January 10, 2024 • 56 mins
In part two of this week's series, Margaret continues her conversation with Kaveh Hoda about the down-and-out Black men who created the world's first modern paramedic service, way more recently than you'd imagine.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast about cool people who did cool things. Uh,
not to be mistaken with our evil nemesis podcast Cool
People Who Did Cool Things, which is about cool people
who did cool stuff. That all makes sense and is
totally a bit that I'm totally going to keep. I'm
(00:25):
Mardur Kiljoy and I'm the host and my guest is Kavejda. Hi,
I'm back, I'm back. I know, thank you for having
me back. I missed you in these two days that
separate the recordings. I can't believe you actually made me wait.
I know in that room a lot so hard, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Really uncomfortable, but listen, I'm here to I'm just so
excited to be here. I'm not going to complain.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
This is right. Yeah, I told him that he's allowed
to leave the room once we finished recording. I hope
it never ends. Yeah, that's right. And also here is Sophie.
Sophie not a doctor, but you are the audience's doctor.
Are we going to take turns each episode to be
the doctor? Medical advice would you like to provide free
(01:13):
of charge to our listeners.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Even if you're not leaving the house that day. You
should still wear sunscreen.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
That's like skincare advice that's not bad you just in
case you mean like in case you leave, or in
case like the uview lights like penetrate your house.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
I mean all of the above, preferably a mineral sunscreen.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, I will say Sophie is someone who taking skincare
advice from makes sense. It does you have I don't
know how to say this without sounding like a serial killer.
That's what I was just thinking.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I will say it is something that I take care of. Yeah,
like really, it's really really I have like a whole
cabinet that's just skincare.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I figured out how to control it, and I was like, oh,
this is good for me.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
It's strong work, strong work. It took me a long
time to actually get into skincare, and I'm a little
bit sad that I waited so long, but it's it's
been working.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, where sunscreen. This podcast was edited by Oh right, Ian, Nope,
what Oh we already did this, Daniel, Daniel.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Is it still so new?
Speaker 1 (02:31):
We're totally keeping and we're totally keeping that in Hi
Ian and Danel.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Hian and Danel I ever wont to say hi at
least a Daniel, because Daniel's Danel. I love you, And
then everyone listening at home you have to stop saying Hi, Ian,
and you have to start saying Hi, Danel, otherwise Daniel
will know he does. It's wild.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Also if you did, if you didn't listen to our
Q and eight, they just switched around shows, they're both
they're both still they're both still our best boys, don't worry.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, and they're both doing fine. Our theme music was
still written for us by unwoman. And this is part
two in a two parter about some really I feel
like this is like such a distilled, cool people who
did cool stuff episode where it's just it's just some
people who did really cool stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Yeah, do you almost feel bad about the fact that's
so good, like that they're so cool?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, I mean like I'm like, there's got to be
something terrible under the you know, I mean, like everyone has.
But no, I'm mostly just excited. I'm it's such a
why I'll just tell you this story and then you
can also be excited about it. And if for anyone
who's listening, you should go back and listen to part
one because otherwise you have no context, and what will
you do without context? It'll be like you're in school
(03:42):
all again, but bad. Don't be weird that the first episode.
Then come back. Don't don't be that person. Yeah, absolutely so.
Pittsburgh nineteen sixties, emergency medical services were not so great.
It was mostly cops in the city proper. And then
it'll be like a few homes in different areas because
they have the hearses, and they would be firefighters in
(04:03):
other areas. But like, mostly cops who are not famously
good at sanctity of life, right, even the people that
they like kind of should ostensibly care about, Like the
rich white guy we're about to talk about, who they
totally fucking murdered through medical neglect. I wasn't well, I
(04:25):
just I'll just tell you what happened. There was this
big deal Democrat guy in Pittsburgh. His name is David Lawrence,
and he had previously been both the mayor of Pittsburgh
and the governor of Pennsylvania one point or another. Most
history remembers David Lawrence very kindly. In nineteen ninety three,
he was ranked third in the top ten mayors in
American history. He was a working class Irish Catholic guy
(04:47):
who fought in World War One. He lived in Pittsburgh
during the peak of the anti Catholic era of the Klan.
So I should like him, but I don't. He was
the guy who engineered the renaissance, that urban renewal, that
just like fucked over all the black people who lived
in the ho So whatever. Anyway to late nineteen sixties,
he's not in charge of anything anymore. He's just influential.
(05:07):
And he is going to go and give this great,
big speech at a Democrat guy politic thing about why
Democrats rule and Republicans drool. But instead he decided to
have a heart attack on stage. Funny choice. I know
it was a bold choice. It didn't work out for
the candidate he was trying to endorse. Actually the guy loses,
(05:29):
But I don't think we can put that on David Lawrence.
A nurse from the audience ran to the stage and
started giving him CPR the you stand in character cove
as you discussed that you like when well, you don't
like people have heart attacks, but you get to the war. Yeah,
I don't want people to be sick. I just want
to be of use. Yeah, yeah, And so a nurse
(05:53):
runs up and starts giving CPR, and then the ambulance
arrives and at the time ambulance and in this case
met cops. So the cops arrived shoved the nurse out
of the way, and she's like, uh, I need to
keep doing emergency breathing and they're like nah, and then
they're like running him off to the cop car. They're
using arrest vans what I called paddy wagons, And then
(06:16):
someone got really mad at me and they're like shoving
the nurse out of the way. She's like following, trying
to give emergency breathing because like he's not breathing, you know,
and they're like showing her off and shit, and they
throw her in the back. They throw him in the
back of the cop car and they drive off and
and no one rides in the back with him whenever
they do this, so they just like careen through the
(06:37):
streets with this Oh my god, this person who's unconscious
and not breathing. Yeah, just flopping around loose in the back.
So it's not good for him, and.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
That's not great patient care, I can tell you.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah. And that was actually the norm. That was actually
the norm that no one rode in the when the
cops took you, No one rode in the back with you.
How terrifying that those are your two options. You either
have the cops throwing you into.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
The back of one of those arrest vans, or you
got picked up in a hearse I know where.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
There's like literally still flowers in there. Yeah, like the worst. Yeah,
Like I I at that point, I might be like,
leave me to die on my kitchen floor. Yeah, you know,
like if you're just going to die anyway. Yeah. And
so this guy, it turns out, I don't know if
you knew this big medical revelation, your brain actually needs oxygen,
(07:34):
big if true. Yeah, his brain didn't get any because
there was no one to be an emergency breathing because.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
The one person that was trying to they wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, right, happened to be a woman, happened to not
be a cop, like, had all kinds of things going
against her.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
And when the cops taken to hospital, it's literally Peter
Saffer at the hospital door there to receive him because
they get they get a call and they're like, oh fuck,
this is a big important thing. And the doctors managed
to restart his heart, but there's no brain activity because
he had gone too long without oxygen for seventeen days.
He was medically there's two words here. One of them
(08:12):
was alive and one of them was dead. He was
like medically alive but biologically dead or the other way
around or something.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Yeah, it sounds like he wasn't having any brain activity.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
So yeah, And eventually his family removed him from life
support and he died more completely. And this was a
big deal. And Peter Saffer had been looking for ways
to improve emergency medical services, but there hadn't been the
political will for it. Also, even though he's like the
father of CPR, everywhere he goes people kind of don't
like him, and for a long time, eventually has enough
(08:41):
cloud that he gets away with stuff. But like in
Baltimore and he first shows up, people are like, you're
just that weird guy with an accent, you know, like
and you want to do things not the right way.
We don't really like you very much.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
That seems like a common story in medicine.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I think, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. So when mister
Democrat dies, they literally called David Lawrence mister Democrat. That's
how important he was to the political machine in Pittsburgh.
He dies, and suddenly there's political will to improve emergency
medical care because it gets out no one's blaming the cops,
but it gets out that had actual proper medical care
(09:16):
been provided, he would have survived most likely.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
So people are like, all right, we can have ambulances
that aren't shitty. And Saffer got together with a nonprofit,
the Folk Medical Fund, which got together with Freedom House,
the people who were driving around and you know, selling
groceries and giving job training and stuff, right, And the
plan wasn't just put doctors on ambulances. It was to
put paramedics on ambulances, which is this entirely new word.
