NFPA Journal - Spring 2023 - 49

from hospital appointments-a very
lo-fi kind of system. He saw Freedom
House employees delivering these vegetables
and he said, 'Well, if you can
deliver a vegetable, you can deliver a
person.' Hallen linked up with McCoy,
and the two of them envisioned this
ambulance service working as part of
Freedom House's job training effort.
"
In late 1966, Hallen and McCoy
learned about Safar's ideas for
emergency care, and the three
of them met to discuss the
ambulance idea. What
happened at that meeting?
They asked Safar if he wanted to be
involved in their ambulance project
and Safar had zero interest in something
that small. He started laying out
in a very animated and passionate fashion
the idea he'd been cooking up in his
head for training a new brand of medical
professional and how it would take
months, how it would be hundreds of
hours. Trainees would be in emergency
rooms and the ICU, they'd be trained
to treat seizures and heart attacks and
strokes and trauma. They'd be able to
deliver babies. They'd have this brandnew
kind of ambulance that would be
really advanced, with narcotics on board,
with an orange and white color scheme
so it could be seen a million miles away.
Hallen and McCoy sit there listening to
all of this. They're very progressive men,
one white, one black, but they live in a
world where nothing like this exists. They
listen to this thing raining down on them
and they're aware instantly that what
Safar is describing is nothing short of a
medical revolution. And they were also
aware that they have nobody capable of
doing what he's suggesting.
What did they tell him?
What Safar was suggesting was incredibly
advanced and required highly
skilled people. They said, 'Look, all
this sounds wonderful, we love your
idea, but we don't think you understand
what we bring to the table. We
bring very ordinary people.' But that
was the crux of it, because Safar knew
AMERICAN SIRENS
The Incredible Story of the
Black Men who Became
America's First Paramedics
By Kevin Hazzard
Hachette Books
336 pages, $30
NFPA.ORG/
PERSPECTIVES
Listen to the NFPA
Podcast interview
with Kevin Hazzard
about his new book
American Sirens.
Read an extended
version of the NFPA
Journal interview
with Hazzard.
That [the original class of Freedom
House paramedics] were black men
would've been remarkable now, [and] in
1984, or even a decade earlier, but in '67,
when they started, it was unthinkable.
They got pushback from all sides, handwringing
and head-shaking that carried
with it the usual justifications, but the
subtext was there, it'd always been there,
and sometimes it wasn't even subtext,
but the actual text. Even as Freedom
House was making history, across town a
white truck driver passing a line of black
demonstrators protesting discriminatory
hiring practices in the construction
industry leaned from the window of his
truck to yell, " Want a job, n-s? Join
the army! " It was the same old story, the
anger of one part of America brought to
bear against the wishes of another. The
paramedics knew it well.
As much as possible they ignored
it-the job was too consuming, too
important-but still it felt as if the whole
thing was built to fail. Probably that's
what made the way it ended so painful.
They didn't fail. They succeeded, wildly.
Paramedicine as they practiced it-practically
invented it-worked; it saved lives.
It became a fixture, spawned a subculture,
inspired a hit TV show. It was the
rare innovation so intuitive and obvious
that in hindsight no one could imagine
or even remember a life without it. But
in the end that wasn't enough, and the
Freedom House medics were replaced by
people who followed what they did but
looked nothing like them at all.
-From American Sirens
"
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http://www.NFPA.ORG/PERSPECTIVES
NFPA Journal - Spring 2023

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