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SPEAKER_06: Moon grew up in Pittsburgh's largely black and economically depressed Hill district.
SPEAKER_02: In better times, the Hill had its own Negro League baseball team and jazz clubs that hosted Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. But by the time Moon was graduating high school in the late 1960s, there was no escaping the neighborhood's unemployable stigma. The reputation was there that I don't want to go to the Hill because you may get beat up.
SPEAKER_06: You have drug addicts and alcoholics and that same label was placed on myself and I understood that. But just because that was your thought doesn't necessarily mean that I had to live up to it. So Moon was glad to land a well-paying job right out of school at the local steel mill.
SPEAKER_02: Only to discover that the hours weren't as reliable as he had hoped. Next he was an orderly at Pittsburgh's Presbyterian University Hospital, which provided steady employment but not much else. All I was doing was making beds and taking people back and forth to the operating room and lifting and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_06: Mechanical things where you didn't have to think.
SPEAKER_02: For a while, Moon tried his best to find meaning in the work. But there was a part of me that said there has to be something more that I can do.
SPEAKER_06: Then one night, halfway through the graveyard shift, Moon watched as two men burst through the doors of the hospital.
SPEAKER_02: They were working desperately to save a dying patient. And as they rushed by, Moon stood pressed against the wall and wondered. Who are these people? What are they doing? How did they get to be able to do that?
SPEAKER_06: Maybe today he wouldn't bat an eye at this scene. But in 1970, nothing about it made sense.
SPEAKER_02: The two men weren't doctors and they weren't nurses. And their strange white uniforms weren't hospital issue. But these guys came in with a certain type of confidence that was just shocking to me from the very point that they came into the room.
SPEAKER_06: And they had an emblem on their breasts that just piqued my interest. The emblem was the two-snaked caduceus, the traditional sign of medicine and healing.
SPEAKER_02: But just below the familiar symbol was a word John Moon had never seen before. Paramedic.
SPEAKER_07: Moon wasn't familiar with the term paramedic because back then, no one was. That's reporter Kevin Hazard.
SPEAKER_02: Moon was witnessing the birth of a new profession. One that would go on to change the face of emergency medicine.
SPEAKER_02: But to Moon, perhaps the most striking thing of all was that these first ever paramedics looked like him.
SPEAKER_06: I'm standing here looking at these two guys and I'm saying to myself, my God, these are black guys. Never before had Moon seen young African-American men performing that kind of work.
SPEAKER_06: These were two guys that had afros and beards and the staff on the floor gave them a level of respect that amazed me. And there's something I never really mentioned to anyone is I actually snuck off of the floor and I actually followed them out to the vehicle. Because I wanted to see what prompted them to show such proudness and boldness. Once I looked at that vehicle, pull off, it was almost like, there goes my job. There goes my career. That's what I want to do. Moon vowed right then, halfway through his long night shift, to become a paramedic, whatever that was.
SPEAKER_07: And in Pittsburgh in 1970, the only place to do that was an organization called Freedom House Ambulance Service.
SPEAKER_06: So I went and applied to get a job with him. And the rest is history.
SPEAKER_02: But that history about how a group of young black men from Pittsburgh became the world's first paramedics is still largely unknown. I'm a former paramedic myself. I did this job for 10 years.
SPEAKER_07: And you'd think the profession's origin story would be a big deal. But the truth is, most of the EMTs I've talked to have never heard of the Freedom House paramedics or understand what we owe them.
SPEAKER_02: Today, it's easy to take what paramedics do for granted. Call 911 and they'll arrive with cardiac monitors, airway equipment, and an array of pharmaceuticals to treat anything from heart attacks to gunshots to premature births.
SPEAKER_07: But for a long time, emergency medical service, or what today is called EMS, didn't provide anything resembling that.
SPEAKER_04: In the early days of what we would view as EMS, it really wasn't the equivalent of what we see today. They would do whatever it was they knew to do. But, you know, were they doing the right thing? Who knows? That's Richard Clinchy. He's the president of the EMS Museum and a trained paramedic.
SPEAKER_07: Clinchy says that when he started in emergency care in the late 50s, emergency services didn't provide treatment at the scene or even necessarily on the way to the hospital. They were just about getting you to the hospital as quickly as possible.
