“So you would get, usually, a fireman’s wife that would be dispatching for you. He recently sat down for an interview with the West Chester Community Storytellers video series. “When they started the Fire Department in 1963, there were four women that did the dispatching from their home,” Jim said. Rather, callers would give a description of the location, a landmark or a nickname – Rosselot’s Curve, Keehner Farm, and so on. He said in those days, calls for service didn’t always include a numbered address where emergency response crews needed to make the run. I mean, you were the only one patrolling the Township,” Jim remembers of his time on the police beat. The West Chester Police Department was founded on April 17, 1967, four years later. The West Chester Fire Department celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2023. He initially worked as a police officer and volunteer firefighter until he was hired to become our first-ever full-time Fire Chief in 1977. His career in public service in West Chester (Union Township) began at the end of 1971. “When I started up here, I think I was the sixth full-time police officer hired,” Jim said. That was the situation Jim Detherage stepped into when he moved north from urban Hamilton County to rural Butler County to take a job in law enforcement and raise a family here with his wife Jennifer, a Lakota graduate. Imagine, if you can, a community of 35-square miles without a single traffic signal. Perhaps none more different – then from now – than West Chester Township, Ohio. The world, as they say, was a different place in the 1960s and 1970s. Would you believe our community’s first 911 dispatchers were volunteers working out of their homes?
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