Garys Books: American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics

Book: American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics
Basic Information : Synopsis : Characters : Expectations : Thoughts : Evaluation : Book Group : Book References : Good Quotes : References

Basic Information:

Author: Kevin Hazzard

Edition: ePub on Libby from the Sacramento Public Library

Publisher: Hachette Books

ISBN: 0306926075 (ISBN13: 9780306926075)

Start Date: November 18, 2022

Read Date: December 20, 2022

336 pages

Genre: History, Interracial Understanding

Language Warning: Low

Rated Overall: 3 ½ out of 5

History: 3 out of 5

Synopsis:

Hazard starts with an emergency which John Moore responds to. Then the rest of Part One is a review of Moore’s life. Part Two talks about Dr Safer who envisioned a mobile hospital unit responding to emergencies. Dr Nancy Caroline is introduced. Part Three goes through Freedom House being set up, people being trained to be paramedics and what they needed to respond with. The last Part is the dismantling of Freedom House providing emergency services.

Cast of Characters:

John Moon-Paramedic with Freedom House
Ragin-A former paramedic
Will Holland-supervisor with Freedom House Ambulance
Peter Safar-Noted doctor who co-invented CPR, the first ICU and instigator of paramedicine
Nancy Caroline-director of Freedom House Ambulance. Moved on to Israel and became its “Mother Teresa”
Phil Hallen-idea of an ambulance service on The Hill
Jim McCoy-Black activist, founder of Freedom House, general
Arthur Davis-Part of initial class. “Funny” mind. Itinerant worker
Dave Rayzer-Part of initial class. Bookbinder. Out of work
Michael Blackman-Part of initial class. Criminal background
Dave Thomas-turned 21
Leroy Morant
Pearl Porter-dispatcher
Walt Brown-Night supervisor. Big personality.
Curtis Scott-former bookie, in his mid-sixties
Harvey Gandy-former cab driver
Mitchell Brown-medic in Vietnam. WOrked way up from paramedic to crew chief to director of operations. Leader of paramedics.
Bill Raynovich-Second white guy hired. Medic in the Navy. Comfortable around blacks in his unit. Stayed till the end.
George McCary-Became Moore’s partner. Easy to be around, confident..
Pete Flaherty-Mayor of Pittsburg
Robert Rade Stone-Council person. Opponent to Flaherty. May have been corrupt.
Glenn Cannon-urologist. He was the first city director of ambulance services.
Darnella Wilson-Dispatcher. Last hire of Freedom House.

Expectations:

Recommendation: NPR
When: November 5, 2022
Date Became Aware of Book: November 5, 2022
How come do I want to read this book: Talks about the state of emergency services in the United States was before Freedom House was established. It was staffed by all blacks in Pittsburg. From there, their reputation grew and so did the general quality of emergency services grow.
What do I think I will get out of it? Background and appreciation

Thoughts:

I am a bit disappointed in this book. Not so much from the writing, which tells a good story. But more by the lead up to it. Let us start with the title: American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics. To me this is saying this will be a story about Blacks who are the first, and only paramedics in America. The title is only partially true. About half of the book is about the black paramedics. The other half is primarily concerned with the Austrian doctor, Dr Peter Safar, and with the Jewish doctor, Dr Nancy Caroline who ran the ambulance service for a year.

Also in the run up to Freedom House’s role in ambulance service, there were previous services which tried to do a semblance of medical care on the streets before Freedom House. Also it sounds like other cities were trying to do similar projects as Freedom house, but were not as advanced.

I think the book is a victim of too high expectations from the various writeups. From the writeups, it sounds like this is a Black only group. The ambulance medics were almost all Black. But three of the four main people to either start or run Freedom House Ambulance were white. This does not seem to be congruent to the line of being a Black organization. The author does spend a fair amount of time and dynamic with the Blacks of the group. But a good third to one half of the book is about the whites of the organization.

I do think the Blacks deserve a great deal of credit in the making of Freedom House. I for one, would not come close to doing what they did. Also I am not arguing that Safar or Caroline should not have been part of Freedom House. Obviously they were a very important part of Freedom House’s story. My contention is that the build up to the book leads one to believe this was a Black only endeavor.