(09:43):
I don't think they invented it for this context, but
it's like a new word that've been floating around as
a concept. And he wanted to prove that you could
train regular folks into the job, not quickly and easily,
but reliably. Freedom House was like, we will do it
on one condition, and the ordinary people who are going
to get trained to serve the black community are going
(10:05):
to be black people from the black community. And Peter
Saffer was like, that is literally not a problem. I
fucking survived Nazi occupation. There's no part of me that's
excited about racism. That's fine. Yeah, later a bunch of
people were really into the racism thing, fucked the whole
thing up. But that's a while later. Yeah, that checks out.
So I'm sorry. What was Freedom House at this point?
(10:28):
What were they? Remind me? Like, what were they doing?
Or so they were a job training center for black
people looking to learn how to start their own businesses,
like doing like landscaping and stuff. And they were also
doing the grocery not delivery. It wasn't like a mutual
aid project. It was a break the food desert thing
where they'd drive in and drove the vans, right, yeah, okay,
(10:50):
And so they were basically like a method of empowerment
to the neighborhood that ended up being like the most
appropriate rough infrastructure to build out, you know. And so
all the first paramedics in the first class were men
because of sexism, and all the phone operators were and
this will shock you to hear women whoa yeah, thank
(11:13):
you history. At least later one of the phone operators
ends up a paramedic, which is cool. And so when
they decide to get all these people together to do
this thing, the nonprofit world, the you know, Freedom House,
and Saffer. Some cops come to the first meetings. They're like, well,
we're the we're the ambulance drivers. We should be part
of it, you know. And then the cops were like, wait,
(11:38):
hold on, we get paid to do ambulance ride of
death routine. We don't want black people fucking it up.
So they were out and they left the coalition immediately,
which is for the best.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
I don't give a shit, but like, they would have
made I mean, they would have at least made money, right,
they may have made a little bit LEAs because someone
else is doing it, But weren't they still going to
be couldn't they still be involved if they want it
to and still be able to make money off it?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Probably they probably could have figured out a way to
do that. Yeah. Saffer was like, I can teach a
class of forty four students, and they were like, okay,
we need forty four people willing to take three hundred
hours of job training for a job that has never
existed in history. That was hard to find people who
were willing to do that. So the first class of
forty four students was a lot of them were literally
(12:24):
kind of off the streets, like they'd go around and
basically be practically rounded up and dragged off to go learn. Wow.
They were aged eighteen to sixty. They were high school dropouts,
they were Vietnam vets on drugs, they were a tenant workers.
They were felons with records that kept them out of
most work. They were people who were having a hard
go of it themselves. One of the recruiters who ended
(12:47):
up also being one of the paramedics who worked at
Freedom House, he actually ran an ambulance service, of private
ambulance service prior to that, just because the neighborhood needed it.
But it was the old school of style of ambulance service,
like call us drive you to the hospital, you know,
and they start a three hundred at this point. Cops
have like ten hours of medical training if they're on
the ambulance duty, which is a lot, you know. I
(13:08):
mean that's probably roughly what you had to do. It
was about ten hours or something like that. Yeah, total, Yeah,
or years? Was it years or hours?
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Like decades it feels, but yeah, yeah, it's probably a
little bit more.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yeah, so more than ten hours. And the paramedics. Of course,
we're not training to be become doctors, but they're training
to become a new thing. It is between EMT emergency
medical technician and doctor to be able to provide the
kinds of life saving support that are necessary on the
street rather than immediately taking people to hospitals. It was
(13:41):
a grueling schedule for everyone, the teachers and the students alike, days, nights,
and weekends. They learned far more than any civilian ambulance
team and probably history. Yeah, everyone without a high school
degree was like coach through gd programs on the side
during all of this. Well so cool man, Yeah, they're like,
(14:02):
it is so cool what they did, and it it
really proves the point about giving people a chance to
do good things and save lives and you know, and
people are taking advantage of it. It's just so cool. Yeah,
only twenty four or the forty four of them made
it through the classroom portion of the training, just because
(14:23):
it was an incredibly grueling classroom thing, you know. And
then they after that they did rotations. They did rotations
at morgues and helped with dissections. They showed up in
operating rooms, they showed up in emergency rooms they would
like they had problems where they wanted to show up
and like help deliver babies. They faced racism everywhere they went.
Doctors would assume they were orderlies and like hand them
(14:45):
ups as soon as they walked into the room, and
a lot of places they were just literally shut out
of even though they were with one of the most
important doctors in the city.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
You know, yeah, I mean, you know, if you talked
to like black doc is now, you'll still hear. Everyone
has like a story where they walk in and they're like, okay,
you can take my tray, I'm done with it, and
they're like, no, God, I'm not here for the tray.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
I wish that surprised me in any way. And actually
some of them started off as orderly. There's one, Oh,
I didn't write down his name, unfortunately. There was one
guy who later he sticks with us for decades and
becomes a paramedic and stuff like that. He actually started
off as an orderly and he saw these first paramedics
come in. He saw black men come in and take
(15:32):
charge of a situation and like be treated with respect,
and he was like, I don't even know what that
job is, but that's gonna be my job now, yeah,
you know. Yeah, And so they finished, they finished their
three hundred hour training and they were they went down
to Baltimore to do ambulance rides to do to like
start doing it because Saffar had more connections with fire
departments in Baltimore than he did with police in Pittsburgh. Right,
(15:58):
But before they could go these first ambulance rides, and
so the first paramedics in history weren't in Baltimore because
some asshole went and killed Martin Luther King Junior, and Pittsburgh,
among other places, revolted, and so the first time a
paramedic team in history did medical work was in black
neighborhoods during the riots after Martin Luther King Junior's assassination.
(16:22):
And they didn't have their ambulance as yet. So they
were in borrowed cop vans because the city was on
we'll talk about the relationship with the city. It wasn't great,
but it did exist. You know, they used borrowed cop
vans and so they had to keep the inside lights
on so that people could see that they were black
paramedics and not cops. And I don't know, I think
(16:42):
that rules that that is the birth of the paramedic profession.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Yeah, that is so cool, so cool. It's crazy that
we don't mean it's someone that sounds so ripe for
like a movie. I'm surprised and no one made a
movie of this yet.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I know there's a short documentary, it's not even a
feature length documentary. But yeah, no, I would watch the
shit out of the movie version of this. It even has,
it has all of the notes we're going to get
to it. There's even a token white paramedic who is
literally there as a token white paramedic. So you still yeah,
but you know what else is good and entertaining and
(17:17):
created within the confines of a capitalist system because the movie.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
I can guess, I know, I can guess. It's a
it's ads.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
It is, it is ads. Yeah, pretty smart. Yeah, you're
pretty good at this. This isn't your first rodeo. Here
they are and we're back. So Freedom House, which is
(17:46):
still the name it is operating under, is up and running.
And they had an ambulance service, and it was by
July nineteen sixty eight. Whenever someone called emergency services, if
it was a medical call for the Hill Oakland under Downtown,
three different neighborhoods not Oakland in the Bay but confuses me.
(18:06):
But yeah, yeah, the call was routed to Freedom House
and they'd send out an ambulance with actual paramedics. In
their first year, they responded to six thousand calls and
saved at least two hundred lives directly. Wow, it's good. Yeah,
it strong. Yeah, there's like thirty five of well, it
starts off with twenty four. Soon enough there's thirty five
(18:26):
of them that new classes are immediately cycling in, you know.
But it's like not a huge operation. The financing for
the whole thing was really scant. They managed loans from
a bunch of foundations and government shit, and soon they
had a second class in paramedics school. By nineteen sixty
nine they had actual ambulances that were purpose built that
they like designed the first ambulances that look like today's ambulances,
(18:49):
have a dedicated space in back and a place for
a medic to sit at the head of the patient.
And to quote Kevin Hazzard, who wrote that book American Sirens,
quote Ton Chevy G twenty van the kind of thing
the ice cream man might drive. The top was painted
white and bristled, with light sirens and a long whip antenna.
