- [Narrator] Major funding for this program was made possible by the Richard King Mellon Foundation, with additional major funding from UPMC, and generous support from these funders.
Thank you.
(funky bass music) - Back in the sixties, you stood a better chance of surviving a gunshot wound in Vietnam, than you did a car accident in the city of Pittsburgh.
- There weren't ambulances as we think about them today.
People called the police and hopefully the police would actually come and pick them up.
- Relations between the police and the black community were oppressive.
- I found my mom laying on the floor.
Two police officers showed up and said she was drunk, and they were not going to transport her to the hospital.
- You never knew how it was going to turn out.
It was a gamble.
- It was up to us at Freedom House to provide that care that they were not gonna get from the police.
- Freedom House Ambulance Service really turned into an incredible, incredible success story.
(sirens wailing) - We didn't realize that in the very backyard of the Hill District, you had the father of CPR, Dr. Peter Safar.
- Dr. Safar wanted to show that people they marked unemployable, was really just waiting on opportunity.
They were black, they were trained, and they were keeping people alive.
- This is my first big call and I'm going to save this person's life.
(chatter over radio) - [Radio] 7L6, 7L6.
See the woman at 294, Mill Street, apartment 207.
(calm jazz music) - The high point of Black Pittsburgh would've been in the 1940s.
Pittsburgh was the center of making armaments for the war effort, which funded the nightclubs, Black music, Black businesses.
Really created an era of prosperity.
(funky jazz music) - In the evening, we watched the grownups go back and forth to the clubs.
They were all very spiffy, dressed up.
It was quite a joy to watch them.
(upbeat jazz music) - Centre Avenue corridor was filled with businesses.
You never had to leave for anything.
- By the late 1950s, Pittsburgh was really prosperous.
The mills were running but the mills produced tremendous pollution.
People were not interested in living in a place that was so filthy.
So the city set out to do something about it and produced what's called the Renaissance.
(slow piano music) - The word started going around that everybody was gonna have to move.
They were gonna demolish the neighborhood.
I remember wondering, why?
Where are we gonna move to?
What's gonna happen with our friends?
It was a frightening experience.
(somber piano music) They created a racially segregated housing plan, accommodating white families with government subsidies, that enabled them to move to the suburbs.
And they gave Black families public housing.
As the civil rights movement was heating up, the conditions on the street were heating up.
- The NAACP had appointed a man named James McCoy to engage in action against discrimination.
(funky bass music) McCoy established Freedom House Enterprises.
One big need that the Hill had was medical services.
- I can remember as a kid, anytime someone was sick, the big black wagon would come up and they would just throw them in and leave.
They used the same wagon to put dead bodies in, people they arrested, and they also used it to transport people in the community to the hospital.
- In 1966, Mayor David Lawrence was speaking just two blocks from Presbyterian Hospital and he had a massive heart attack.
By the time they got him to the hospital, his brain had been damaged.
He could not recover.
- One of my friends was very sick.
Her mother called the ambulance, the ambulance didn't come.
She ran her daughter, carried her daughter from where she lived to Montefiore Hospital, to take care of this child.
- You had no alternative but to call the police.
- Found my mom laying on the floor.
I picked her up, put her on the sofa, called the police.
I informed them that she was not drunk, that she was sick, she didn't drink, and they said, well, it didn't matter, they weren't gonna take her to the hospital.
I carried her down the stairs and I ended up putting her in the back of a patty wagon.
She died five days later from a cerebral hemorrhage.
- [Larry] This is where a man, Phil Hallen, really stepped in.
He came into Pittsburgh, very aware of these inadequacies of underserved communities.
- In 1967, I was one of the co-founders of the Freedom House Ambulance program.
It grew out of a need in Pittsburgh's Hill District, for medical care.
A friend of mine, who was the administrator at the university hospital, introduced me to Peter Safar.
- As it turned out, Peter Safar was working in the hospital that night that David Lawrence had been brought in.
Peter and Eva were at a conference in Chicago when Elizabeth, who suffered from lifelong asthma, became severely ill. She couldn't breathe.
- Dr. Safar is known as the father of CPR.
- The experimental study you are about to see compared various methods of artificial respiration.
- Dr. Safar and his colleague, James Elam, were doing some experiments that showed that if you put a tube into someone's airway, that you could breathe for them.
Peter found this to be a fascinating idea, and then he conducted some other experiments, in which he gave, believe it or not, curare to volunteers.
Curare paralyzes the breathing muscles, so they could not breathe on their own.
- First by selecting as subjects, men and women of various body types.
Second, by anesthetizing and curarizing these subjects, in order to simulate limp asphyxia victims.
Third, by having untrained lay personnel perform some of these methods.