SPEAKER_02: Which kind of makes sense in a way. It is, after all, where the doctors are. But as a result, it often wasn't clear whose responsibility it was to rush to the scene of an accident.
SPEAKER_04: Before the evolution of EMS, who did you call? Well, I was a paid firefighter back in the 60s and sometimes we got the call. If somebody needed a fire truck in the city of New York, there were fire boxes everywhere. You'd pull the handle and fire personnel and fire equipment would show up.
SPEAKER_07: In other areas, the responsibility for transporting patients often fell to local funeral homes.
SPEAKER_02: So imagine that. You're having a massive heart attack, your life's in the balance, and who rolls up to save you? Two morticians in a hearse.
SPEAKER_07: In many major cities, this crucial task fell to another municipal service that probably had even less business responding to medical emergencies. The police. In the area where I was a firefighter, we had a police department that had a 57 Chevrolet wagon. That was an emergency response vehicle.
SPEAKER_04: So the idea the general public was faced with was more or less what I would call swoop and scoop, which simply meant that you'd call the police that rushed the person out there to you and then they'd pick you up, put you in the back and rush you back down to the hospital.
SPEAKER_06: With minimal training and equipment, John Moon says police departments could do little more than offer patients basic first aid, a canvas stretcher, a half-empty oxygen tank, and a pillow.
SPEAKER_02: Which more often than not only served to choke off the patient's airway.
SPEAKER_06: And on top of that, both individual, meaning police officers, got up front and left you back there by yourself. So if you stopped breathing by the time you arrived, you were perhaps DOA because no one had done anything for you.
SPEAKER_07: The police simply didn't have the tools, the training, or the disposition to save people in a medical emergency. But in the absence of a dedicated emergency medical service, the job was being left to them by default. And perhaps nowhere was the problem of relying on the police for help more vividly illustrated than in Pittsburgh's largely black Hill District.
SPEAKER_07: Moon says the city's mostly white police force was often slow to respond to emergencies in the Hill, while the black residents, for their part, were reluctant to even call the police to begin with. Because there was a trust issue with the police, primarily because there were no constraints. I mean, they could do whatever they wanted and there was no repercussion or consequences for their actions.
SPEAKER_06: No one wanted to get into the exact same police van that the cops had threatened to throw them in the day before.
SPEAKER_06: So there was issues all the way around. Do I really want to call the police? Chances are they're going to take their time getting here, number one. And if I wait too long, then chances are a cab won't come to my neighborhood primarily because of fear of being robbed or whatever the case is. So the options were very limited during that time. And the same was true to varying degrees in the rest of the country. Whether a neighborhood was served by the police or the fire department or the local funeral home, so long as the priority was transportation as opposed to treatment, no one even realized that there was a job that needed doing.
SPEAKER_02: But then, in the mid-60s, something happened which flipped the paradigm for emergency care on its head and laid the groundwork for the invention of paramedicine.
SPEAKER_07: In 1966, the federal government published a white paper that would prove so influential that even now in EMS circles, it is simply called the white paper.
SPEAKER_02: Basically, it told us we were killing over 50,000 people a year on the highways and doing so unnecessarily that there was a way to intervene and save those people. But we didn't have the people nor the resources nor the training to do a whole lot about it.
SPEAKER_04: Techniques practiced by combat medics overseas had been largely ignored by the medical community with the result that a person was more likely to die of a gunshot wound in America than on a battlefield in Vietnam.
SPEAKER_02: The white papers shamed the government into providing money for EMS development on the local level, and government officials and local community leaders began searching for solutions, including a community organizer in Pittsburgh named Phil Hallin. Oh my God, why do I do this?
SPEAKER_07: Hallin is a former ambulance attendant who came to Pittsburgh in the early 60s. And yes, he hates being interviewed.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, how long are we going to be going on this? I don't last very long at age 90.
SPEAKER_07: Hallin ran a civil rights organization called the Maurice Falk Medical Fund, which examined health disparities due to institutional racism, and he immediately focused his ire on the city's pitiful emergency services. What was your impression of the level of care that was available in Pittsburgh?