The sides were orange with a large blue star plastered
(19:12):
on its sliding door. The words Freedom House jumped out
in large block letters, and they took a lot of
pride in their uniforms. They had like really sharp uniforms.
They'd like walk around with pride through the neighborhood and
people people joined just to become part of something like that. Yeah. No,
I could see that. It's really inspiring. Yeah, I know
it's it would be such an easy, feel good movie.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
They really would. I mean I could already, we can
start casting. Yeah, but like all you have all the bits,
they have all the right bits.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
I think I think part of the problem is Hollywood
had this brief run where it was like they did
some really interesting kind of ideas like the first like
all black like airplane squad, and then like the first
basketball team, and then the first like sw I mean thing,
And at some point Hollywood was like, Okay, we got
to move on from this.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah. Yeah, but I'm like this is a good one.
I said, like an important one. Why why not do
this one? If you're gonna do some.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
War I know?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
And it's like it's not even the first black paramedics.
It's the first paramedics. Yeah, right, like you could do
a movie about the first white paramedics. They come later, right,
you know, sure they did. I'm sure that's been done. Yeah, no,
I'm sure. They charged twenty five dollars for their services,
which is about two hundred dollars in today's money, which
(20:29):
is a lot of money. But given the costs of everything,
I mean, I don't know, the average ambulance ride in
the US is currently one thousand dollars. Yeah, so five
times as much as what they were charging. Ye, And
the twenty five dollars wasn't enough to keep the lights on.
They needed funding from the city and shit, which makes sense,
And they got some funding, and that's what taxes should
(20:50):
use for instead of like genocide overseas. That's my controversial take, hippie. Yeah,
and also primary they're serving the hill and so a
lot of people just aren't paying their bill, which is
completely fair. They don't have enough money to they shouldn't
have to. But in order to keep funding from the
city and in order to get to like qualify for
(21:13):
like specific loan thing that happened at one point, they
needed to hire a white person. They needed one diversity higher. Yeah,
and so they hired one white guy who freaked out
about being the only white guy and he left, didn't
even come to his second shift. Oh come on, guy,
I know. Then they found this like working class kid
who had been the token white guy in his unit
(21:35):
in Vietnam, and he was like, I'm happy to reprise
the role. I don't give a shit. Yeah, And he
stuck it out to the very end, right on right.
So he would be the unfortunately main character in the
Hollywood version of this, But he probably didn't want to
be the main characteruse he was a decent fucker anyway.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Timothy shallow May's got that one on lock here.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
I am essentially blind to name of actors and don't.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Do not know, definitely has no idea who that is?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
No, I know like three and I use them a lot,
so I seem like I'm hip er and no things.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
But why is that one of the three?
Speaker 2 (22:13):
What's he in? He's in Dune and I like Dune.
Is he like the main guy in Dune? Yeah, he's
more ideep. Wait the guy who is also in Star Wars.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
No, no, no, no, no, no, he's the guy that's
in the new uh unnecessary Walker movie.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Oh yeah, no, that would be Yeah, you're thinking Oscar
Isaac's who was in the new Star Wars movies and
in Dune he played Duke a Triades. Yeah, okay, I'll
take your word for it. Yeah, it's been a while
since I've seen Dune. Even though the litany against fear
is like literally a mantra use on a regular basis,
that's a great line. Yeah, okay, So they got the
(22:50):
white guy and they're like it's cool because then they're like, oh,
that's good, and they don't like move to suddenly being
you know, they're like, well, this is for a black community,
so we're going to stick the way we have it.
You know. By nineteen seventy two, there's thirty five paramedics
fielding seven thousand calls a year, and the idea starts spreading,
like all across the country. National standards associations and shit
(23:12):
start coming together with totally memorable names like the National
Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians. The Freedom House folks start
inventing like new stretchers and shit that can go around corners.
And I didn't see any diagrams, so I don't really
understand them. Paramedics from Freedom House went all over the
country into Germany to teach their methods because it's not
just medical. I mean it is medical methods, but it's
(23:33):
also like how do you run paramedics?
Speaker 3 (23:35):
You know?
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah, because they are the world's experts. And like Saffer
absolutely did a ton, he came up with the initial thing,
but these are the people who actually did it, Yeah,
implemented it, and we're doing it and actually learned how
to do it. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
And they were calling it paramedics at the time. Yes,
that term they're using now.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah. Wow. And because Freedom House and Peter Saffer invented
half the cool shit ever, Saffer and the paramedics started
using Narcan to reverse heroin overdoses right on. It had
been previously done to reverse anesthesia. It's possible that other
(24:14):
I am not one hundred percent certain whether Peter Saffer
was the first person to start using Narkan to reverse overdoses,
but Freedom House was absolutely the first organization to start
doing that on the street.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Very cool, very here, very now, so very important.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
If you had asked me, I would have thought Narcan
was fifteen years old. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
My friend Ryan Marino is going to give me a
hard time for this, But I thought it was at
least fifteen to ten. I didn't think more than that.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Jeez. Yeah, I thought it could be older than like oxycon,
like the opioid crisis starting in the right right, you know,
couldn't be older than me because I'm so young. Yeah,
and because these guys were so obviously not cops when
they would show up to calls and they were from
the neighborhood and they didn't rat anyone out for anything,
(25:05):
like they just really weren't cops. They could do things
like go to the overdose victims dealer and find out
exactly what the person was on so that they could
treat that and also provide like other you know, provide
the hospital with like this is what this person is on.
That's so so so cool, so interesting. Yeah. I just
(25:25):
got really excited about all that part because I'm just like, God,
that's that's what a lot of the conversation around emergency
response stuff is now is like, don't send cops, we
have someone odine, send an ambulance, you know, yeah, right exactly.
So the result of all of this patients in Black
neighborhoods in Pittsburgh ended up with far, far better chances
(25:46):
of surviving accidents, heart attacks, gunshots, overdoses, all of it
than people in white neighborhoods.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah, oh wow, that's that's This is where I'm sure
it gets fascinating. This is probably where they're like, Okay,
what do they have there? We must live there. Let's
buy that area the hills now ours. They kind of
do sort of the opposite. They don't go into the hill. Instead,
they're like, how do we steal their thing? We're like,
we want the ambulance, but we don't want the ambulance driver.
(26:16):
You know, we don't want we want the thing that
black people invented, but we don't want the black people.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
How do we do this?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
But how do we say it make them more I
don't know, American colored.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is almost exactly what ends up
bringing down Freedom House. But before that, nineteen seventy two,
some like doctors at the hospital start auditing how different
ambulance crews, including the cops, were treating different people. Right
in nineteen seventy two, doctors found that paramedics provided the
right care eighty nine percent of the time as compared
(26:48):
with cops who provided the wrong care sixty two percent
of the time.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
God, I'm surprised it wasn't higher.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
I know so enemy of all things noble and good.
The police union starts getting really mad because they're like, well,
we don't want new training. We don't need new training.
All over the country paramedics are like starting to become
a thing, But the Pittsburgh cops are like, no, we
can't do that. They're not going to let some uppity
paramedics change how they've been doing things and enter the
(27:20):
main villain of the story. The cops weren't the only
folks who didn't like Freedom House. There was this new mayor,
Peter Flaherty. He was elected in nineteen seventy. He was
not one of the best things ever produced by the
Irish diaspor He was a populist Democrat who refused to
align himself strongly with the Democratic Party, which sounds fine.
(27:41):
He hated labor unions, which is less fine. He claimed
he hated public slash private partnerships, which seems are right
on its surface right because he's like, well, all public
infrastructure should be run by the government, is what he's
saying he is notably only saying this about Freedom House. Yeah. Right,
immediately after he takes office, he fires two thousand public
(28:03):
employees and then he turns his ire on an ambulance
service that's saving everyone's lives.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
The important thing is getting getting in to the important stuff, right.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah. All over the country, Freedom House, like Freedom House
is changing everything, everything about emergency medicine. Twenty four states
at this point had instituted better minimum EMS standards. Miami
started a paramedic class. As soon as Freedomhouse got going.
They were like, holy shit, that's amazing. But back at
home in Pittsburgh, he was hated by the city government.