An observation is that much of the story is told through John Moon’s mouth. It sounds like it is a pretty fair telling of the Freedom House story.

Prologue

John Moon hears on his radio that the police have someone who is having a psychiatric emergency and is being combative. Moon races there and finds it is his friend Ragin who is the one. He asks if he can have a crack at him. This nonchalance was a learned habit. … To practice medicine in the street a paramedic must first gain control of the environment. Ragin had been a paramedic with Freedom House, like John until it got disbanded. Since then Ragin was on the streets.

Their journey started just a few blocks from where they now stood, in the basement of Presbyterian-University Hospital, when a small group of Black men—some forty-four students in all—were selected to take the world’s first paramedic course. That was back in 1967. It was now 1984. Those who did would go on to staff a pioneering ambulance service called Freedom House, work that would change the world, truly, and inspire a whole nation—John included—to follow them. Ragin had been one of those men.

It was the same old story, the anger of one part of America brought to bear against the wishes of another.

Book One

CHAPTER ONE

In 1971 John Moon was working as an orderly in a Pittsburg hospital when he saw a couple Black EMT’s with authority. Even in the North, Blacks still were repressed without authority in 1971. Moore thoughtLimited as it was, the job revealed a potential for compassion and empathy that he didn’t know he possessed and that could, if allowed to grow, give him an identity.

medics have no specialty

Moore saw more EMT’s and that they were from Freedom House Ambulance. They were paramedics. what John wanted was a place in this world where he felt he counted

CHAPTER TWO

Talks about John Moon’s background. His mother hardly took care of her children-Her life was a trap to be escaped. So she drank. “Long as I’m not working,” she’d say, “I can get drunk.”. His father did spend time with them, but he put in long hours. His mother died. Father tried, but could not take care of the kids, so he put them into foster care at an orphanage. Note: Moore’s father could not take care of the kids, but he loved them. Later on he tried to get them back and could not.

Hazard talks about urban renewal. He quotes James Baldwin saying that when he heard the words urban renewal, he understood it to mean Negro Removal. Urban renewal was changing the face of America with little thought given to the fate of the removed

CHAPTER THREE

Carrie Steele-Pitts Home-the orphanage. Describes the orphanage and the environment. It looks like the orphanage is a good place, but as Hazzard says, an orphanage isn’t a family. It does not look like the home was a bad place, it seems like it is a caring place. But from going from free to roam to confinement, took adjustment. For one thing, Now he had nowhere to hide. Before when something he did not like happened, he ended up under the house. Also there were thirty kids under a single person. His father would sometimes visit, but that got less and less until it stopped.His father died. Then one day, a relative came and said she would be adopting him and his sister,

CHAPTER FOUR

His adopted parents lived in Pittsburgh. They took a bus from Atlanta to Pittsburgh. There, beyond his window, lay the first mountains he’d ever seen, an indication that his world was widening. I am always amazed when people say they have not seen mountains or oceans. I have been blessed to be able to experience them in abundance.

Moore’s life was changing. Even as he embarked on his new life, he couldn’t let go of the one he’d left behind. This is true of grownups, much less kids. He never really had a family. Also his new family was not sure how to react to him. He didn’t know how to be in a family. Moore did not act like the rest of the family, so he was getting in trouble frequently.

CHAPTER FIVE

As a ninth grader, Moore got a job in a hardware store, stocking shelves. This led to money and a boost in his self esteem. His neighborhood was called The Hill. Urban Renewal wreaked havoc on the community, destroying homes and areas. Political promises never were fulfilled and this left a void which got filled with drugs and crime. His senior year was 1968 and change was in the air.

CHAPTER SIX

And then MLK was killed, which shook the nation and it created a riot on The Hill. The Pennsylvania National Guard came, not to bring peace, but They came to make sure nothing happened to the business district or City Hall, to Squirrel Hill and all the other rich white neighborhoods. They were here to contain, to make sure whatever was happening in the Hill District stayed there. So the end result was the further destruction of The Hill. Similar things happened across America.

