Short Stuff: Freedom House Ambulance Services

Published Feb 17, 2021, 10:00 AM

As part of Black History Month, we wanted to share the little known story of the Freedom House Ambulance Service. Listen in to learn all about this seminal group of EMTs.

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Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Dave Kustan the producers here in spirit, but not really. He'll hear this eventually, and I'll bet he just got a warm feeling from the shout out. Uh. And since I said all that, it's short stuff, so let's go audios. Yeah, and you want to really mess with people sense of time and space. Yes, I'm picking Nica wafers out of my teeth as we record this. That should be a little hint. I'm actually refraining from eating one right now. Oh really, you're trying, but you want to? I do. I kind of like to go wafers now. I mean, I'm not crazy for him, but I do like him. Chuck. All right, So this is um. This is part of our Black History Month content, A very cool story about the Freedom House Ambulance Service, which you know we did. Did we do one on E M T S or ambulances or what was the name of that? Paramedics? We do one on paramedics. We've done one on CPR, which is I think where Dr Peter Safar's name. Sure, we've done one on medical stand ins. I can't remember remember practice patients. Oh yeah, yeah, well, I can't believe we did an episode on that. It's like one of the most obscure things that exist. But this one. I knew nothing about this, And then as I was researching, I was like, oh, Visible did one. They're basically like our our Simpsons did it to our South Park. Basically. It's crazy. Romans always one step ahead of it, he is. I was looking up the Mohave phone booth. You ever heard of that? No, but I'm sure Roman knows everything about it. He does. He does. It's like, why even do a short stuff on it now because there's Visible, But this one, I would say, go listen to the Visible episode. I haven't heard it yet, but I'm sure it's quite good. This is still worth talking about here too. Yeah, and it also really highlights our long motto w W R M D What would Roman Mars do? That's right, he would talk about the Freedom House ambul Services, which is one of the most astounding origin stories I've ever heard in my entire life. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty easy to think about the fact that you call an ambulance today and someone's going to show up that actually knows how to save your life. UM. But it wasn't that long ago, as recently as fifty years that ambulances were sort of like taxi vans that would show up and drive you as fast as they could to the hospital and hope that you weren't Yeah, I hope that you wouldn't die. UM. And that changed between UM nineteen sixty seven and nineteen seventy five, when a low income neighborhood in Pittsburgh, the Hill District, launched an ambulance service that actually featured trained, uh, gentlemen. They I don't think there were any women as a part of this first run, but trained gentlemen that could actually help save your life before and as they took you to the hospital. Yes. So like the the history of e m t s, of paramedics, of emergency medical services, of this idea of an ambulance staffed with people who knew how to UM, to perform life saving procedures and had equipment in their car that could help them perform life saving procedures started out in a traditionally black, low income community in Pittsburgh, and the first c m t s were young members of this community. That's where it all came from. Everything we understand about paramedics today that had nothing to do with military UM medicine came from this, which I just am astounded by. I think it's so cool, it's awesome. Uh and also like terrible that we didn't even know about this when we did the the E. M. T episode. I thought so too, Like that's how little known it is, so even we hadn't heard of it. Ure Roman new Yeah, of course, uh so in nineties, Like he probably listened to that episode and was like, that's weird that the guys didn't talk about the Freedom House. He was probably more like, what do I even listen to these two? I don't think he does it anymore. Um So. Pittsburgh Hills Hill District in the nineteen sixties was a place where if you and this is just like so many African American communities back then and even still today, if you called an ambulance you were lucky if one came at all, much less on time. And in ninety seven the Freedom House Enterprises opened up. It was a community agency. They focused on employment, trying to raise employment, trying to get voting rights UM installed. And this sort of dovetailed with a guy named Phil Holland, who was a social reformer there, and he was like, this is this is unacceptable that we don't have a reliable ambulance service in this community and we have all these guys around that people are saying aren't employable at all, and why don't we get them and train them up and put them in these vans? Yeah, which again like this isn't just some guy being like, oh, you know, it would be