(28:33):
Peter Flaherty was what you call a racist. Oh yeah,
he And it's funny because it's like all the journalism
takes are like he was often called a racist, you know,
because you have to hedge your bets.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
What is being called a healthcare crisis by some in Gaza.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, exactly. He opposed desegregating city buses, and folks involved
in the struggle around Freedomhouse were pretty blunt that the
main reason that Flaherty opposed Freedom House is because he
was an overt racist. So he at the very least
did racist things, but it seems very likely that he
was literally overtly like just an anti black person racist,
(29:14):
and he had actually kind of started off not that
way because he was a Democrat and he was like
playing to the base and all that shit, and he
just like shift, he just went further and further right
once he got in office. Weird again, the past crazy,
I know totally. I don't live in West Virginia with
mansion as my you know, anyway, Yeah, betterman? So, oh god,
(29:36):
he's even Pennsylvania too, isn't he. I think? So I'm
not a I know them slightly better than I know actors,
but not a lot better. Yeah, okay, So he cuts
Freedom House's city budget in half. They were getting one
hundred thousand dollars a year, which was not enough, and
he gives starts getting them fifty thousand dollars a year.
(29:57):
And he also says they have to provide just as
much service, and they somehow don't. Anywhere they don't provide service,
the cops will take over again. So Freedom House starts
fundraising everywhere they can, but a lot of grants, most
of the grants, and there were a ton of grants going
around for black businesses and stuff around at this time
required cities to match the funds, and so the city
(30:18):
wouldn't do it. So they got passed over for all
these grants, even though they are like setting the standard
nationwide and worldwide, because Flaherty was like, Freedomhouse has to
be financially self sufficient, even though he didn't ask that
of anyone else. Right, he was such a libertarian. In
nineteen seventy four, he won the Democratic primary he was
already he was the incumbent. He also won the Republican
(30:41):
primary as a right end candidate and the Constitutional Party primary.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
I don't know what the Constitutional Party is, but I
don't like it.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, I just don't like it. Yeah. I used to
know more about them, and now they're all blurred together
in my head. They're all a bad Yeah. Even though
he was giving nineteen million dollars a year to the
cops and he was giving one hundred thousand dollars a
year to the dog catchers, the dog catchers got twice
as much money as the ambulances. Oh my god. Now
(31:13):
I love dogs, yeah, but no, I love dogs and
I love catching them.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
But this is a that's such a that's such an
amazing jexposition.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, and paramedics made like nine grand a year and
cops made like fourteen grand a year. It should be
about eight times that in modern money. And the ambulances
were way cheaper to make than the cop cars because
they were like purpose built and not full of people
taking the extra money off of shit, so financing the
(31:46):
whole thing for the whole city. If they had just
been like Freedom House or even other paramedics built on
the Freedom House model who aren't cops like, it would
have been so much cheaper for the city. Yeah, but
it was a it was an ethical thing for him.
He hated whatever piece of shit.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Do you get any sense of whether or not there
was public support for this at the time. Were people
like upset about it or did people not even notice?
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Was it flying under the radar, Like, oh it was
a big deal. Yeah, people started making it a big
deal because the other neighborhoods, including wealthier neighborhoods, were like,
can Freedom House please come here? I like not dying.
I'm a really big fan of not dying, like being
a live rules and cops suck at that particular thing,
you know. Yeah, but the funeral home industry at other
(32:33):
private ambulance services started fighting back against Freedom House too,
because that was like they treated more of like the
suburbs and the surrounding areas, you know. Yeah, and so
basically everyone running the ambulance services was like, no, fuck
you the private ones, you know, or the not Freedom
House ones. But yeah, and we'll talk more about the
activists who defended Freedomhouse in a little bit. So the
(32:54):
mayor was like, all right, what can we do cutting
their budget and have didn't destroy Freedomhouse? How do I
just a Freedom House? Because he's a fucking villain. He's
very highly remembered and his Wikipedia pages very balanced. The
budget and blah blah blah blah blah. He banned ambulances
from using sirens in downtown, so they were like, you know,
(33:15):
race to go save people and they're in the hill
and then as soon as they cross into downtown they
have to turn it off and they're allowed to like honk,
you know. And because they it was a noise ordinance,
it didn't want to be disruptive to the business community.
Yeah yeah, allowed to use sirens, Yeah yeah, I've heard
of that happening. Still.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
Actually mean, I don't know if it's common, yeah at all,
but I have heard of that that is amazing. I'm
sure like there are like building people like behind real
estate developers that sort of thing, who pushed for.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
That sort of thing. Yeah, and then he also ran
into racist patients as a big problem. And this was
actually part of because they started explanding to a few
more areas. I read a couple of different things exactly
about this, But they started going to a few more
places because people neighborhood councils would be like, we really
want them to come here. But individual rich white racists
would be like, what are you talking about. You can't
(34:08):
treat me that man is black. You know, I want
an actual doctor, not this black man. And so, and
especially in downtown, right, you have all this white flight
from the cities, but people still come into the town
to work. And so when they're working downtown, a lot
of their patients are white. And so they just had
(34:29):
to literally run around all day and save the lives
of racist who would physically recoil from their presence. Woh,
what a bummer.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Yeah, I mean again, like you talked to African American doctors,
Jewish doctors, lots of doctors of color, they all have
some story still of you know, treating some patient with
the swastika or something like that.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
That's very very common.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
But this is, you know, this was just the battle
days of it even worse. Not great still, yeah, but
even worse. It's so hard to do your job and
to be like in to have a tough gig, and
to have that on top fit is truly heroic efforts
(35:14):
to help those people.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
It really is. And on top of it all, all
these rumors started spreading around that they like sold drugs
and ran dice games and shit like that. And I
don't believe there's any basis to these particular rumors. That's
certainly no evidence was provided to back this up that
I've ever found. Right, cops started trying to beat them
(35:35):
to calls in order to get the money from having
you know, thrown someone in the back of the wagon
and driven them off or whatever. Yeah, And so when
paramedics would show up and the cops were already there,
they would like threaten to arrest the paramedics if they
tried to treat patients. My god, then so far. Yeah.
In nineteen seventy four, the mayor did a one to
(35:57):
eighty he suddenly loved ambulances. Maybe they should be city
financed after all, as long as there's not Freedom House
and it's cops. Oh god, so close. Yeah, So the
city canceled its contract with Freedom House and set up
a cop run paramedic organization. This is when the activist
(36:18):
groups were like, are you fucking kidding me? And the
activist groups were like, we want to be interrupted in
the middle of like sentences with to be sold things
that were like, that's what we demand. We demand that
in the middle of sentences someone comes in and says,
haven't you tried listening to this podcast or getting mental
(36:41):
health services through the following product? Because Zach, same thing,
here's the Zach same thing. Yeah, here's the ads. So
activist groups, both white and black, fought hard against what
(37:03):
was happening, which was the destruction of Freedom House and
the empowerment of the police. The NAACP, various neighborhood associations,
women organizations, a bunch of different Catholic organizations, youth organizations.
Even conservative papers were running opinion pieces that were like,
we already have a good ambulance service. What are you doing?
(37:25):
You know? Because it was so transparently about race, Yeah,
and that's why they kept being They're like, no, it's
that I hate private public stuff or whatever. You know.
But these activists might have changed the face of modern
emergency response across the US because they won cool and
(37:48):
the racist in charge of the city relented and funded
Freedom House for two more years. It was like fine,
nineteen seventy four, nineteen seventy five, you're getting funded again,
still at the like shitty rate, but they stop the
cops from being the paramedics, and that rules, and that
has like reverberating effects throughout history that have saved so
many people's lives, because even even if cops were fully
(38:11):
trained as paramedics, you still just run into the conflict
of interest about law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
And you know, absolutely, like for fens andal overdoses the
last thing. I mean, it's that's a whole im sure
of itself. Never call them, Yeah, I mean, what would
happen is one of them would touch like.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
A baggie, have a panic attack, and.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Then they would add to the sentence of whatever guy
that they arrested because they would be like, well, this
person almost kills a cop. Yeah, we had to use
four narcans to revive him. Which, by the ways, how
narcan would work. But like it's it.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Would be terrible the concept. It gives me chills, literal
chills to think of cops running codes. Yeah. Also, can
we talk about the fact that, like people accept the
idea that cops are somehow wildly allergic to fentanyl, where
if they're in the same room as it, they all
die because, like it is, I don't do drugs. A
(39:09):
lot of my friends do drugs. Some of my friends
do fentanyl on purpose, which I think is not a
good idea, but the only way they die of it
is if they owe d on it, like not by
touching it, correct for being in visual contact with it.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
Yeah, fentanyl great in the hospital. I don't love it
use elsewhere. But yeah, I have to let you in
on a secret. I also understand this process because as
a doctor, not everyone knows this, but an apple will
destroy me, and for cops, fentanyl is their apple. An
apple will keep your doctor away. Sentinyl is the same thing.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
For a cop. I think I know where you're going.
