Chicken On The Hill

Jim Bibby... Jim Bibby... when we heard that former baseball All-Star pitcher Jim Bibby died at 65, there something about his name that rang a bell. Then we saw he started for the Pittsburgh Pirates in Game 7 of the 1979 World Series, and then we remembered that team under Pops Willie Stargell, and how it was the series in which the Pirates used that disco anthem We Are Family as their theme song long before it was appropriated officially by lesbians (a gay anthem that took the exact opposite cultural trajectory of The Village People's YMCA, an obvious gay anthem that over the years has somehow become another Take Me Out To The Ballgame).


And then we remembered the fried chicken story. Pirate radio announcer Bob Prince would call a Willie Stargell home run with the phrase "Chicken on the Hill," a reference to Stargell's ownership of a chicken restaurant in Pittsburgh's Hill District. For a time, whenever he homered, Stargell's restaurant would give away free chicken to all patrons present in the restaurant at the time of the home run. What ended up happening was that all the folks from the neighborhood would wait in the parking lot, listening to the games on the car radios, only to run inside and crowd the joint to the rafters every time Pops came to bat. That promotion didn't last long.