SPEAKER_03: Well, it wasn't my impression of it. It was the way it was, you know. There wasn't any level of care. There was no such thing as emergency medicine or any of the things we now look back on and think, what the hell was going on? No, there was nothing. I mean, nobody was trained, especially the cops.
SPEAKER_07: He could see that what was going on was effectively a public health crisis that was disproportionately affecting black neighborhoods. But then one day, Hallin came across an article in the local paper about a black-operated jobs training program based in the Hill District called Freedom House.
SPEAKER_07: The article described how Freedom House had rolled out a kind of mobile grocery store for black neighborhoods using trucks to bring fresh vegetables to people's doors. And I thought, well, health care is terrible in the Hill District. We have to do something. If they could run a grocery van around, why can't we run a medical van around or something like that?
SPEAKER_07: Hallin wasn't envisioning anything like modern emergency medical services. At first he just thought Freedom House's trucks could help transport people in underserved neighborhoods to the hospital and that they could hire people from the Hill District to drive them. But that's when I got the director of the university hospital on this group as well. And, you know, before the first meeting was over, he said, oh my God, we have to go immediately to Saffir.
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_01: The experimental study you are about to see is one of 18 similar studies during which we compared various methods of artificial respiration. Dr. Peter Saffir was the head of anesthesiology at the University of Pittsburgh. And by that time, he was already famous in medical circles.
SPEAKER_07: Saffir was a pure scientist and a very precise and impatient Austrian.
SPEAKER_03: We simulated field conditions by selecting as subjects men and women of various body types.
SPEAKER_07: This is a film of Saffir from 1951 demonstrating a new technique he developed for resuscitation, what today we call CPR. To help orient you, we have made a diagram of the experimental setup.
SPEAKER_07: Saffir understood that to be effective, resuscitation needed to be started immediately by the first person on the scene. But he faced heavy resistance from the medical community, which felt the general public couldn't be trusted with such specialized knowledge. So Saffir performed an experiment.
SPEAKER_02: By anesthetizing and curerizing these subjects, we simulated limp asphyxia victims.
SPEAKER_02: Saffir paralyzed a group of volunteers using a chemical compound from the Amazon normally used on poison-tipped arrows. It's just the same medical testing has changed a lot. Once the volunteers could no longer breathe on their own, Saffir had untrained laypeople use CPR to keep those volunteers alive.
SPEAKER_07: And when I say untrained laypeople, I mean children. This boy scout will perform mouth-to-airway breathing.
SPEAKER_02: Ultimately, Saffir's views would be vindicated. And for his effort, he'd forever be known as the father of CPR. Helen already knew some of this when he walked into Peter Saffir's office in 1966. But nothing could have prepared him for what actually happened.
SPEAKER_07: Within seconds of greeting Helen and the Freedom House team, the wiry and energetic Saffir began to unleash a torrent of ideas.
SPEAKER_02: Basically, he said, you are just what I'm looking for. I've been trying to figure out how to take rescue breathing and the rest out on the street and to train people how to do that. You got the people.
SPEAKER_07: But Saffir didn't stop there. He wasn't content to just teach some van driver CPR.
SPEAKER_03: I said, let's go beyond that. Let's train them to be professionals as well.
SPEAKER_02: Professionals who could provide high quality medical care before the person was even taken to the hospital. It was not go to the scene, pick up a patient, transport to a hospital and then start care. It was emergency treatment right there on the pavement.
SPEAKER_02: Instead of repurposed cargo spaces, Saffir argued that ambulances should be mobile intensive care units staffed by professionals trained to use cardiac monitors, administer medication and anything else that might keep a patient alive. Helen and the others could barely keep up. Saffir wasn't proposing a simple update to the existing system, but to change the whole culture of pre-hospital care.
SPEAKER_07: He wanted to do it using Freedom House. I think somebody said, well, how big? What are we talking about here?
SPEAKER_03: He said, I can teach. I can remember this. I can instruct 40 people. And, you know, inside of a half an hour, we realized that there was something going on here which was way beyond anything that we had thought of.