I was wondering if that was going to work. I
was just I was like, Okay, you are specifically allergic
to apples, And I was like, oh no, yeah, I
realized that. To make that clear. Yeah, yeah, bad, my bad. No, Okay,
I'm going to start I dehydrate apples and give them
to people way too often, and I'm just going to
start calling them a doctor Baine, doctor, yeah, doctor pain. Yeah. No.
(40:14):
It it the fact that people believe, I mean, the
fact that people believe cops like full stop is like complicated,
but the fact that people believe all of these weird
cop lies about fentanyl is just so. I don't understand
why we as a society accept the way that cops
talk about fentanyl, even though again, yeah I love being sober,
(40:35):
you know, but whatever. Yeah. So the activists save Freedom House,
and I mean Freedom House also saves itself. They're part
of this process, you know, and they continue. They're underfunded
as hell, and they're honestly starting to fall apart from
the inside from their underfundingness. At this point, their organization
is starting to collapse. Their ambulance is barely run like physically,
(40:57):
you know, mechanically. And then they always had this doctor.
They would have like one doctor who's like their chief
medical director. It was, you know, a doctor's being everyone
else's paramedics. And this person I think was always white.
It was never mentioned otherwise, and I'm not one hundred
percent sure, but I think it was always a key.
And then in nineteen seventy four they got a white
(41:17):
Jewish woman named Nancy Caroline who basically slept at the
office and helped organize the place and bring things back
together and improve the level of medical training even higher.
One of the big like things that they didn't do.
They did all of these different things. They would interpret kgs,
they would do all these like fairly high level things.
(41:39):
They didn't intubate patients on the street, And under Nancy
Caroline's training, they learned how to do that. Wow, were
they the first people to do that? They were the
first people. That's so rad Yeah, And I think they
were like the first people to like use shock paddles
and go clear and shit and like save people's lives
(42:00):
that way or whatever. But in the on the street
on the street, sure, yeah, Wow, that's so cool. And
that's what I was saying, was like, shit that even
I've heard of, like intubating and narcan and I call
them shock padals because I don't know what they're called.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah, that's all the shock We'll accept, all right, cool.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Thanks. So under her training, they're now intubating patients in
the street, which as hard as fuck and if you
do it wrong people die, but can be a very
important life saving thing. There's this like moment where they
bring in an intubated patient and they're like, Matt. The
doctor's like, who the fuck intubated is patient? And the
guy's just like, yeah, I did. I'm a paramedic. And
(42:42):
they were like, oh, okay, you know wow.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah, that must have been mind blowing at the time.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, absolutely. And Nancy was also frustrated by this other
thing that was defeating the organization that she worked with
the cops, and somehow she got a hold of a
police scanner. History does not indicate how she got a
hold of this police scanner, which means it was not legal.
That's right. Yeah, I assume either she stole it or
(43:09):
someone working with the cops stolen and gave it to her.
And so Freedom House started listening in the police scanner
and beating cops to medical emergencies to save people's lives.
Oh that's so cool, yeah, because the cops are already
doing that to them, yeah, but now they can do
it in reverse. And they would like tell stories about
being like, ah, I just was in the neighborhood and
(43:29):
happened to drive by and saw this person. You know, right,
that's so cool with their time today.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
I'm sure they got their faster because they probably cared
more to get their faster.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, that was it. Yeah, And so she actually ends
up writing the book on street medicine and emergency medical services,
and Freedom House at this point becomes the official model
chosen by the Department of Transportation about what ems should
be in the country. And so this is like they
have cemented their legacy at this point, not necessarily by
name and not by memory, but in terms of the
(44:02):
way that they've learned how to do things over these
seven years. Yeah. But the mayor, instead of being like, okay,
I give up, I'll listen to the federal government and
realize that Freedom House rules, he spent the last two
years when he gave them like the stay of execution
for two years. He basically just spent the time figuring
out how to copy it, expand on the model with
better funding, and then shut down Freedom House and replace
(44:25):
it with white paramedics, which is what he did. The
upside the thing that they won. Is that it wasn't cops. Yeah,
that's huge. Yeah, huge.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
In today's world, we look at like evidence based medicine.
That's sort of our mantra for everything. We tried to
have make sure there's evidence for everything. So I have
to think if that's the case, there's no way that
it would have held up. But the fact that it
might have taken an extra fifteen twenty thirty years, yeah,
(44:58):
to maybe get the police out, and how so many
people would have been killed in that process, yeah, is
really startling.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Yeah. Yeah, there's just like an objective body count to
doing better emergency medical services, you know. Yeah, like yeah, absolutely.
So these white paramedics who are going to take over,
basically it's like they're like, all right, we're starting up
this new city program. Freedom House is a few more
months to go. And so the white paramedics did their
(45:25):
training rides on Freedom House ambulances, but the black paramedics
weren't told that they were training the men who would
replace them. They thought that they were training guys from
the suburbs. Who was gross.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
That's fucking gross.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Yeah, it's absolute fucking worse.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
I mean, it's like more people having medical training, good
that gross.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah. They were like, all right, this guy from the
suburb is gonna go back from the suburbs where this
is great, where the teachers were the trainers, you know,
what a bummer. The city was like, well, we need
a medical director for this new program, someone with experience. Someone.
Fortunately Nancy Caroline met those requirements and they offered to
hire her. And she was like, God, I don't fucking
(46:07):
know about that. So she went to talk to everyone
and I think this was like functionally a democratic decision
of Freedom House, but I'm not She certainly included them
in her decision making. Yeah, And she came back and
she said all right, because they knew Freedom House was done,
she was like, all right, I will do it. I
will be the medical director for the ambulance program if
you hire everyone from Freedom House who wants it. And
(46:30):
the city was like, no, we're good. And then she
was like okay, then I'm going to the press and
the city was like, okay, we'll hire everyone from Freedom House.
Good for her. Yeah. On midnight at midnight on October fifteenth,
nineteen seventy five, as it turned over to October sixteenth,
Freedom House shut its doors and actually the token white
(46:52):
guy like stayed until morning to like lock up. So
it's like you have the fucking movie moments.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Every symbolism, there's some symbolism there, know what it means,
but there's like that's a symbolic sort of like last shot.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Yeah, and uh, I don't of you knew this. The
US government routinely breaks the agreements it makes with people
who are racially marginalized. What I know, I know that
was my face when I learned this. One of the paramedics,
one of the black paramedics, had actually been offered second
in command of the new Ambulance Corps, but the city
changed its mind and didn't offer to him, and he
(47:25):
just was a guy on an ambulance. So none of
the people, none of the black people from Freedom House,
had any kind of standing within the new organization, even
though they are literally the world's first paramedics and they
have seven years of experience, so this is so wild.
Most of the Freedom House people took the paramedic jobs
(47:48):
that were offered, but they were treated like pariahs. They
would like show up and people be like, oh, your
Freedom House and would like stay away from them. Even
the token white guy was treated like shit by the
new staff for having been part of the quote goon
squad and for having been quote white only on the outside.
Oh yeah, So then the people who had literally invented them,
(48:11):
which is sort of a compliment that I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Yeah, absolutely, it's sort of a compliment. I like, I'm
sort of I'm undercover too, I'm off white.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Yeah. Yeah, like so I kind of get it. Yeah,
kind of.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
I think that'd be a cool, like, it's not a
bad title.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
No, I doubt he had a problem with that, you know. Yeah.
