A newsmaker you should know: Bob Prince's 'Gal Sal' keeps Pirates alumni in the game
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Sally O'Leary
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For a girl who came of age in a small town loving baseball, Sally O'Leary grew up to have the perfect job -- a public relations assistant for the Pirates.
Ms. O'Leary loves the Pirates so much that, although she is retired from her daily job with the club, she really isn't retired.
At 77, Ms. O'Leary from New Sewickley still serves as the alumni liaison for the Pirates. One of her main duties is to organize and write the Alumni Newsletter for the organization.
Ms. O'Leary grew up in Sheffield in Warren County and moved to Pittsburgh in 1957 when she landed a job with an ad agency here. One of the agency's primary clients was the Pirates.
"Since they were one of our big clients, we did a great deal of work with them and I got to go to a lot of games," she said, "It was great for a girl who grew up listening to the Pirates games."
Thanks to this relationship between the agency and the team, Ms. O'Leary also became good friends with the late Pirates announcer Bob Prince.
"He was a wonderful person, and he knew how much I loved the team," she said.
Mr. Prince encouraged Ms. O'Leary to apply for a job with the organization, but she only received a standard form letter rejection in response to her application. That is when Mr. Prince stepped in.
"When a job opened up, he told me he would supplement my income if I would also serve as his secretary," she said. It was 1964, and the team was playing at Forbes Field in Oakland.
As part of her duties, Ms. O'Leary had to attend all of the baseball games and keep the statistics for the team.
"This was back when we had to do everything by hand, and I was terrible at math," she joked.
Ms. O'Leary also helped Mr. Prince keep up with his correspondence, organize the speaker's bureau and other public relations duties as well as assisting Mr. Prince.
"If you ever heard him refer to his 'Gal Sal,' that was me," she said.
Since she would attend every home game, Ms. O'Leary worked a lot of Saturdays and Sundays and late nights, but she would still get up early each morning and take the trolley from her home in Shadyside to Forbes Field.
"We had a small staff, so I had to go to all of the games," she said, adding that she didn't mind.
"The team was my whole life until I retired in 1996," she said. "I worked with them for 32 years."
When she retired from her full-time duties, the organization asked her to continue as the alumni liaison for the nonprofit Pittsburgh Pirates Alumni Association, a role she was happy to continue.
"They supplied me with a computer, and it was something I could do from home," she said. That was important because it's a long commute from New Sewickley.
Although she no longer goes to very many games, preferring to watch them from the comforts of her own living room, Ms. O'Leary loves keeping in touch with the Pirates alumni and writing the two 32-page newsletters each July and December. She considers many of the past Pirates her friends, and the newsletters help her maintain those friendships.
The newsletters contain information on activities of the Alumni Association such as the annual Alumni Golf Classic; important milestones for alumni including birthdays, weddings, births of children and grandchildren and deaths; and trivia about the alumni and team.
"This has been the most rewarding thing that I have ever done," she said, "We are keeping history alive."
First Published February 9, 2012 12:00 am