SPEAKER_07: Saffir set about designing advanced ambulances and an intense 300 hour course whose graduates would be the world's first comprehensively trained first responders. This wasn't just the birth of a profession, but of a whole new branch of medicine. It would become a vital link in the chain with a subculture all its own. And the world's first fully trained paramedics would be staffed exclusively with young black men from the Hill District of Pittsburgh.
SPEAKER_02: And the people that worked there all were labeled unemployable.
SPEAKER_02: Freedom House recruited many of its first students right off the street, most of whom were just happy to land a good job, even if they were a little fuzzy on the details. John Moon wasn't part of that first class. He signed up a little later. But even he admits that as incredible as he thought the opportunity was, he didn't fully understand what he was getting into.
SPEAKER_07: On some level, he was just excited to finally be wearing the uniform with the cool emblem that he saw on the first night.
SPEAKER_06: I'll put it this way. If someone bought you a thousand dollar suit and just gave it to you and said, just walk up and down the street in it, how would you feel? That's the way I felt. I was at the point where, OK, I got this uniform. That's all it takes to help people. And boy, was I wrong. It took a little bit more than that. After they signed up, Moon and the others underwent a battery of psychological evaluations and interviews with medical professionals.
SPEAKER_07: They learned anatomy, physiology, CPR, advanced first aid, nursing and defensive driving. At first under Safer, but later under Freedom House's first medical director, a 30 year old white doctor with no previous ambulance experience named Nancy Caroline.
SPEAKER_06: And we look at her with skepticism because you have to remember she's not black. But once we found out that her heart was with us, that was really nothing she could do wrong. And everywhere she went, she took us with her.
SPEAKER_07: Caroline got the trainees access to almost every department of the hospital. She had them work in the morgue, the anesthesiology suite and the maternity ward. And of course, if they were going to bring the ICU to the street, they had to master everything that happened in an ICU.
SPEAKER_02: So that included spinal immobilization, cervical immobilization, IV insertion. And the advantages of classroom training for us at that particular time is we would learn a procedure in class or she would teach it to us.
SPEAKER_06: And then we would go out a half hour, 45 minutes later after we got out of class and perform that procedure on the person. And Freedom House paramedics were often the first people to perform that procedure outside of a hospital.
SPEAKER_07: They were among the first to use Narcan to reverse an overdose and the first to save a patient by shocking their heart in the field. Moon told me that the biggest first he personally experienced came on a call where Nancy Caroline was riding along.
SPEAKER_06: It was a patient having trouble breathing. He was unconscious. So Moon started calling it in. But then Nancy Caroline stopped him.
SPEAKER_06: And lo and behold, she said, start an IV and intubate this patient. And I said, repeat that. She said, start an IV and intubate this patient.
SPEAKER_07: Moon thinks he was the first paramedic who was ever asked to intubate someone in the field. I wasn't able to confirm that. But intubation, the subtle but critical art of snaking a breathing tube into a patient's trachea is an incredibly difficult procedure. I've gone through the training. It's not easy, even in a hospital setting. And here they were doing it on the sidewalk. Moon says he was scared to death.
SPEAKER_06: And once I gathered my nerves together and remembered how she had taught us in the anatomy lab, I went ahead and did it. And once I intubated the person and took him to the emergency room, I had to deal with the ER doctor saying, well, who intubated this person? Who caused them to be intubated? And I said, I did. And you are? I said, well, my name is John Moon and I'm a paramedic at Freedom House Ambulance Service. But it wasn't enough for Moon and the other paramedics to simply master the techniques required for emergency medical care.
SPEAKER_02: Freedom House personnel faced an even bigger challenge from the moment they got the call. The city had contracted with Freedom House to handle calls in Pittsburgh's mostly black neighborhoods in the downtown area.
SPEAKER_07: But the Pittsburgh police dispatchers often refused to send them. Because the police looked at us as someone taking their jobs away.
SPEAKER_06: But Freedom House looked at the police as being a threat to the patient. And one of the things that we had to put in place is we used a police scanner. And we would monitor the calls and we would subsequently try to get to the scene before they did.
SPEAKER_07: Moon recalls getting to the scene just seconds after the police arrived and seeing them try to drag patients out of wrecked cars. And here we are saying, no, you can't do this. Let's put them on a spine board and put a cervical collar on them.