Of course a report was done and it was found that recent violence in Black communities was rooted in racism, police brutality, and poor prospects for advancement—probably shouldn’t have taken so long to find. The lesson which Moore was taught by his parents was “It’s a white man’s world, John. You gotta be the kinda Black guy the white man wants.”

Kerner Commission

CHAPTER SEVEN

Moore has an interview with Will Holland and it does not go well. Moore did not know anything which Freedom House needed. Holland’s response-get some training.

Book TWO

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hazzard talks about what a paramedic is. He notes that they give drugs; they diagnose (not really, but we’re splitting hairs) and treat cardiac irregularities; they slip tubes into the lungs and breathe for anyone not breathing; they shock hearts that aren’t beating. All this they do outside of the hospital, generally on an ambulance. They’re often partnered with EMTs, who are skilled providers but have less training and cannot perform the advanced life support techniques that medics do. And they represent an ideal. An assurance from society, backed by money, that human lives are sacred and will be saved anywhere and everywhere they’re in danger.

He goes through the history of “medicine on the street” including Jesus healing and Hemingway, who drove a Red Cross ambulance in Italy, was injured by shrapnel and spent months convalescencing... During war, it was shown there was a need to take care of soldiers at the front. This required trained medics. But after wars, these trained medics would fade away into society. So there was not a good system in place on the streets of America to save lives.

CHAPTER NINE

Hazzard goes through who Peter Safar is. In the fall of 1966, that project [Safar was creating] was to sketch out the parameters of a state-of-the-art emergency medical service.

A Pennsylvania politician collapsed on stage. He died.

CHAPTER TEN

Lists the history of Pete Safar.

CHAPTER ELEVN

Returns to the story of the dead politician. Safar sees he is clinically dead, but biologically alive. He was restored back to living, but the brain was damaged from the prolonged time without oxygen.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Talk about Safar and Elam figuring out CPR/artificial respiration. Hazard describes the initial trials. The first person to try resuscitating a person never once doubted that Peter had everything under control and that, if necessary, he could avert disaster. It was a success. Elam was there as a witness. Elam was not entirely an ally and in fact had begun to feel his initiative was being stolen by this young upstart who’d turned his thoughts into action.

The method was to paralyze the victim until they could not breath on their own. It would be impossible to overstate just how close to the edge Safar was pushing it at this point. The old method failed; Safar’s method worked wonderfully. Call it what you want. For the first time in human history, someone who’d stopped breathing and had no pulse could be kept alive until they reached a doctor. CPR even preserved the health of the body’s organs, including the one most likely to be damaged by a lack of oxygen—the brain.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The politician was removed from life-support.

Safar realized the issue was that the politician got no medical care between the place he had his heart attack and the hospital. The chain’s only as strong as its weakest link, and here a criminally weak ambulance system had condemned an otherwise healthy man to die.

Dr Safar’s daughter died. If CPR had been administered sooner she would have lived.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The death of the politician opened the door to upgrade medicine on the street from running with a body to being able to do some rudimentary items in transit. Phil Hallen was the one working on this. Since The Hill had the worst service, he focused there. He then found Jim McCoy at Freedom House. FREEDOM HOUSE WAS the brainchild of McCoy, a civil rights activist, with the long-term goal of fostering Black-owned businesses. In the meantime, to build capital as the organization got on its feet, Freedom House was selling produce in the street from the back of a truck.

McCoy said, “A person does not get into the movement. The movement is in a person.”

Hallen convinced McCoy that bringing health care would mean making Blacks health care workers, upgrading their status.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

McCoy and Hallen heard they needed to talk with Safar. Safar said that he wanted to train paramedics—a phrase just then coming into existence. This would be training them to handle almost any emergency on-site, even before getting to the hospital. Safar wanted to end the “swoop and scoop” process that typified ambulance work, in the process changing an entire culture.