So then the people who had literally invented the profession
of paramedics had to be mentored by the less trained
new recruits because they were new to that particular job.
So they had to be mentored, and the city had
promised to hire them, the city did not promise to
keep them on, so the organization set about icing them
(48:47):
out to get them to quit or finding excuses to
fire them. They weren't allowed to touch patients, just observe because
they're the new kids, you know. They had to take
classes that were beneath their level, that didn't even meet
national standards which they themselves had set set. Yeah, and
they were like given like constant pass fail tests and
I'd be like, oh, we don't get one hundredercent, you're
(49:09):
fired just tomorrow, you know. And about half of them
quit within the first year, including Nancy Caroline. She was like,
this sucks, fuck you, you so demoralizing, and she she left.
She went to Israel to set up emergency services there,
and some of the paramedics, the first paramedics in the world,
(49:32):
ended up tow truck drivers and taxi drivers and shit.
At least one ended up homeless soon enough, and Pittsburgh
paramedics became an overwhelmingly white profession, though a few of
the original paradomedics rose in the ranks of the new
organization and became supervisors and stuff eventually, and then the
(49:53):
history was almost completely forgotten until now, until this episode
of the podcast. I am the one who's breaking this
story by having read a very best selling book by
Kevin Hazard. I will tell you this.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
You are breaking this story to me, and I'm going
to be sharing this with every medical professional that I
have contact or range of Yeah, because it is just
amazing and it's one of the few ones where I
feel like it's still not too late to give the
right people their credit.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Totally or flowers as kids call it.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
Like, I feel like that, like there, I mean, unfortunately
some of them have probably passed away, and probably some
of them will never be able to get it, but
like just I feel like there's still at least a
little opportunity. And it's funny too because like just like
with the Tuskegee stuff, Yeah, people assumed that was the distant,
distant past, right, We're talking about things that ended in
the sixties seventies, things that people who train people like
(50:52):
me were alive for and very much like practicing at
the time. So it is it is so important to discuss.
I think this is such a good such a good topic,
and I'm so happy that you did it. I've learned
so much from this.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Yeah, no, thank you for being the guest you were
you were, I knew, I was, like I had that.
I've been wanting to do this for a while ever
since I found this book because I was blown away
by the story of it. And yeah, I was like,
saved it for when I had my when I had
my doctor, guest.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
That's me so but yeah, and then cool, very cool.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
So the just to shouted out. Kevin Hazzard wrote a
really good book called American Sirens. I did pull from
some other sources, but honestly not as many as I
sometimes do, because he covers contexts better than most people,
most authors I've read. And it turns out American Sirens
is not about women in the ocean learning sailors to
their death. So a little bit of a disappointment there.
(51:49):
But you you are a writer, Yeah that's true. And
titles aren't copyrightable. Totally you could you can make like
Syle with the Z at the end. Yeah, yeah, totally.
That'll be a totally good thing to do to an
author I respect. But speaking of podcasters I respect. We're
(52:11):
here at the end. Do you want to plug anything?
Speaker 3 (52:14):
I would like people to listen to my podcast.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
Go and do that.
Speaker 3 (52:19):
Anywhere you get your podcast. It is called the House
of pod You will hear all the people from the
Cool Zone, media world, the universe, the c Z m
u H and they'll all be there, including Margaret if
she is willing to come on. And it's going to
(52:41):
cover a lot of similar stuff. We're going to talk
about inequality, We're going to talk about equity issues in medicine.
We're going to cover some random stuff. Too, like where
the spartans really as cool as everyone makes them out
to be answers No, So we're kind of all over
the place. But I think you'll enjoy it. Give it
a shot. There's something in there you're going to like.
(53:01):
And thank you so much for having me on. This
is super fun. I feel like I want some sort
of contest to get on the show. Its super cool.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
Yeah. Well, you know there was the Golden tickets and
then everyone else died horribly accidentally.
Speaker 3 (53:17):
I had nothing to do with it, Margaret Ye.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
Interesting thing about working in the medical field and ability
to understand forensics totally unrelated. Well, if you want to
know more about I also have a podcast called cool
Zone Media book Club every Sunday where I read fiction
and it is on this very feed as well as
(53:43):
the feed of it could happen here. And you probably
already know this because if you listen to this you
probably subscribe. I mean, if you don't, I don't know
what you're doing with your life. And so every Sunday
you get a notification about me reading you a new story,
and what do you got to shout out, Sophie? Just
follow at.
Speaker 1 (53:59):
Cool Zone Media on social media. If you do use
social media still because we have a lot of upcoming
projects that were releasing this year that you should look
at for a lot of good stuff.
Speaker 2 (54:10):
There's a new Jamie Loft is going to drop nice
pretty excited there is.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
We're really really really really really excited about that one.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
I've been finally listening to raw Dog on audiobook. Yeah
it's so good, so fun. Yeah, it's so fun. Yeah,
that's the book about hot dogs. Yes, Jamie's Jamie's book
about hot It is about way more than hot dogs. Yeah,
that's secret.
Speaker 1 (54:30):
That's secretly about like labor and you know, health, health
rights and just.
Speaker 2 (54:36):
Really cool but also just like entertainingly written and about
the way that Jamie. It's great, but hot dogs are
in it. Correct, Yes, correct, there's enough hot dogs that
I as a vegan, I was partly. That was partly
why I kept putting it off. And you know, and
then but several points throughout it, Jamie is like, vegans,
(54:56):
you're right and I'm wrong. Anyway, let me talk more
about me. That's so I'm like, I feel seen.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
Well, I'll also tell you, as a Gaston trologist, you know,
when I hear hot Dog the first thing I think
about is somebody who went to like a barbecue or cookout,
was in the hot sun, not hydrating, well, eat a
lot of hot dogs, and they got stuck in their throat,
and I'm coming into the hospital like three in the
morning to try and dislodge.
Speaker 2 (55:21):
That's so, that's the thing that pops in my head
when I hear hot dogs first, even above how delicious
they are, they are delicious, amazing that. Yeah, I have
a weird job. My job is so much easier than
your job in some ways. Yeah, but it's kind of fun.
I got to do some fun stuff. Yeah. No, the
(55:42):
people who I just described in this episode are fucking heroes,
and I I'm very grateful for people who do that work.
All Right, we will see everyone next Monday.
Speaker 3 (55:53):
Bye bye.
Speaker 4 (55:57):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 2 (56:09):
You get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast about cool people who did cool things. Uh,
not to be mistaken with our evil nemesis podcast Cool
People Who Did Cool Things, which is about cool people
who did cool stuff. That all makes sense and is
totally a bit that I'm totally going to keep. I'm
(00:25):
Mardur Kiljoy and I'm the host and my guest is Kavejda. Hi,
I'm back, I'm back. I know, thank you for having
me back. I missed you in these two days that
separate the recordings. I can't believe you actually made me wait.
I know in that room a lot so hard, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Really uncomfortable, but listen, I'm here to I'm just so
excited to be here. I'm not going to complain.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
This is right. Yeah, I told him that he's allowed
to leave the room once we finished recording. I hope
it never ends. Yeah, that's right. And also here is Sophie.
Sophie not a doctor, but you are the audience's doctor.
Are we going to take turns each episode to be
the doctor? Medical advice would you like to provide free
(01:13):
of charge to our listeners.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Even if you're not leaving the house that day. You
should still wear sunscreen.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
That's like skincare advice that's not bad you just in
case you mean like in case you leave, or in
case like the uview lights like penetrate your house.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
I mean all of the above, preferably a mineral sunscreen.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah, I will say Sophie is someone who taking skincare
advice from makes sense. It does you have I don't
know how to say this without sounding like a serial killer.
That's what I was just thinking.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I will say it is something that I take care of. Yeah,
like really, it's really really I have like a whole
cabinet that's just skincare.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I figured out how to control it, and I was like, oh,
this is good for me.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
It's strong work, strong work. It took me a long
time to actually get into skincare, and I'm a little
bit sad that I waited so long, but it's it's
been working.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, where sunscreen. This podcast was edited by Oh right, Ian, Nope,
what Oh we already did this, Daniel, Daniel.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Is it still so new?