cool as if we staffed to paramedics service um from members of the community to serve this you know, under service community or underserved community. It's totally different. Um the like. He also created paramedics out of out of thin Air too. It was like a two part creation and luckily for this whole project, there was an anesthesiologists from Austria named Dr Peter Safar, who again has probably made multiple appearances in some of these episodes, but he's the guy basically who created the concept of civilian paramedics out of thin Air. He he said, look, we need to figure out how to take these life saving procedures that we perform in the e er that actually work and get them out into the streets and ideally into the ambulances so that you're not just sitting laying there hoping that you get to the e R before you die, Like they're actually working on you as you're making your way to the e R. So him combined with this idea to create this paramedic service in the Hill District, combined to create the Freedom House Ambulance Service. And again they picked from the community, the local community to serve their own community. I think this is so cool. All right, let's take a break, okay, and we'll be back right after this. Alright. So Dr Peter Safar, Peter Peter Safar has said, hey, CPR is not that difficult. We like, we should teach people to do this stuff. He's like, eventually it's going to be a song called Staying Alive. It's gonna make it even easier. That's right. Uh, there was a man um there's a man named Gene star Zinsky, Pittsburgh native and former paramedic, who directed a documentary about ten or eleven years ago called Freedom House Colin Street Saviors, and he said that these, uh, these guys that they got off the streets were like some of them were drug addicts, some of them were veterans War veterans who maybe had a little bit of medic training, but a lot of them were guys that were struggling on the streets to get by and this was a chance to to get like a real and not only a job that like that actually paid a good you know, a decent wage, a living wage, but a job that actually had a real impact on the community. Yeah. So like a guy named George McCarry UM. He was twenty at the time, and his grandma said, look, you either need to get a job or go to school, or you have to leave. You just can't. There's no free ride here longer. UM. And he had heard about the Freedom Freedom House UM and that they were looking for volunteers UM or employees I guess is what what they would be called UM. And he didn't even know it was for medical services. He he just knew that they were looking to hire people. So he went down UH and showed up and started getting trained UM. And the way that he he described it as it was like a real genuine ragtag group at first, but under the guidance of Dr safar Um and this kind of vision towards creating paramedics, like these guys were trained in life saving procedures. They went from like zero to you know, life savers over the course of you know, basically a first year Dr. Safar created a h orientation course that lasted a year, required a hundred and sixty hours of hands on training, took him to the Morgue to see autopsies, had them basically assist in operating rooms in the E. R Department to give them like real world, UM experience in this. Yeah, they had to train for six weeks in hospitals, in the emergency room and operating rooms. I see you. There was another man named John Moon as another great example of someone who um really really flourished in this new role. Uh. He said that he was kind of turned on by the glamor of it all. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it was I think it was sort of a I don't know, it was prestige the right word. I got the impression big time. I think, um, John Moon in particular, was like he would notice like the the ambulance kind of drive him by, and I get the impression that the the this uh Freedom House Ambulance Service had a really golden reputation in the community and they were kind of viewed as you know um, everyday heroes in the community. So I would guess there was definitely a lot of aspiration for for people or inspiration maybe both. One of the bad or sad things about it all is, even though there were cases where patients were saved by CPR, there was one call where they actually had to intubate a patient where they you know, put that tube down the throat to get someone breathing again. UM. A lot of times the emergency room was like, oh my god, this is amazing that you did this, But a lot of times they actually weren't welcome um, and they were looked at as sort of like, you guys are just drivers, You are not doctors or nurses. You shouldn't be getting involved. This was and I'm not defending them, but this is sort of before that was a real thing. So I'm sure they were like, what is going on. You can't have these guys that you pull off the street actually getting involved in our business. Yeah, and I think like, um, the ambulance drivers would be like, oh, I'm okay, you're gonna re intubate them, and they would