The concern which McCoy and Hallen had was that the Hill had no people who were even remotely trained like that. Safar’s response was “I’m trying to train people, who don’t have the slightest bit of training, to be professionals,”

McCoy and Hallen were prepared to follow a good idea wherever it led.

the Freedom House ambulance corps was to be first and foremost a beacon of pride. The only question was, could they pull it off?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

And then the planning and trying to find the money to fund the initial class of 45 students.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

All of the men in the initial class of 44 lived on the margins. Conley felt the men he’d helped pull in off the street “had little to look forward to” before Freedom House, but he believed the program would transform them from “life-failures to life-givers. Safar was unlike the men who were in that class. This was a concern-would the men listen to him. The task to transform was immense.

The screening process took the class from 44 to 25. Even so, there were dropouts and discipline problems which brought the class size down to 12. The class was grueling, intense. They were sent to Baltimore to get street training. Even in a hospital, the assumption was that these black men were there to perform low function jobs, not to learn medicine. for now he was forced to drop intubation from the list of skills the medics would master during their course-when there were not enough opportunities.

It was during the riots following King’s assassination did these men hit the streets.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Description of what happened with a call. Many times it was an overdose-that is the result of living in a place like The Hill or Oakland-not the California city, but a part of Pittsburg. Hazard notes that This was the kind of place ambulance cops had once avoided and the morticians in their hearses refused to go, the kind of patient who without Freedom House would get no treatment, no transport, no nothing.

on July 15, a call had gone out for a woman with seizures on a city bus at the 3900 block of Forbes Avenue. She was transported without incident to Presby, and her routine and largely unremarkable emergency marked the official start of the Freedom House Ambulance Service.

In the first year, they responded to 6,000 calls. The ambulance crew was definitely not the cream, but they did the job and were part of the neighborhood. The impression they gave was that They all just walked tall—you could tell they were proud of themselves

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Talked about Mitchell Brown.

To get money, they would also need to hire white people. Safar went to Brown to tell him why. First white guy hired did not last more than an hour-too many black faces and the neighborhood where they worked. They hired Bill Raynovich. While he had the credentials, would he accept and be accepted by the blacks? It turns out that on the trucks, nobody batted an eye. If medicine teaches you anything, it’s that we all bleed red and die easy, and for the Freedom House crews, only one thing really mattered: When everything went wrong, as it frequently did, and all hell broke loose, could they trust him to hold his own and have their backs?

CHAPTER TWENTY

Freedom House Ambulance came to the forefront of street medicine throughout the nation. Heron was raging rampant throughout the nation. The ambulances started carrying Narcan to counteract overdoses.

Book THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Moore took classes and became a medic with Freedom House Ambulance. He had something to be proud of: he swore that someday he’d be something, and now at last he was.

He blew his first time out. Too afraid he would make a mistake. According to his boss, the sin was panicking. He was disappointed in himself and could feel the disappointment of his boss.He then got partnered with George McCary.

Hazzard talks about McCray and how this was a job made for him. … he liked that there was always the chance of touching a moment that felt close to grace. This is a wonderful statement. We each could have this moment. A bit of eternity in our lives.

The sense of everything is going to be already and it is not that serious is what Moore needed and McCray provided. Ease bred success and success bred the ease to do well the next time. The job became Less like what he was paid to do and more like what he was born to do

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Pittsburgh gets a new mayor, Pete Flaherty, who started off by antagonizing the police. He fired the police chief, fired two thousand workers. Then was going to go after Freedom House.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The new mayor slashed funding by half. The experts weighed in on how good Freedom House’ service was. Pittsburgh actually lost money because it would not fund the service. The Feds did not give Pittsburgh grant money.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Continuing on talking about Flaherty. How he drifted so far towards conservatism that the next time he ran, he not only ran as the Democratic candidate, but as a write-in Republican and won. Helping Blacks was no longer fashionable. It is of some debate if Flaherty was a racist or an opportunist.

