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The Forgotten Story of America's First EMT Services

A new documentary tells how a paramedic unit from a troubled part
of Pittsburgh became a national model.

Tanvi Misra

@Tanvim

Mar 3,
2015

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Courtesy of Freedom House Street Survivors

In the 1960s, if you were having a medical emergency, a police van
would respond, not the paramedics. There were no other standardized,
government-run emergency services in America at the time. In Pittsburgh, the
police and firemen who answered these calls lacked proper medical training and
"had little, no, or outdated equipment," according
to the University of Pittsburgh.

All of Pittsburgh's residents suffered. Not even the mayor was
spared. NPR's
Erika Beras shares that story:

In 1966, the city's mayor collapsed. By the time he
reached the hospital in a police car, he had gone too long without oxygen; he
later died.

But these police emergency
vehicles refused to go to some poor black areas, like the Hill
District in Pittsburgh. It was there that the precursor of modern EMT
service was born—partly as an employment-generating initiative, partly as a way
to provide emergency health care to an underserved minority neighborhood. Gene
Starzenski, who became paramedic when he moved to California, tells the forgotten history of these EMTs in a new
documentary titled "Freedom
House Street Saviors."

"Freedom house is revolutionary," Starzenski
tells CityLab. "They're the ones who started all that you see today—but
they never got the claim for it."

In the 1960s, Pittsburgh's
Freedom House organization helped Hill
District residents with employment and voting information. In 1967, Peter Safar,
a University of Pittsburgh
physician (also known as the
"father
of CPR") enlisted Freedom House to help
him implement a plan to provide emergency medical services to the neighborhood
and help its residents get jobs. Safar wanted to train unemployed African
American men (and later women) in the troubled area as ambulance drivers and
EMTs.

Photo of Freedom House from the 1960s. (Courtesy of Gene
Starzenski)

Freedom House ambulances had much more advanced equipment than
the police vans that answered emergency calls. (Courtesy of Gene
Starzenski)

Freedom House emergency responders were trained by doctors like
Peter Safar. (Courtesy of Gene Starzenski)

By the mid-1970s, the model's success made the city
government take notice, and it soon took over the program.

Starzenski says the ambulances people see driving through
America's streets today all trace back to the Freedom House program. Other
cities trying out similar programs, such as Seattle and Miami, were not as
advanced at the time, he says. By 1974, the U.S. government recognized
Pittsburgh for having the best city emergency services program, and today
the city has a
booming healthcare sector.

The legacy of Freedom House goes beyond Pittsburgh. Nancy
Caroline, a Pittsburgh physician who trained Freedom House EMTs in the
1970s, later went on to write a seminal
text that's still used to train paramedics today. Recently, St. Paul,
Minnesota implemented an EMT recruitment model similar
to Freedom House to make their paramedic force more diverse.

But still not a lot of people outside Pittsburgh know about this
buried chapter in the city's history, and that's why Starzenski made the documentary. Watch
the trailer here:

H/t: NPR Code
Switch

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About the Author

Tanvi Misra is a staff writer for CityLab
covering demographics, inequality, and urban culture. She previously
contributed to NPR's Code Switch blog and BBC's online news magazine.

All Posts

@Tanvim

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