SPEAKER_06: But remember, these were a bunch of black guys from the Hill lecturing mostly white cops.
SPEAKER_06: You know, and we're yelling at them and they're cussing us out.
SPEAKER_07: Sometimes the police would relent. But other times they would threaten the paramedics with arrest unless they backed off.
SPEAKER_06: And, you know, the only thing you can do is just stand back and say, OK. And then you watch them drag the individual out of the car and put them in the back of a paddy wagon. And and both guys get up front and they race off to the hospital. So those were oftentimes battles that you were not going to win.
SPEAKER_07: And it wasn't just the cops who didn't understand. Patients couldn't fathom why Moon was using a cardiac monitor and starting IVs in their house instead of hurrying them to a doctor.
SPEAKER_06: Their idea was, let's call the ambulance. The ambulance comes to pick you up and take you to the hospital. That's all they knew. And it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to explain to a family member that we have brought the emergency room to the person.
SPEAKER_02: Trying to convince white patients to submit to treatment was especially difficult. Some wouldn't even let the black paramedics touch them.
SPEAKER_06: That was frowned upon on more than one occasion where they would say, no, do you have to really do this? I would prefer that you not do it. And it's it's something that we had to endure because the problem was not with us. The problem was with the patient. It was their belief or their preconceived notion about the individuals that were touching them. The same went for doctors and nurses at any hospital not directly affiliated with Safer and the Freedom House program.
SPEAKER_07: Moon remembers trying to read a patient's vital signs only to have a nurse laugh in his face as if he was pretending to play doctor. Other Freedom House paramedics were mistaken for orderlies and asked to mop the floor. But despite all the struggle, Freedom House's reputation was growing.
SPEAKER_03: People were beginning to recognize that something really different was going on here. This wasn't just call the ambulance.
SPEAKER_07: Phil Hallin says stories started to spread about an ambulance service that could perform miraculous life-saving procedures at the scene of horrific accidents.
SPEAKER_02: Perhaps the most influential story was about a kid on his bike who was hit head on by a car. The accident was in Squirrel Hill, one of the city's most affluent neighborhoods and one that Freedom House had never been allowed to enter. So initially the dispatcher sent the police, but the cops panicked. The kid was bleeding out in front of them and they had no idea what to do.
SPEAKER_07: And somebody said, get Freedom House up here. And they did a miraculous activity which nobody had ever seen happen to take place on the street before.
SPEAKER_03: People watched it happen. And that was a major turning point.
SPEAKER_02: By this time, Freedom House's five ambulances were running nearly 6,000 calls a year and providing demonstrably better care. At a city council meeting, staff represented data showing that as many as 1,200 people a year had been dying needlessly while in the care of other emergency services. Freedom House paramedics, by contrast, had saved 200 lives in the first year alone.
SPEAKER_07: Doctors and medical directors from around the country flocked to Pittsburgh. Freedom House medics were invited to conferences as far away as Germany. Everyone wanted to see what they were doing and learn how they could copy it. And in 1975, the federal government chose Freedom House to field test the first standardized training curriculum for EMS providers. Nancy Caroline was asked to write the textbook.
SPEAKER_02: But Freedom House's growing reputation would ultimately prove to be its greatest liability. The more successes they chalked up, the more certain residents and city officials wanted to see Freedom House gone.
SPEAKER_07: And according to John Moon, it was for a simple reason. How dare you have an EMS system or an ambulance service this good, serving the black economically deprived community, or as society says, those people.
SPEAKER_06: And we don't have anything like that.
SPEAKER_02: And perhaps no one did more to punish Freedom House for this transgression than Pittsburgh's mayor. Elected in 1969, 45-year-old Pete Flaherty was a fiscally conservative Democrat.
SPEAKER_07: Tall and broad-shouldered, he went into office already believing programs using taxpayer money should be managed entirely by the city. But ask Phil Hallin, and he'll tell you he believes that the mayor's beef with Freedom House went beyond issues of fiscal or bureaucratic turf. What was his opinion of Freedom House? Well, I didn't like it particularly because it was doing too well and it was black.
SPEAKER_07: You think that's why he felt that way? I think so.