How Pittsburgh did its emergency medical work was disorienting, particularly to the men working it-and it was all male and almost all Black. It meant something as elemental as an emergency call—the simple act of saving a human life—could take on the dimensions of a disorienting, at times upside-down, unreality. Such as the boundary of operations. At the boundary of the Hill and downtown, they needed to turn off the siren and act like a normal vehicle, even if someone’s life was on the line. It felt to him [Moore] as if the rug was being pulled out from under them, and that was frustrating and infuriating and incredibly sad in its own way, but that was just emotion talking, and emotion clouded your judgment when what the scene of an emergency called for was focus, so he channeled all that emotion into a hardened resolve. Whatever they threw in his way, he’d get over it and save the life at hand.

And then there was the issue of a Black man needing to care for a white woman. Sometimes they refused care.

And then there were the cops. The police did not recognize many times that first Blacks could have medical knowledge, they could have authoritative knowledge of the situation and that they were better able to handle the situation. Jules Brown, a medic, said that it was the consequence of putting a rough mindset to fragile use.

The people at the top abused them, and it normalized the behavior and all but ensured the abuse would trickle down into every interaction the medics had

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In rescuing others, he’d [Moore] found a way to rescue himself.

Stories of rescues.

Book FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The recruitment of Dr Nancy Caroline to head up Freedom House Ambulance.

Flaherty was now into upgrading ambulance service in Pittsburgh. But he wanted to cancel Freedom House. Community support of Freedom House was shown. Hazzard goes into the back and forth. The police take over of services was set, but the lead up was in disarray.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

President Ford started an initiative to establish federal policy on ambulance care. Safar was on the committee to decide the standards and select a model for implementation.

The need for an administrative replacement for Safar at Freedom House was evident. He is an innovator, not an administrator. The doctors Safar thought would be good refused, until Caroline was asked.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Caroline was both of a scientific mind as well as an artistic one. Talks about Caroline’s background. Caroline also could be mischievous. But there was a sense of what I call awe:

Maybe it was better to let it be, to leave the magic unpierced. I think those of us who are interested in finding out how things work can take a hint from this. Sometimes it is better to leave the magic or mystery than to expose something to the light and still be left feeling empty.

In the 1960s, when Harvard still admitted only men, intellectual, independent-minded women with their eyes on Cambridge applied to its sister school, Radcliffe College. She went to medical school at Case.

The sense of mystery also is what drew her in. On a smoke break, an ambulance arrived. She asked what that was. The person said do not bother, no real medicine was practiced there. That was a hook with bait which drew her in. It was this question which got its way back to Safar and why he knew her name. She had a list of questions and Safar must’ve smiled as he read her note. At last he’d found his doctor. In 1975 Safar offered her the job.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Caroline is now the director. The pressure was on to be the best EMT’s around.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Caroline had no clue how things went on the street. What she saw and heard did not make sense. It also seemed disorganized. She then instituted something she called maximally obnoxious and her Orwellian reign of terror. One tactic was for her to challenge them on what and why they took some action during one of their event emergencies. This drove away the men, but they returned and became better. She started going on their missions as well.

Not only did she teach, but she learned. Like Safar and John, she found salvation in the saving, in its noise and chaos, and chased it into “the squalor and misery… the decay, the violence, the depravity.”

Caroline had other duties, but Freedom House was taking all of her time. She got pushback and pushed right back as well. And the calls were sometimes dangerous as well.

The medics were what Caroline was looking for: warmth, friendship and purpose.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Caroline tweaked (or revamped) a Safar class. Now it was about survival, about making Freedom House indispensable, about letting everyone everywhere know they were as good as it got, certainly too good to bury alive. Caroline’s style was to go back to the basics and build from there. This would be frustrating, particularly for those who had been around for a while. I can understand that having sat through classes which I knew the material already. Caroline was trying to get them to understand how to talk with medical people. The problem might’ve been with the doctors, but the fix would have to come from the medics themselves. “If you don’t learn to speak like they do,” she said, “they’ll never stop laughing.”

This led the medics to revere Caroline and they would follow her anywhere.

Moore, under Safar’s guidance, intubated a patient. This was a major upgrade for the medics.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Freedom House Ambulances were doing well. They were getting national attention, saving lives locally, even in hard circumstances such as cardiac arrest. Caroline put on a display for an international symposium on trauma and critical medicine. The practices were messes. She gave Walt Brown the job of seeing it put together.

