40 Years & Counting--Part I: Show Me the Money

It was fall of 1972, and the local fire department was in need of some volunteers. This information came my way via a longtime friend of the family who had been volunteering since the early ’60s. Uncle Rudy was a retired railroad brakeman who spent his time building a basement-size model railroad and running calls. Over the years, he’d taken my brother and me to the fire station on many occasions, so it was already a comfortable place with lots of friendly faces.

I turned in my completed application and found out I’d need to take the 81-hour EMT-Ambulance course offered by one of the local hospitals. That was a requirement if I wanted to ride on the Inhalator Squad. That’s what they called the 1970 International Harvester with the fiberglass extended roof. The primary piece of equipment on board the vehicle was an E&J resuscitator. It was about 75 pounds in a metal suitcase, and per the instructions on the case, you only used it for people who weren’t breathing. That was certainly helpful to know.

I successfully completed the EMT-A course and shortly thereafter finished up the three months of fire training classes and drills that netted me my Firefighter I credentials. I was officially in the game.

Harvey Fire Department is located on the south side of Chicago in Cook County, and even at that point was one of the busiest departments in the region. It had 55 full-time career firefighters and 24 paid-on-call volunteers making up the contingent that responded to calls in one of the most industrialized areas in the nation. Given the incredible volume of factories and already marginal air quality, housing was really affordable. Compared to the single-wide trailer our family of four lived in for the first two years after we left north-central Alabama, we had taken a step up.

Over the next couple of years I continued to run calls while working full-time as a carpenter. In fall 1974, I responded to a job posting at headquarters, hoping to snag one of three full-time openings for a career firefighter, and snag one I did. Even then, there was a growing buzz among our crews about this new idea called “advanced life support,” where care would be delivered by providers with capabilities well beyond that of the EMT-A. The term being tossed about was “paramedic.” Even then, a significant number of our members dug in their heels against this proposed transition, their philosophical position being, “I didn’t sign up to be no ambulance chaser. I want to fight fires and save lives.” Though we certainly ran a ton of fire calls (156 hose jobs in one year), even then close to 80% of our responses were for medical aid.

In spite of the incessant whining of the naysayers, a core group of our progressive-thinking firefighters embraced the concept of ALS, and when Ingalls Memorial Hospital began offering paramedic classes, we took as many slots as they’d let us have. The city still had no interest whatsoever in ALS, being more than content for us to provide care via the Inhalator Squad, so we decided as a group to pay the school tuition out of pocket and trade shifts so we could attend class. It took me 2½ years to pay back the trades I needed so I could attend the six months of medic training.

At the time, our fire department had a women’s auxiliary. For the most part it functioned to set up canteens at major fires to provide hot coffee and doughnuts to the crews. Spearheaded by Dawn, the wife of my shift commander, Captain Jack O’Leary, the women’s auxiliary began pursuing a new focus: pulling together the monies needed to by a real ambulance. Using a door-to-door campaign, they needed just a few weeks to raise the $40,000 required to buy and outfit it, and they then donated it to the city.

In spite of all the hard work and concerted efforts it took to bring the Harvey Fire Department on line as one of the first ALS services in the region, our city fathers remained remarkably indifferent. However, their attitude changed drastically when, about six months into the program, our recently christened new medic unit, Rescue 1, responded to a cardiac arrest at city hall and saved one of the city commissioners, right in front of God, the mayor and the other six commission members. It was an honest-to-goodness return-to-life-and-work event, with just the slightest bit of neuro deficit. Almost as miraculous as the code save, the city fathers suddenly found the money to buy us a second ambulance and even decided that the city would pay for paramedic training in the future.

With this recently discovered funding, we approached the union with our new medic credentials in hand and raised the question of getting some compensation for being paramedic/firefighters. Strangely, the city fathers seemed to have a memory relapse about the recent event with the commissioner at city hall, but in the end they reluctantly agreed to give us a $5 raise per month for being paramedics. That was $60 a year, all for me, in exchange for not getting a full eight hours of sleep for the rest of my career. Wow! Show me the money!

Until next month…

Mike Smith, BS, MICP, is program chair for the Emergency Medical Services program at Tacoma Community College in Tacoma, WA, and a member of the EMS World editorial advisory board.