say, no, this is good. Actually it's pretty good. But that so there does seem to be like, um, just like there isn't like a restaurant where the back of the house in the front of the house, there's always tension like that, or whenever somebody's stepping on somebody else's turf, like a basil Brown versus the British Museum kind of thing. Um, there there's going to be resentment and mistreatment, especially if the people are from a lower socioeconomic class or a racial minority, They're gonna get mistreated. But it seems like overall, especially in the Hill District, these guys were viewed rightly so as heroes. So as with just about any um story in American history where um, Black Americans or any minority groups, as they take matters into their own hands and and become successful at it, I think gets taken away from them and broadcast onto the larger community at their expense. Usually. Yeah, And this happened in the form of uh saving a boy who was hit by a bus. It was in a more affluent area. The ambulance was called there from the Freedom House, and um they basically I mean they helped us get out, They splinted his leg, They started in an I V word got around and then these white residents in the more affluent neighborhoods were like, this is amazing. You know. They weren't like, wait a minute, why were these African Americans like treating my son. They're like, this is amazing. They did a great job. We want our own services like that in our neighborhood to the Hill District shouldn't be the only one getting this. And so the city of Pittsburgh said, yeah, you know what, you're right, we should have the citywide. We're gonna launch our own service. It's it's overdue. Um. The really bad part about all this, I think you probably see where this is going, is it cut off the contract with Freedom House. They lost most of their funding because now it was this big, official city program, and they had the nerve to tell the Freedom House workers, hey, you can still for us. You've been doing this for a while now and you're super trained, but you've gotta go back and get retrained by our criteria. Yeah, despite all of the experience, years and years and years of experience. I mean, these these guys were working from and this happened in ve you had to go back and retrain even though you're the original paramedics that all this is based on and and Freedom House losing its contract with the city was a little more insidious than that. UM. From what I saw, there was a mayor named Joe Flaherty, and he always kind of balked at the idea of funding Freedom House. But when he got the opportunity to, when UM, more affluent and more white neighborhood said they want their own and they created a city wide e M S Service. UM, to him, that meant seizing the assets of Freedom House, freezing any funds going their way, and then using those funds and those assets to create this larger citywide version. Rather than just increasing the funding and widening the jurisdiction of Free Him House, who were already good at it and knew what they were doing, he shut it down and started up basically a white version of it. That's right, not to be confused with SETV Great Joe Flaherty and and Freaks and Geeks Father beloved Freaks and Geeks. Father Joe Flaherty so great, and he was the crazy guy and Happy Gilmore who used their heckle happy uh So the end of the Freedom House was very sad, but UM some of these workers did end up working for a long time and have really long careers with the City of Pittsburgh and their official service. John Moon, who we referenced earlier UM worked for thirty five years in the e M S Department, eventually was assistant chief before he retired in two thousand nine. There was another man named Mitchell Brown. He was an e MS commissioner in Cleveland, Ohio, and then ran the Department of Public Safety in Columbus, Ohio, all because of his start at the Freedom House. An't that cool? I mean, these guys were just like hanging around looking for jobs, and all of a sudden, you know, decades later, they have enough experience that they're running public safety in an entire city. That's just so cool to me. Yeah, And because it's so little known, Pittsburgh finally has installed a couple of plaques commemorating their work UM one in the actual Hill District and one in the Presbyterian University Hospital. And then Moon, who we mentioned um, He lobbied for a long time and was finally successful in getting Freedom House Medallion's placed on the side of every ambulance in the city of Pittsburgh, which is pretty cool. And there was there was a woman involved. Her name was Nancy Caroline. She took over from so far for oversight of the ambulance service the Freedom House Ambulance UH in three and apparently lived eight and breathed Freedom House Ambulance Services. So I love it? Yeah? Uh, you got anything else? And nothing else? Just Roman Mars. That's right. Well, then I have one thing to say out. I like the orange one. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

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