Caroline tried to get cooperation with the police. Lip-service, but no change. Cops were still doing bad medicine.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Freedom House was now playing a game of trying to beat the police to those people who needed medical care. Caroline attempted to even the playing field by obtaining a police scanner.

There was one call where both Moore and a cop risked their lives to rescue a man. Moore showed the cop how to do certain techniques. In the end, the cop’s response was “we need to work together more often.” What is the face of victory? If you had asked John at that exact moment, he would’ve said it looks something like surprise

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

This chapter is the high point of the book.

It is show time at the symposium. Caroline’s stomach was in knots, but John [Moore] loved the attention. Previously I thought the author said when John was asked to put the breathing tube in OR that he shied away from people observing him.

The demonstration was eye-opening for all. Doctors saw that lay people could perform as first responders. Locals saw that they had a top flight team ready to respond to emergencies. It was a success.

Caroline and Safar would develop a textbook, training and procedures for other EMT’s. Freedom House was chosen as the demonstration project.

Moore did his first intubation in the field. This was the result of Caroline. Each time she opened a door they weren’t supposed to enter, a growing sense that they belonged and they were vital, a determination.

The attending doctor could not believe that a medic had done it. Caroline knew he could intubate, that it was only a matter of time for that part. On the other hand, the world did not see them as medical. So They’d have to be better than anyone, all the time, just to be accepted. Pulling that off would take a level of supreme confidence that couldn’t be faked. … That’s what Nancy was doing. Making them feel worthy enough to stand up to whatever came their way. It might’ve been her job to carry them to the door

Book FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

And then the Freedom House Ambulance was no more. The City took over the service. But Preby Hospital, Freedom House and Safar were pushed aside. City employees, not the police, would be on the ambulances. Moore was relegated to being a baggage boy.

When the city started hiring, they did what seemed impossible then and seems so painfully inevitable all these years later. They took the newer and inexperienced students, the white guys, first.

The city wanted to hire Caroline. Her condition was that they hire the Freedom House medics. This was the difference between Safar and Caroline. For Safar it had always been about advancing the medicine, even now. But Nancy, who had more than proven her commitment to that goal, also shared Hallen’s vision: the people mattered.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Caroline had been in a relationship with a married man. The man was an alcoholic.He committed suicide. She put her whole being into Freedom House.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Caroline was not the only hardship. Moore and the rest of the medics also had issues. At the time, he took this as evidence of self-reliance but admits, years later, it must surely have felt to Betty like isolation. His refusal to talk or share, to let anyone else in at all, would eventually tear them apart, but in the summer of 1975 it was what allowed him to keep going.

Moore wondered what mattered? Did patients matter? Did running a good efficient service matter? Did Moore matter?

The shutting down of Freedom House was unfair, ugly, full of deceit. The medics were frustrated and angry. Caroline was not giving up. She hoped her medics would not either. Caroline decided to go public with what was happening, if they did not hire the medics.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The end of Freedom House Ambulance. Caroline says the medics have reason to be proud. At the end, when a real serious emergency would happen, the police recognized it was the Freedom House medics who knew what they were doing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

October 15, 1975, at 11:59pm, this went on the air: This is Mr. Zepfel, manager of Freedom House ambulance service. It is now 11:59 p.m. As agreed with the City of Pittsburgh, we are now going off the air.

Bill Raynovich, who was expected to fizzle in less than a week, stayed with the equipment until it could be picked up. Why? He wanted to honor the job, to follow through. To close the doors.

Caroline was told, if she had come earlier she might have saved the operations. She said they had it wrong. It is they who saved her. “How many people, not only in Pittsburgh, but all across the country, owed their lives to the pioneering work done by Freedom House over eight years? I cannot escape the feeling that they were cheated.”

Would the medics ever see each other again?