Speaker 1 (02:31):
We're totally keeping and we're totally keeping that in Hi
Ian and Danel.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Hian and Danel I ever wont to say hi at
least a Daniel, because Daniel's Danel. I love you, And
then everyone listening at home you have to stop saying Hi, Ian,
and you have to start saying Hi, Danel, otherwise Daniel
will know he does. It's wild.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Also if you did, if you didn't listen to our
Q and eight, they just switched around shows, they're both
they're both still they're both still our best boys, don't worry.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, and they're both doing fine. Our theme music was
still written for us by unwoman. And this is part
two in a two parter about some really I feel
like this is like such a distilled, cool people who
did cool stuff episode where it's just it's just some
people who did really cool stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Yeah, do you almost feel bad about the fact that's
so good, like that they're so cool?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, I mean like I'm like, there's got to be
something terrible under the you know, I mean, like everyone has.
But no, I'm mostly just excited. I'm it's such a
why I'll just tell you this story and then you
can also be excited about it. And if for anyone
who's listening, you should go back and listen to part
one because otherwise you have no context, and what will
you do without context? It'll be like you're in school
(03:42):
all again, but bad. Don't be weird that the first episode.
Then come back. Don't don't be that person. Yeah, absolutely so.
Pittsburgh nineteen sixties, emergency medical services were not so great.
It was mostly cops in the city proper. And then
it'll be like a few homes in different areas because
they have the hearses, and they would be firefighters in
(04:03):
other areas. But like, mostly cops who are not famously
good at sanctity of life, right, even the people that
they like kind of should ostensibly care about, Like the
rich white guy we're about to talk about, who they
totally fucking murdered through medical neglect. I wasn't well, I
(04:25):
just I'll just tell you what happened. There was this
big deal Democrat guy in Pittsburgh. His name is David Lawrence,
and he had previously been both the mayor of Pittsburgh
and the governor of Pennsylvania one point or another. Most
history remembers David Lawrence very kindly. In nineteen ninety three,
he was ranked third in the top ten mayors in
American history. He was a working class Irish Catholic guy
(04:47):
who fought in World War One. He lived in Pittsburgh
during the peak of the anti Catholic era of the Klan.
So I should like him, but I don't. He was
the guy who engineered the renaissance, that urban renewal, that
just like fucked over all the black people who lived
in the ho So whatever. Anyway to late nineteen sixties,
he's not in charge of anything anymore. He's just influential.
(05:07):
And he is going to go and give this great,
big speech at a Democrat guy politic thing about why
Democrats rule and Republicans drool. But instead he decided to
have a heart attack on stage. Funny choice. I know
it was a bold choice. It didn't work out for
the candidate he was trying to endorse. Actually the guy loses,
(05:29):
But I don't think we can put that on David Lawrence.
A nurse from the audience ran to the stage and
started giving him CPR the you stand in character cove
as you discussed that you like when well, you don't
like people have heart attacks, but you get to the war. Yeah,
I don't want people to be sick. I just want
to be of use. Yeah, yeah, And so a nurse
(05:53):
runs up and starts giving CPR, and then the ambulance
arrives and at the time ambulance and in this case
met cops. So the cops arrived shoved the nurse out
of the way, and she's like, uh, I need to
keep doing emergency breathing and they're like nah, and then
they're like running him off to the cop car. They're
using arrest vans what I called paddy wagons, And then
(06:16):
someone got really mad at me and they're like shoving
the nurse out of the way. She's like following, trying
to give emergency breathing because like he's not breathing, you know,
and they're like showing her off and shit, and they
throw her in the back. They throw him in the
back of the cop car and they drive off and
and no one rides in the back with him whenever
they do this, so they just like careen through the
(06:37):
streets with this Oh my god, this person who's unconscious
and not breathing. Yeah, just flopping around loose in the back.
So it's not good for him, and.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
That's not great patient care, I can tell you.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah. And that was actually the norm. That was actually
the norm that no one rode in the when the
cops took you, No one rode in the back with you.
How terrifying that those are your two options. You either
have the cops throwing you into.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
The back of one of those arrest vans, or you
got picked up in a hearse I know where.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
There's like literally still flowers in there. Yeah, like the worst. Yeah,
Like I I at that point, I might be like,
leave me to die on my kitchen floor. Yeah, you know,
like if you're just going to die anyway. Yeah. And
so this guy, it turns out, I don't know if
you knew this big medical revelation, your brain actually needs oxygen,
(07:34):
big if true. Yeah, his brain didn't get any because
there was no one to be an emergency breathing because.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
The one person that was trying to they wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, right, happened to be a woman, happened to not
be a cop, like, had all kinds of things going
against her.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
And when the cops taken to hospital, it's literally Peter
Saffer at the hospital door there to receive him because
they get they get a call and they're like, oh fuck,
this is a big important thing. And the doctors managed
to restart his heart, but there's no brain activity because
he had gone too long without oxygen for seventeen days.
He was medically there's two words here. One of them
(08:12):
was alive and one of them was dead. He was
like medically alive but biologically dead or the other way
around or something.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
Yeah, it sounds like he wasn't having any brain activity.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
So yeah, And eventually his family removed him from life
support and he died more completely. And this was a
big deal. And Peter Saffer had been looking for ways
to improve emergency medical services, but there hadn't been the
political will for it. Also, even though he's like the
father of CPR, everywhere he goes people kind of don't
like him, and for a long time, eventually has enough
(08:41):
cloud that he gets away with stuff. But like in
Baltimore and he first shows up, people are like, you're
just that weird guy with an accent, you know, like
and you want to do things not the right way.
We don't really like you very much.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
That seems like a common story in medicine.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I think, yeah, that doesn't surprise me. So when mister
Democrat dies, they literally called David Lawrence mister Democrat. That's
how important he was to the political machine in Pittsburgh.
He dies, and suddenly there's political will to improve emergency
medical care because it gets out no one's blaming the cops,
but it gets out that had actual proper medical care
(09:16):
been provided, he would have survived most likely.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
Yea.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
So people are like, all right, we can have ambulances
that aren't shitty. And Saffer got together with a nonprofit,
the Folk Medical Fund, which got together with Freedom House,
the people who were driving around and you know, selling
groceries and giving job training and stuff, right, And the
plan wasn't just put doctors on ambulances. It was to
put paramedics on ambulances, which is this entirely new word.
(09:43):
I don't think they invented it for this context, but
it's like a new word that've been floating around as
a concept. And he wanted to prove that you could
train regular folks into the job, not quickly and easily,
but reliably. Freedom House was like, we will do it
on one condition, and the ordinary people who are going
to get trained to serve the black community are going
(10:05):
to be black people from the black community. And Peter
Saffer was like, that is literally not a problem. I
fucking survived Nazi occupation. There's no part of me that's
excited about racism. That's fine. Yeah, later a bunch of
people were really into the racism thing, fucked the whole
thing up. But that's a while later. Yeah, that checks out.
So I'm sorry. What was Freedom House at this point?
(10:28):
What were they? Remind me? Like, what were they doing?
Or so they were a job training center for black
people looking to learn how to start their own businesses,
like doing like landscaping and stuff. And they were also
doing the grocery not delivery. It wasn't like a mutual
aid project. It was a break the food desert thing
where they'd drive in and drove the vans, right, yeah, okay,
(10:50):
And so they were basically like a method of empowerment
to the neighborhood that ended up being like the most
appropriate rough infrastructure to build out, you know. And so
all the first paramedics in the first class were men
because of sexism, and all the phone operators were and
this will shock you to hear women whoa yeah, thank
(11:13):
you history. At least later one of the phone operators
ends up a paramedic, which is cool. And so when
they decide to get all these people together to do
this thing, the nonprofit world, the you know, Freedom House,
and Saffer. Some cops come to the first meetings. They're like, well,
we're the we're the ambulance drivers. We should be part
of it, you know. And then the cops were like, wait,
(11:38):
hold on, we get paid to do ambulance ride of
death routine. We don't want black people fucking it up.