SPEAKER_07: Was it your opinion that he was racist?
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
SPEAKER_07: When Flaherty took office, he slashed Freedom House's operating budget in half. This didn't leave enough money to cover even routine maintenance on the ambulances. Caroline repeatedly wrote frustrated missives to Freedom House's board, complaining about brakes and steering that locked up, doors that fell from the hinges, and seats that toppled over. Once, according to Caroline, an engine caught fire while transporting a patient.
SPEAKER_02: Flaherty passed an ordinance that banned ambulances from using their sirens in certain neighborhoods, which significantly slowed their response times.
SPEAKER_06: And at first I would say you can't use a siren downtown because people are complaining about it. Unfortunately, people look in the vehicle to see who's driving it and then they complain. So we're going on the call downtown and you have to blow your horn to tell the car to get out of the way. And they're looking at you like you're crazy.
SPEAKER_02: Rumors were spread that Freedom House paramedics were selling drugs and running dice games from the ambulances, and that thousands of dollars had been stolen from headquarters. And it became a struggle after struggle after struggle.
SPEAKER_06: And eventually, you know, it's almost like a patient struggling to breathe. And eventually the heart gets tired and it stops beating and the person stops breathing. And that's exactly what happened. In 1975, Flaherty struck a final devastating blow.
SPEAKER_07: He announced that the city would roll out its own brand new paramedic service.
SPEAKER_02: Not only was the new service showered with resources Freedom House had long been denied, its recruits were all white.
SPEAKER_07: The city needed Caroline to serve as its medical director, and she used that leverage to make one demand that the Freedom House crews be hired on. Flaherty relented, sort of. Because the city was required to bring the employees over, but they were not required to keep them.
SPEAKER_06: So they found a way to get rid of them. So, you know, that's how the city system ended up being 98 percent white when the first EMS system in this country was African American.
SPEAKER_07: Within a few years of being replaced by the city's EMS service, Freedom House was more or less forgotten. In part because, like all good things, paramedics were soon taken for granted. Today, it never occurs to anyone to ask where paramedicine came from.
SPEAKER_02: But to Phil Hallin, that's the true measure of Freedom House's legacy. Paramedicine is just there.
SPEAKER_03: Do you know anybody that doesn't take this for granted at this point in any American city or even in the American countryside? I mean, nobody would even think of a time when somebody would not survive because somebody didn't know how to do CPR. It's unthinkable anywhere in the United States.
SPEAKER_02: The model of care created at Freedom House ended up being adopted by countless other paramedics programs across the country, very often with the help of Freedom House veterans. Peter Safer helped to develop a paramedic program in Baltimore. Mitchell Brown, another Freedom House alum, became the EMS commissioner for the city of Cleveland and later its director of public safety. And Nancy Caroline founded the first ever EMS service in Israel. Her textbook, titled Emergency Care in the Streets, ended up setting the standard in EMS instruction for decades.
SPEAKER_07: As for Moon, he stayed with Pittsburgh EMS and retired in 2009 as an assistant chief. How does he feel about it all now when he looks back on the days when a handful of young men from the Hill made history?
SPEAKER_06: It's something that I'm extremely, extremely proud to have been a part of. And every time I see an EMS unit going down the street, I wonder, do they have any idea? That's where it all began. Because it all began there.
SPEAKER_02: Kevin and I discuss what lessons the surprisingly recent history of paramedicine might offer people contemplating a different role for police in our public safety infrastructure today. After this.
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SPEAKER_07: And I'm sitting in city council meetings and reporting on whether or not they should put speed bumps in various suburban streets. I was just frustrated and bored. And then one night I got sent by my editor to cover a tunnel collapse. They were doing this huge infrastructure project in Atlanta. And there were six guys on a scaffolding that dropped 250 feet into the earth. And we sat outside with the families and waited. And there were a group of paramedics that went down there, the sort of high angle rescue team. And they repelled down into the darkness and were all waiting and waiting and waiting. And finally they emerge. And of course the news is as bad as we anticipated it to be. But there was something in those guys and the way that they carried themselves and whatever it was that they saw once they disappeared into the darkness of that hole, I just thought, whatever version of the truth that I'm looking for, I think those guys are carrying it somewhere within them. And so I just signed up for an EMT class completely on a lark. I had no idea if I even could finish it. And next thing you know, I'm sitting on an ambulance and on my way to some ridiculous call. It all happened somewhat accidentally.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I mean, it sounds pretty similar to the story that John Moon says, of seeing someone being inspired of that as being a vocation and then speaking to you in some way. Did that story have particular resonance with you because of your own experience? Yeah, it did. I mean, if you get to the heart of John's story, really he's a young guy who's looking for a way to prove himself in the world, particularly to a world that has ignored him. And obviously my experience in life is vastly different from John's. But to me it was, I saw this group of people who were doing something that I thought that I could do.