CHAPTER FORTY

The city went back on its promises. Men were offered jobs and then told it was a different, lesser job. Moore was given a blue uniform, like a police one. He dressed without ceremony or emotion. There was no pride in these clothes. This contrasts with the first day he put on the Freedom House white uniform-pride for what it represented. Moore’s thoughts were the same with the rest of the former Freedom House medics. Of those first days after the transition John could only say, “I became a second-class citizen.”

An example is Darnella Wilson. She went from being a dispatcher to being given the opportunity to ride in the ambulance under Freedom House to being an unarmed guard of prisoners with the city. Wilson was treated horribly there. But eventually became a dispatcher in the EMS center. Then went on to work on an ambulance. This was the exception.

The city hired Freedom House staff, but did everything in its power to get rid of them. Moore was treated as a servant not as a highly trained medic.

And the Hill was approached with fear from the white medics. They were treated as scum rather than patients. Definitely a contrast from Freedom House.

Caroline saw what was happening. Also the city shorted her as well. She was not able to institute high standards like there was at Freedom House. She quit. Aims Coney, whose involvement with Freedom House went back to the very beginning, said the “personnel who transferred to the city found a lack of the standards and the mission which had characterized Freedom House.” It is the accepting and striving for higher standards than what is currently have is what gives people meaning and purpose.

About half of the medics left. Some got fired, some left in disgust. Others gathered in study groups and persevered. The only way to get respect from someone who doesn’t want to give it is to walk right over and take it.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Tells how Moore started to fit in. The days were without purpose. He had become just a baggage handler. That is until a the new guys met their first cardiac arrest patient. They froze. Then turned to Moore to do something. Moore’s thought was it is something entirely different to actually do treatment than to hear about it in a lecture. To be faced with a person whose life you either will or won’t save. All that knowledge and the only thing that matters is whether you can put it to use.

Moore did something. He commanded action and they did it. He knew what to do in a crisis. Other Freedom House medics had similar things happen to them. by the end of the year, the guys from Freedom House ceased being the guys from Freedom House and were seen as the one thing all along they knew themselves to be: paramedics.

EPILOGUE

Caroline had a full year since joining Freedom House. And now she was the city’s medical director and writing the book on emergency medical care.

Hazzard goes through where are they now.

International Resuscitation Research Center, renamed the Safar Center. Another Safar creation, he had least had a hand in it, was the Resusci Annie doll. This is used to train medics.

Caroline moved to Israel. She pioneered emergency care there. She started Hospice of the Upper Galilee.

Moore, after being passed over several times, went in, demanded to be promoted. He was when the next opportunity came up. He met up with Ragin and that got him thinking about the bigger picture. He worked to bring disadvantaged people into being first responders. He retired in 2009.

Amera Gilchrist

Evaluation:

American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics is a well written book by Kevin Hazzard, a former paramedic. Hazzard shows the role in which Black men from a devastated area of Pittsburgh were trained and became the first modern day paramedics. It is a story which is easy to become engrossed in..

But there were two aspects to this story which seemed misleading; misleading at least in expectations. First, most of the story of Blacks is told through the eyes of one man, John Moon. This is not a terrible flaw, the title seemed to be more inclusive than that. Moon’s story is one which should hold your attention.

And that leads to the second misleading part-the subtitle: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics. I am estimating that close to half of the story is about the whites who lead the ambulance services: Dr Peter Safar and Dr Nancy Caroline. The expectation was this is a story about Blacks making good. But when the story is largely about these two and how they taught and brought along men from a troubled neighborhood that is different from my expectations both from the subtitle and the articles promoting the book.

I do advocate you read the book as the story is a good one, an eye opening story. These men did a whole bunch better than I would ever do. Just go into the book with an understanding of what the book is about.

Notes from my book group:

When you see an ambulance on the street, what is your reaction?

What is a paramedic? Do you need them in your community?

Safar wanted to train men on The Hill to become paramedics who did not have a background in medicine. What was being risked by doing this? Did Safar have any personal risk? Do you think this was a good risk to take?

Hazzard goes into the term urban renewal. When you heard this term, what do you think of? How does Hazzard portray urban renewal? Have you seen an area which has undergone renewal? What happens to the displaced people? Is the upheaval in a neighborhood worth the results?

