking him to a four-year, $3.2 million contract before the start of the 1979 season and making Rose, for a time, the highest paid professional athlete in America. The summer prior, while playing for the hometown Reds, Rose tied the single-season National League hitting streak at 44 games – a record that still stands today.
And on the day Bob McGuire took the mound, with our firefighters behind him, to face the eventual all-time hits leader, Rose stepped into the batter’s box having just recorded a .331 batting average with 208 hits – third and fourth best, respectively, among all professional hitters – in 163 games against the greatest ballplayers on the planet.
Bob recounted his story of pitching to Pete Rose, and many more memories, in a 2023 interview for West Chester TV’s Community Storytellers series. The oral history archive celebrates our community’s 200th birthday bicentennial anniversary with interviews featuring some of our founding families and pivotal leaders.
Are you a long-time West Chester resident or stakeholder with stories to tell? Complete our Community Storytellers web form and share with us! Interviews with more than two dozen community members are available to watch on WCTV right now.
Continue reading for an excerpt from the Hamilton Journal-News/Pulse Journal recapping the 1979 charity softball game in West Chester, then known as Union Township.
LOCAL PROS PLAY ROSE
By Becky Chambers, staff writer
Some observations from last Thursday’s benefit softball game between the Union Township Fire Department and the WUBE All-Stars…
Pete Rose really did show up, incredible as it may seem that a man making $900,000 a year would play softball in the mud for 600 fans.
I sat within two feet of him for three innings and couldn’t bring myself to say even so much as “Hi, how ya doing?”
Pete’s brother David is a regular on the All-Star team which is traveling the area to raise funds for the Ruth Lyons Christmas fund.
David looks less like his famous brother than the flashy guy I saw holding court at the bar of the Mike Fink restaurant one night.
He only wished he was Pete’s brother.
Even the guy standing near Union Township Fire Chief Jim Detherage on the sidelines looked more like Pete than that guy.
Detherage, by the way, didn’t play.
“They’re doing bad enough without me,” he confided.
Bob McGuire got the honor of pitching to the man who’s collected more than 3,000 hits in his lifetime – and Rose not surprisingly got one or two off McGuire too.
Doug Morath robbed him of one hit – a long flyball to left field.
McGuire was a logical candidate to send to the pitcher’s mound. After all, as the township’s road superintendent, he’s faced enough calls about snowy roads in mid-winter to have no fear of a man like Rose.
The All-Stars, someone claims, appealed for mercy before the game began.
Union Township’s team obliged, letting their more famous counterparts carry a 24 run lead into the final inning.
“We’ve put out bigger fires than that,” the undaunted firefighters noted as they came to bat for the final time.
Their generosity extended through the final inning as they let the All-Stars salvage a 24-2 or 25-4 victory. (no one’s quite sure which.)
Both the All-Stars and the firemen were available for autographs after the game.