This boy scout will perform mouth to airway breathing.
He has some difficulty, but corrects himself.
He was able to adequately ventilate subjects weighing up to 210 pounds.
- Someone would, you know, administer mouth to mouth and then you could see, they kept them alive.
I could not imagine getting away with those kinds of experiments now, even if people were willing to volunteer.
Very different time, but very, very powerful proof that this was a technique that could keep people alive.
- Just about the time we were coming together, Safar was looking for a mechanism in which he could take CPR to the streets.
(funky bass music) We literally drove up and down the streets.
We saw a group of people, handed them a leaflet and said, here's who you contact.
(funky bass music) - My name is George McCary the third.
When I signed up, I was 19.
I was one of the original class members of the Freedom House.
Dr. Safar said, well, I'm gonna give you a new chance in life.
I'm gonna give you something to learn.
To the rhythm (funky bass music) Woo To the rhythm Then you had a chance to take all that and you learned how to maneuver yourself on the vehicle.
(siren wailing) - They learned how to do physical assessments.
They learned to put in endotracheal tubes, intravenous lines on the scene.
They did everything.
- By the time the ambulances hit the street, these men had become the most highly trained.
Literally, they were the only trained EMTs in the country.
- My first memory of Freedom House was people coming to take you to the hospital, that looked like you.
That understood you.
- My first runs that I remember very well was the Fifth and Pride.
There was a guy, he had had a heart attack.
To be there, to see the whole system, you know, for me, from me opening the airway, to them shooting drugs in them, to him getting any kind of response.
You know, it's amazing to be on the team, from scratch.
(calm piano music) - Back in the sixties, there was a war going on.
I enlisted and took a bypass test in the Air Force.
They made me a medic.
That's how I got involved in emergency medicine.
When I got out of the Air Force, I came back to Pittsburgh.
My aunt said, you need to go help these people, they got this thing going on called Freedom House.
There's this guy over there, Dr. Peter Safar.
Said, that's the guy that started CPR.
She said, yeah, he's at Pitt.
I said, really?
Okay.
- I joined Freedom House in the fall of 1972.
I was raised in the Hill, so I knew firsthand what type of response the police were providing.
You're living in a underserved, neglected area of the city, so you're not gonna get the proper response from the police.
(somber piano music) - Freedom House was providing a useful medical emergency service.
That was something that everybody was proud of.
- There was a sense of pride on our part, as well as a sense of pride in the community.
- There was times when we would go to gunshot calls and the person that did the shooting was still there.
We didn't have any concern about our own personal safety because of the reputation that we had sustained in the neighborhood itself.
Once you call Freedom House, you are calling someone that's gonna make a difference in this person's life.
- Brought a sense of pride and dignity to the community, to see young, Black men that we knew, working on those wagons.
(siren wailing) - At the very beginning, the police looked at Freedom House oftentimes as a threat to their job security.
There was times when I was cursed out by the police because I corrected them on the treatment they were providing to a particular patient.
(somber piano music) - The cops knew what their limitations were.
It took time, but they recognized the capability of what Freedom House could do.
- In Squirrel Hill, a young kid was struck by a Port Authority bus.
The police arrived on the scene and they didn't know what to do, so one of the police officers requested Freedom House and the police dispatcher said I can't send them because it's not their district.
Police officer responded, well, you need someone out here that knows what the hell they're doing.
Fortunately, we were able to provide care and transport them to Children's Hospital.
(upbeat funky music) - When you had officers call you, you know you'd made it.
- These systems were being copied all over the country and all over the world.
(upbeat funky music) - Peter and I went to Los Angeles.
There was a TV program called Emergency.
They contacted Dr. Safar and then we went to Germany.
We talked about how you could train almost anyone, who was willing and wanted to learn how to take care of somebody in a pre-hospital environment.
- Despite Freedom House's success, we had to overcome a number of roadblocks.
- We started to have issues about money and availability of grants, so the need for diversification became an issue.
- White males came in and got the training and experience, and moved on to better employment opportunities.
And we were left there as being their stepping stone to bigger and better things.
(somber piano music) Naturally, we doubted.
Here's another person coming in to increase their resume.
What we didn't know at that particular time, was that Nancy Caroline was different.
(upbeat funky music) - She was indefatigable in her commitment to this.
She worked night and day.
She rode the trucks, was on scene.
It was an extraordinary kind of training that she made possible.
- She was no taller than a minute, but she was tough, tough as nails.
I never forget, we went to the Hill District.
I said, "you better stay here, Doc."
She said, "get out the way."
We got there and the guy said, what's she doing in here?
She said, don't worry about what I'm doing.
Just get out of my way.