George McCary says that he liked that there was always the chance of touching a moment that felt close to grace. What does he mean by that? Have you ever had a moment like that?

As Moore relaxed on the job and started feeling comfortable in it, it felt Less like what he was paid to do and more like what he was born to do. Other people say they found salvation through their work. Have you had a job which seemed like this is what you were meant to do? [Christians use the term this is a person’s calling.]

Pittsburgh gets a new mayor, Pete Flaherty. Flaherty seemed bound and determined to dismantle the Freedom House ambulance service. Why do you think he tried to do this? What factors were driving his decision? Do you think he did it from racists intentions? On what basis do you think this? Even if his intentions are not racist, do you think the results were?

One of the breakthroughs Caroline made was to instill a sense of professionalism in the medics. This professionalism, they learned to communicate on a professional level with other medical staff. Why is it important to communicate in the same way as others in your profession? Isn’t knowing something enough?

One of the medics says this about how the police thought about the Freedom House medics: consequence of putting a rough mindset to fragile use. What did he mean by this?

Safar was very much goal oriented: advancing medicine. Caroline loved medicine, but was also people oriented. Talk about the differences in accomplishments which Safar and Caroline had. Could either one of them do the other’s job well? i.e., Could Safar be a good department head? Could Caroline be good at leading committees setting national agendas or figuring out advanced techniques?

As Freedom House dissolves and Moore is given menial tasks, he wonders what matters? What conclusions does he come up with? What does matter? How important is your job? To whom? What makes it matter?

Even with the city promising to hire the Freedom House personnel, they were given second-class jobs and were treated badly on their jobs. Do you think it was racism? Determination to do in Freedom House? Something else?

After the 1968 riots, the Kerner Commission found that recent violence in Black communities was rooted in racism, police brutality, and poor prospects for advancement. Consider the protests/riots after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, how much has changed since the Commission came to its conclusions?

Do you think the sub-title gives a fair description of the book? How would you have labeled the book?

How do you want your life to change because you read this book?

Many of these questions are either from or adapted from LitLovers.

Why the title of American Sirens?

Does this story work as a work of history?

Did the ending seem fitting? Satisfying? Predictable?

Which character was the mostLikeable? The least?

Which character did you identify with?

Every story has a world view. Were you able to identify this story’s world view? What was it? How did it affect the story?

In what context was religion talked about in this book? Was there anybody you would consider religious?

Why do you think the author wrote this book?

What would you ask the author if you had a chance?

What “takeaways” did you have from this book?

What central ideas does the author present?

Are they personal, sociological, global, political, economic, spiritual, medical, or scientific

What evidence does the author use to support the book's ideas?

Is the evidence convincing...definitive or...speculative?

Does the author depend on personal opinion, observation, and assessment? Or is the evidence factual—based on science, statistics, historical documents, or quotations from (credible) experts?

What implications for you, our nation or the world do these ideas have?

Are these idea’s controversial?

To whom and why?

Describe the culture talked about in the book.

How is the culture described in this book different than where we live?

What economic or political situations are described?

How did this book affect your view of the world?

What questions did you ask yourself after reading this book?

Talk about specific passages that struck you as significant—or interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad...?

What was memorable?

Book References:

Gone with the Wind byMargaret Mitchell
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Carrie by Stephen King
Emergency Care in the Streets by Nancy Caroline

Good Quotes:

First Line: It took Ragin screaming in their faces on the corner of Fifth and Market for people to notice him.
Last Line: They did something truly remarkable, for that or any other time, and their story goes something like this.…
A person does not get into the movement. The movement is in a person. Quote from Jim McCoy, Chapter Fourteen
it was better to let it be, to leave the magic unpierced. Chapter Twenty-Eight
The only way to get respect from someone who doesn’t want to give it is to walk right over and take it. Chp Forty
To be faced with a person whose life you either will or won’t save. All that knowledge and the only thing that matters is whether you can put it to use. Chp Forty-One