SPEAKER_07: It didn't feel like an unattainable goal, but it felt like this incredible opportunity to do the sort of thing that I never anticipated I'd have the opportunity to do. And so there was a lot in John's story that always felt, that always rang true to me.
SPEAKER_02: And what part of your career did you learn about this history about the first paramedics being black men from an underserved neighborhood in Pittsburgh and this whole origin story?
SPEAKER_07: No part. I think that's probably the reason that John sits up at night filing his teeth in his Pittsburgh home. Nobody knows this. When I went to paramedic school, my instructor was one of the first six medics in the state of Georgia. And he was telling us these stories of the early days when he was riding a hearse, coming out of the funeral homes and they would embalm bodies one night and then transport the next. And he did get a call and you sweep the flower petals out of the back of the hearse and you rush off. So when you say sweeping out petals in the hearse, he was one of those people sent by the funeral home to be an EMS person. Is that what you mean?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. In much of Atlanta, the only people who were capable of transporting a body were the funeral homes. How many people have something like a hearse?
SPEAKER_07: And so he was a funeral home employee and one night a week he would embalm bodies and then the next night he would be responsible for responding to emergency calls. And this was before there was any notion of a paramedic. So these guys had maybe 10 hours of first aid training and they're sitting down in the basement of the funeral home. Call comes in, they rush out. Again, they yank out the casket, sweep out the flower petals, slide in some sort of a stretcher. And then race through the streets in a hearse, which you know with these old Cadillac hearses. And he said that if you got going too fast, the brakes would soften up and you couldn't stop. So they're screaming this hearse with a purple light on its roof, screaming through the city of Atlanta with no brakes, flower petals trailing out of the back window. Oh my goodness. That sounds like a totally different world. It's amazing that that's within our lifetimes. That's just amazing.
SPEAKER_02: It's not that long ago at all.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Yeah. And so hearing these stories of the early days when they carried a credit card machine with them and before they dropped a patient off the hospital, they'd slide it in front of them and say cash check or charge. This really sort of wild west era in which nobody really knew what they were doing. But that was all I knew about it was that it started out in a very slipshod sort of way and then slowly became serious. It wasn't until after my book came out that somebody said to me, hey, there's another story, another EMS story if you're ever looking for one. And it was set in Pittsburgh. And so I started Googling it and the only thing I could find were a handful of local press accounts of these young men and women who had done this thing in the late 60s and early 70s. And I started digging into it and all of a sudden just the reality of what it was that had happened that nobody knew. I know a paramedic from Pittsburgh who has no idea that this was the start of it all. And for no one to know that, it was shocking to me, particularly some who did it for a year and wrote about it. It's when I got in touch with John and I said, how does nobody know this? And he just screamed, I know. Nobody knows.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I'm so glad that we get to tell that story because it's amazing to me. And it's pretty resonant today. In particular, the role of police in both the story that you told and what's happening right now. There's this history there that we presented that is, you know, the police were the kind of default person to be called in this type of emergency, even though they had no skills or inclination to do the job that was required. And we're looking at what policing means today and what does it mean that a person potentially armed like a soldier is brought to a situation where someone had a stroke, for example. And maybe that isn't the right thing to do. And we had this discussion, you know, or we, you know, like people had this discussion, you know, in the late 60s and 70s, too. So when you think about the story you told in your experience and you think about what the discussions are happening today, how do you take in the moment and reconcile it with this history that we told in this story?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, you know, what's crazy about that is when I began researching this story, I was coming across quotes that really got to the heart of a conversation we're just now having today. And these are things that I was reading in the fall and spring of 2018 and 2019. You know, the early medics who were out there saying, hey, you know, if you want this police truck to show up at your house, you have to understand that last night that was a truck that showed up to arrest your neighbor. And tomorrow night might be the truck to show up to arrest you. And if you really think people are going to be comfortable calling that guy to arrive tonight, then, you know, you don't think you understand the situation we're living in. And there was a lot of pushback from, you know, the city of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County about changing this system because it was the system that had always been and people thought, well, it works. And somebody was able to come along and prove that, no, this isn't working and these guys aren't suited for this task.
