Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Freedom House Ambulance Services

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Dave Coustan,

the producer is 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. And since I said all that, it's short stuff. So let's go. Adios. Yeah. And you want to really mess with people's sense of time and space? Yes. I'm picking neck of 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? But you want to? I do. I kind of like wafers now. I mean, I'm not crazy for them, but I do like them, Chuck. All right. So this is this is part of our Black History Month content, a very cool story about the Freedom House Ambulance Service, which we did. Did we do one on EMTs or ambulances,

or what was the name of that? Paramedics? We did one on paramedics. We've done one on CPR, which is I think where Dr. Peter Safar's name came from. Spoiler. We've done one on medical stand ins. I can't remember. Remember practice patients? Oh, yeah, yeah. I can't believe we did an episode on that. It's like one of the most obscure things that exists. But this one, I knew nothing about this. And then as I was researching, I was like, oh, 99% invisible did one. They're basically like our Simpsons did it to our South Park, basically. It's crazy. Roman's always one step ahead of us. He is. I was looking up the Mojave 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 a 99% invisible. But this one, I would say go listen to the 99% invisible 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, WWRMD, what would Roman Mars do? That's right. He would talk about the Freedom House Ambulance 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. But it wasn't that long

ago, as recently as 50 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 wouldn't die. And that changed between 1967 and 1975 when a low-income neighborhood in Pittsburgh, the Hill District, launched an ambulance service that actually featured trained gentlemen. 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 the history of EMTs, of paramedics, of emergency medical services, of this idea of an ambulance, staffed with people who knew how 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 EMTs 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 medicine came from this, which I just am astounded by. I think it's so cool. It's awesome. And also terrible that we didn't even know about this when we did the EMT episode. I thought so too. Like, that's how little known it is.

Yeah, even we hadn't heard of it. Right. I'm sure Roman knew. Yeah, of course. So in 19, 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, why do I even listen to these two? I don't think he does anymore. He'll never hear about this.

So Pittsburgh Hill District in the 1960s was a place where if you, and this is just like so many African-American communities back then, and even still today, if you call it an ambulance, you were lucky if one came at all much less on time. And in 1967, the Freedom House Enterprises opened up. It was a community agency. They focused on employment, trying to raise employment, trying to get voting rights installed. And this sort of dovetailed with a guy named Phil Holland, who was a social reformer there.

And he was like, 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, this isn't just some guy being like, oh, it'd be cool as if we staffed a paramedic service from members of the community to serve this under-service community, or under-served community. It's totally different. He also created paramedics out of thin air too. It was like a two-part creation. And luckily for this whole project, there was an anesthesiologist 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 said, look, we need to figure out how to take these life-saving procedures that we perform in the ER that actually work and get them out into the streets and ideally into the ambulances so that you're not just laying there hoping that you get to the ER before you die. Like they're actually working on you as you're making your way to the ER. 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. What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention.

Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So Dr. Peter Safar has said, hey, CPR is not that difficult. We should teach people to do this stuff. He's like, eventually, there's going to be a song called Staying Alive.

It's going to make it even easier. That's right. There was a man. There's a man named Gene Starzynski, Pittsburgh native and former paramedic who directed a documentary about 10 or 11 years ago called Freedom House, Colon, Street Saviors. And he said that 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 get like a real, and not only a job that actually paid 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 McCary, he was 20 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 any longer. And he had heard about the Freedom House and that they were looking for volunteers

or employees, I guess is what they would be called. And he didn't even know it was for medical services. He just knew that they were looking to hire people. So he went down and showed up and started getting trained. And the way that he described it is it was like a real genuine ragtag group at first. But under the guidance of Dr. Safar and this kind of vision toward creating paramedics, like these guys were trained in life-saving procedures. They went from like zero to, you know, lifesavers over the course of, you know,

basically a first year. Dr. Safar created an orientation course that lasted a year, required 160 hours of hands-on training, took them to the morgue to see autopsies, had them basically assist in operating rooms in the ER department to give them like real world experience in this. Yeah, they had to train for six weeks in hospitals, in the emergency room, in operating rooms, ICU. There was another man named John Moon as another great example of someone who really, really flourished in this new role. He said that he was kind of turned on by the glamour of it all. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it was, I think it was sort of a, I don't know, was prestige the right word? I got the impression big time. I think John Moon in particular was like, he would notice like the ambulance kind of driving by. And I get the impression that this Freedom House Ambulance Service had a really golden reputation in the community. And they were kind of viewed as, you know, everyday heroes in the community. So I would guess there is definitely a lot of aspiration 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. 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. 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 was 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 the ambulance drivers would be like, oh, okay, you're gonna reintubate them? And they would say, no, this is good. Yeah, actually, it's pretty good. But so there does seem to be like, just like there is in like a restaurant where the back of the house and 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, there's going to be resentment and mistreatment, especially if the people are from a lower socioeconomic class or a racial minority, they're going to 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 story in American history where Black Americans or any minority groups as they take matters into their own hands and become successful at it, I think it's taken away from them and broadcast onto the larger community at their expense usually. Yeah. And this happened in the form of 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 they basically, I mean, they helped us get out. They splinted his leg. They started an IV. Word got around. And then these white residents in the more affluent neighborhoods were like, this is amazing. 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 too. 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 city-wide. We're going to launch our own service. It's 1975. It's overdue. 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 work for us. You've been doing this for a while now and you're super trained,

but you got to go back and get retrained by our criteria. Yeah. Despite all of the experience, years and years and years of experience, I mean, these guys were working from 1968 and this happened in 1975. You had to go back and retrain, even though you're the original paramedics that all this is based on. And Freedom House losing its contract with the city was a little more insidious than that 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 more affluent and more white neighborhoods said they want their own and they created a city-wide EMS service, 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 city-wide version, rather than just increasing the funding and widening the jurisdiction of Freedom House, who were already good at it and knew what they were doing, he shut it down and started basically a white version of it. That's right. Not to be confused with SETV great Joe Flaherty and Freaks and Geeks father, beloved Freaks and Geeks father, Joe Flaherty. So great. And he was the crazy guy in Happy Gilmore who used their heckle happy. So the end of the Freedom House was very sad, but 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, worked for 35 years in the EMS department, eventually was assistant chief before he retired in 2009. There was another man named Mitchell Brown. He was an EMS commissioner in Cleveland, Ohio, and then ran the Department of Public Safety in Columbus, Ohio, all because of his start at the Freedom House. Isn't that cool? I mean, these guys were just hanging around looking for jobs, and all of a sudden, 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, one in the actual Hill District and one in the Presbyterian University Hospital. And then Moon, who we mentioned, he lobbied for a long time and was finally successful in getting Freedom House medallions placed on the side of every ambulance in the city of Pittsburgh. Which is pretty cool. And there was a woman involved. Her name was Nancy Carolyn. She took over from SAFAR for oversight of the ambulance service, the Freedom House Ambulance in 1973, and apparently lived, ate, and breathed Freedom House Ambulance Services. I love it. Yeah. You got anything else?

Yeah, nothing else, just Roman Mars. That's right. Well, then I have one thing to say. We're out. I like the orange one.