(George laughs) - So she wasn't afraid, she wasn't scared.
Going into people's homes, shooting galleries where people were involving drugs.
- She became part of us.
She became someone that we loved.
She became someone that we trusted.
(upbeat funky music) - While she was teaching us, she said, we were teaching her.
- I was the first person in the country to do a tracheal intubation in the field.
We had an elderly gentleman that was having trouble breathing, and he was unconscious.
My partner and I called Dr. Caroline.
She immediately said, intubate this patient and start an IV on him.
At that particular time, I thought she had lost her mind.
My partner set everything up for me and we intubated the patient, successfully, on the first try.
She was overjoyed and from that point on, it was normal.
(calm piano music) - Freedom House was not particularly well received by the mayor at the time, Flaherty, who had the idea that this was something he had not created, he had no control over and really didn't like.
- The politics became a problem.
We wanted to expand Freedom House.
Dr. Safar was insistent that the programs that we were doing, would make a difference, and he had the statistics to prove it.
- People in the more affluent areas of Pittsburgh were getting a bit frustrated that poor people in the Hill were getting better emergency care than they were.
Flaherty wanted to please the people who voted for him.
- We got a phone call to come see the mayor.
I had a proposal prepared on how Freedom House could expand throughout the entire city.
The Mayor said, the reason why I called you, was because your ambulances are making too much noise.
He said, can you put a bell on on the ambulances?
A bell?
You mean like an ice cream truck?
He said, you leave that proposal with me, I'll give it to my director.
That's when I knew it was the beginning of the end.
- As Freedom House's tenure was in question, we held a disaster drill in downtown Pittsburgh and it went off like clockwork.
It was one of the crowning moments of Freedom House.
We had hoped that that particular moment would let the city leaders know how important it was to maintain Freedom House's ambulance service.
But you have to keep in mind, you're dealing with a Black organization, and the city leaders at that particular time was not about to allow that to happen.
- I took the very last call, October 15th, 1975.
It was a lady who had fallen.
Took her back to Presby and then we signed off the air at 12 o'clock, and turned everything over to the city.
- Flaherty canceled a contract between the city and Freedom House, and started the City of Pittsburgh EMS.
It was a real slap in the face.
- They had a gentleman by the name of Glenn Cannon, who worked for me at Freedom House.
The mayor had hired Glenn to take on and start running EMS.
I tried to work out a deal with the city, that they would take all of the Freedom House personnel, but I didn't have any control over it.
- Unfortunately, we entered into an environment that I would call survival of the fittest.
We were tested on a weekly basis.
Things that you already knew.
- If you don't do this, you're out.
You don't pass, you're out.
Everything is you're out, you're out.
I've been working this shop for seven years.
I don't know how many lives I've saved.
And all of a sudden I'm getting ultimatums?
- It was a very, very difficult time for me, on a lot of levels.
I know they'd adopted the program that I'd put in place, to expand.
Didn't ask me to run it.
It hurt a lot.
- We entered into a program that was designed to systematically eliminate as many of Freedom House's employees as they possibly could.
I had to experience calls where the paramedics refused to transport African Americans to the emergency room, because I didn't think you were sick enough to ride in my vehicle.
- It was right back to what it was before.
The people that took over didn't understand the culture of the community.
They lost something when that happened.
Yeah.
- I knew of the barriers, and the distractions, and the hurdles that I had to overcome.
That's what motivated me to continue my career when I went to the City of Pittsburgh.
I wanted to make a difference.
At that particular time, I was responsible for hiring and recruiting.
She walked into my office and said that she was looking to work for the City of Pittsburgh.
- He said no one had ever taken the initiative to do that before.
He said, there's something about you.
- I kind of mentored her.
From that point on, my head started to swell as she gradually rose up through the ranks, to become the Deputy Chief.
- And that as Deputy Chief.
- And that as Deputy Chief.
- I will well and faithfully discharge.
- I will well and faithfully.
I'm the first African American to hold this title.
But for the shoulders of the giants that I stand on, who are the members of Freedom House, I would not be here.
Their hard work did pay off.
- Freedom House brought the emergency room out of the hospital, onto the street corner.
- There was a need for us to take care of us, because no one else would.
- Nobody was told that they're drunk and we're not gonna take you to the hospital.
That did not happen.
- We shared a lot of happy moments with the community, people in the hospital, doctors that said, thank you, I'm glad you were there.
- We made a difference.
We took care of people.
People who are alive today, because of us.
- That is the legacy of Freedom House Ambulance Service.
(upbeat piano music) (somber piano music) (somber music continues) The foundation of every EMS service in this country began at Freedom House Ambulance Service.
(upbeat instrumental music)
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