SPEAKER_02: No, but I think what is valuable about these lessons of history, it's so recent that paramedics were invented. You know, like it's so surprisingly recent that it should free your mind to think of the possibilities of what infrastructure, public safety could be today if we didn't all want its arrest on the police and wanted to try something different. I would agree. I understand the resistance to it. I understand the fear that people feel when you say something like defund the police. It sounds like a really radical term.
SPEAKER_07: But if you can sit down and realize how often the police are called out because there's a psych patient who hasn't taken his medicine and his 76 year old parents aren't certain what to do with them. And this police officer shows up, you know, not saying to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, you know, unfortunately, the police really kind of they have it. They're limited in terms of what they can do. And one of the things I learned very quickly in doing that job was that the police can't lose a fight. You know, they're by the nature of their profession, they are their back is against the wall. And once they arrive, they have to keep pushing forward. And oftentimes that led to a situation that didn't need to happen. You know, what could have been a situation that we had deescalated wound up escalating because the person that arrived was someone who had essentially, if they didn't get cooperation, they only had one avenue that they could venture down.
SPEAKER_02: It's amazing to me to think, you know, when John Moon saw the paramedics for the first time, he'd never heard the word paramedic, you know, and it was completely novel to most people. And I'm thinking today about how we're thinking about the police and maybe how to sort of, you know, defund them or divest them of some of these activities, which they're not suited towards. I think it's kind of interesting to imagine that there could be a word, you know, that is like a rapid response social worker, mental health worker that is going to be sent out to people that will be a word like paramedic in 50 years. Have you thought about that? It feels like I have. It feels like we're on the cusp of that moment. You know, there's no doubt that people are looking for a new way for police to respond.
SPEAKER_07: It's something different to come out. And the number of instances we've had in which, you know, these situations have gone wrong, how often it has been someone who's called out for a mental health issue or something that didn't initially appear to be a crime in progress. And you have to think that somebody out there in the midst of all these, you know, defund the police conversation, someone must be saying, well, how else can we deploy these resources? Who else can we bring to bear in these situations that can bring a better outcome? And there's probably a new job title, a new role, a whole new group of people that are sitting out there that not too long from now, we're all going to look back and say, well, of course, it's so obvious. You know, naturally those guys are there. Naturally those people are responding. How on earth did we live without them? And I, you know, I think we're sort of at the moment where these things are born. Well, I think it's really interesting and I'm so glad we're able to share this story. So thanks so much for talking with us and for reporting it. It's been great.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you. It's really great to be here. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Kevin Hazard, edited by Joe Rosenberg, mix and tech production by Sarah McCarthy and Sree Fusef, music by Sean Real. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director of the rest of the team, senior editor to Delaney Hall, Katie Mingle, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lay, Chris Berube, Abby Madon, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars.
SPEAKER_02: Many thanks to The Atavist for sharing Kevin's original story with us. If you want to learn more about the history of Freedom House, you should check out that article. If you want to learn more about Kevin's career as a paramedic, you should go read his memoir. It's called A Thousand Naked Strangers, but we'll link to both on our website. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is distributed in multiple locations around North America, but in our hearts it will always be in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.
SPEAKER_02: We are a proud member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative, listener-supported, 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world. Find us and support us all at Radio-Topia.fm, just like these fine people did, Emilio Martinez, Ashley Travers, Bill Worthing, Alison Meyers, Elizabeth Camaro, and John and Jen, who just got married. Congratulations and thanks everybody for your support. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org or on Instagram and Reddit too, but our true home on the internet is 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
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