How Pittsburgh abandoned Freedom House
In 1966, David L. Lawrence was one of Pennsylvania’s most prominent politicians. But when the fourterm Pittsburgh mayor and former governor collapsed while giving a speech, the fact that he fell just blocks from the city’s biggest hospitals, in Oakland, wasn’t enough to save him.
Just as for every victim of a health emergency in those days in Pittsburgh — or anywhere else, for that matter — the ambulance drivers who arrived had scant medical training. Lawrence died two weeks later withoutregaining consciousness.
Things were much worse another few blocks distant, in the Hill District, a majority-Black neighborhood where those ill-equipped and - staffed ambulances showed up even more slowly, if at all. But as Kevin Hazzard documents in his thoroughly compelling book “American Sirens,” that was about to change.
If it’s a story even most Pittsburghers don’t know, it’s one whose triumphs are as thrilling as its denouementis all too predictably infuriating.
Hazzard, an Atlanta-based author and former paramedic, sketches the prehistory of the modern ambulance to Napoleonic battlefields, but grounds its 20th-century rise in the life of Dr. Peter Safar, the Austrianborn anesthesiologist who basically invented CPR while working in Baltimore.
Safar brought his novel ideas to Pittsburgh, where he was introduced to Philip Hallen, head of the Falk Medical Fund, and Jim McCoy, who ran Freedom House Enterprises, a Black business development outfit based in the Hill.
McCoy led efforts to recruit the first paramedics from among the Hill’s own residents. With rigorous training, the paramedics served the
Hill and Oakland (and, later, Downtown) from 1967-75. They operated under a contract with the city, saved countless lives and brought pride to the Hill — even, Hazzard writes, while suffering racism from some white patients and fighting turf wars with the police who still drove ambulances citywide.
Hazzard, who did extensive interviews and other research, has a novelist’s sense of character and narrative drive. He’s at his best telling the story of John Moon, a hospital orderly who became a Freedom House paramedic in the early ’70s. Moon’s path from a Georgia orphanage and adoptive parents’ home in the Hill to pioneering paramedic makes for gripping and inspiring reading.
But here comes the infuriating part. Despite its medical successes, and its influence on the burgeoning field of street medicine nationwide, Freedom House lost political support at home. Hazzard largely blames MayorPete Flaherty, who — possibly becauseof pressure from police — cut its funding and eventually subsumed it into a new citywide EMS bureau where the skills and knowledge of the Freedom House medics were spurned.As Hazzard writes:
“Incomprehensible as it seemed, a city that for seven years was home to a modern, trendsetting and incredibly competent ambulance corps somehow found itself in 1974 fumbling the effort to replace it with a service everyone already acknowledged to be inferior.”
But if this is a story of Pittsburgh racism, it’s also the story of the paramedics who rose above it. Readers of “American Sirens” will be more than satisfied and can hope Hazzard has helped revive and secure the legacy of everyone who breathed Freedom House into life.
“AMERICAN SIRENS: THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF THE BLACK MEN WHO BECAME AMERICA’S FIRST PARAMEDICS”
By Kevin Hazzard Hachette Books ($30)