So they were out and they left the coalition immediately,
which is for the best.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
I don't give a shit, but like, they would have
made I mean, they would have at least made money, right,
they may have made a little bit LEAs because someone
else is doing it, But weren't they still going to
be couldn't they still be involved if they want it
to and still be able to make money off it?
Speaker 2 (12:02):
Probably they probably could have figured out a way to
do that. Yeah. Saffer was like, I can teach a
class of forty four students, and they were like, okay,
we need forty four people willing to take three hundred
hours of job training for a job that has never
existed in history. That was hard to find people who
were willing to do that. So the first class of
forty four students was a lot of them were literally
(12:24):
kind of off the streets, like they'd go around and
basically be practically rounded up and dragged off to go learn. Wow.
They were aged eighteen to sixty. They were high school dropouts,
they were Vietnam vets on drugs, they were a tenant workers.
They were felons with records that kept them out of
most work. They were people who were having a hard
go of it themselves. One of the recruiters who ended
(12:47):
up also being one of the paramedics who worked at
Freedom House, he actually ran an ambulance service, of private
ambulance service prior to that, just because the neighborhood needed it.
But it was the old school of style of ambulance service,
like call us drive you to the hospital, you know,
and they start a three hundred at this point. Cops
have like ten hours of medical training if they're on
the ambulance duty, which is a lot, you know. I
(13:08):
mean that's probably roughly what you had to do. It
was about ten hours or something like that. Yeah, total, Yeah,
or years? Was it years or hours?
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Like decades it feels, but yeah, yeah, it's probably a
little bit more.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Yeah, so more than ten hours. And the paramedics. Of course,
we're not training to be become doctors, but they're training
to become a new thing. It is between EMT emergency
medical technician and doctor to be able to provide the
kinds of life saving support that are necessary on the
street rather than immediately taking people to hospitals. It was
(13:41):
a grueling schedule for everyone, the teachers and the students alike, days, nights,
and weekends. They learned far more than any civilian ambulance
team and probably history. Yeah, everyone without a high school
degree was like coach through gd programs on the side
during all of this. Well so cool man, Yeah, they're like,
(14:02):
it is so cool what they did, and it it
really proves the point about giving people a chance to
do good things and save lives and you know, and
people are taking advantage of it. It's just so cool. Yeah,
only twenty four or the forty four of them made
it through the classroom portion of the training, just because
(14:23):
it was an incredibly grueling classroom thing, you know. And
then they after that they did rotations. They did rotations
at morgues and helped with dissections. They showed up in
operating rooms, they showed up in emergency rooms they would
like they had problems where they wanted to show up
and like help deliver babies. They faced racism everywhere they went.
Doctors would assume they were orderlies and like hand them
(14:45):
ups as soon as they walked into the room, and
a lot of places they were just literally shut out
of even though they were with one of the most
important doctors in the city.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
You know, yeah, I mean, you know, if you talked
to like black doc is now, you'll still hear. Everyone
has like a story where they walk in and they're like, okay,
you can take my tray, I'm done with it, and
they're like, no, God, I'm not here for the tray.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
I wish that surprised me in any way. And actually
some of them started off as orderly. There's one, Oh,
I didn't write down his name, unfortunately. There was one
guy who later he sticks with us for decades and
becomes a paramedic and stuff like that. He actually started
off as an orderly and he saw these first paramedics
come in. He saw black men come in and take
(15:32):
charge of a situation and like be treated with respect,
and he was like, I don't even know what that
job is, but that's gonna be my job now, yeah,
you know. Yeah, And so they finished, they finished their
three hundred hour training and they were they went down
to Baltimore to do ambulance rides to do to like
start doing it because Saffar had more connections with fire
departments in Baltimore than he did with police in Pittsburgh. Right,
(15:58):
But before they could go these first ambulance rides, and
so the first paramedics in history weren't in Baltimore because
some asshole went and killed Martin Luther King Junior, and Pittsburgh,
among other places, revolted, and so the first time a
paramedic team in history did medical work was in black
neighborhoods during the riots after Martin Luther King Junior's assassination.
(16:22):
And they didn't have their ambulance as yet. So they
were in borrowed cop vans because the city was on
we'll talk about the relationship with the city. It wasn't great,
but it did exist. You know, they used borrowed cop
vans and so they had to keep the inside lights
on so that people could see that they were black
paramedics and not cops. And I don't know, I think
(16:42):
that rules that that is the birth of the paramedic profession.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Yeah, that is so cool, so cool. It's crazy that
we don't mean it's someone that sounds so ripe for
like a movie. I'm surprised and no one made a
movie of this yet.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I know there's a short documentary, it's not even a
feature length documentary. But yeah, no, I would watch the
shit out of the movie version of this. It even has,
it has all of the notes we're going to get
to it. There's even a token white paramedic who is
literally there as a token white paramedic. So you still yeah,
but you know what else is good and entertaining and
(17:17):
created within the confines of a capitalist system because the movie.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
I can guess, I know, I can guess. It's a
it's ads.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
It is, it is ads. Yeah, pretty smart. Yeah, you're
pretty good at this. This isn't your first rodeo. Here
they are and we're back. So Freedom House, which is
(17:46):
still the name it is operating under, is up and running.
And they had an ambulance service, and it was by
July nineteen sixty eight. Whenever someone called emergency services, if
it was a medical call for the Hill Oakland under Downtown,
three different neighborhoods not Oakland in the Bay but confuses me.
(18:06):
But yeah, yeah, the call was routed to Freedom House
and they'd send out an ambulance with actual paramedics. In
their first year, they responded to six thousand calls and
saved at least two hundred lives directly. Wow, it's good. Yeah,
it strong. Yeah, there's like thirty five of well, it
starts off with twenty four. Soon enough there's thirty five
(18:26):
of them that new classes are immediately cycling in, you know.
But it's like not a huge operation. The financing for
the whole thing was really scant. They managed loans from
a bunch of foundations and government shit, and soon they
had a second class in paramedics school. By nineteen sixty
nine they had actual ambulances that were purpose built that
they like designed the first ambulances that look like today's ambulances,
(18:49):
have a dedicated space in back and a place for
a medic to sit at the head of the patient.
And to quote Kevin Hazzard, who wrote that book American Sirens,
quote Ton Chevy G twenty van the kind of thing
the ice cream man might drive. The top was painted
white and bristled, with light sirens and a long whip antenna.
The sides were orange with a large blue star plastered
(19:12):
on its sliding door. The words Freedom House jumped out
in large block letters, and they took a lot of
pride in their uniforms. They had like really sharp uniforms.
They'd like walk around with pride through the neighborhood and
people people joined just to become part of something like that. Yeah. No,
I could see that. It's really inspiring. Yeah, I know
it's it would be such an easy, feel good movie.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
They really would. I mean I could already, we can
start casting. Yeah, but like all you have all the bits,
they have all the right bits.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
I think I think part of the problem is Hollywood
had this brief run where it was like they did
some really interesting kind of ideas like the first like
all black like airplane squad, and then like the first
basketball team, and then the first like sw I mean thing,
And at some point Hollywood was like, Okay, we got
to move on from this.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah. Yeah, but I'm like this is a good one.
I said, like an important one. Why why not do
this one? If you're gonna do some.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
War I know?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
And it's like it's not even the first black paramedics.
It's the first paramedics. Yeah, right, like you could do
a movie about the first white paramedics. They come later, right,
you know, sure they did. I'm sure that's been done. Yeah, no,
I'm sure. They charged twenty five dollars for their services,
which is about two hundred dollars in today's money, which
(20:29):
is a lot of money. But given the costs of everything,
I mean, I don't know, the average ambulance ride in
the US is currently one thousand dollars. Yeah, so five
times as much as what they were charging. Ye, And
the twenty five dollars wasn't enough to keep the lights on.
They needed funding from the city and shit, which makes sense,
And they got some funding, and that's what taxes should
(20:50):
use for instead of like genocide overseas. That's my controversial take, hippie. Yeah,
and also primary they're serving the hill and so a
lot of people just aren't paying their bill, which is
completely fair. They don't have enough money to they shouldn't
have to. But in order to keep funding from the
city and in order to get to like qualify for
(21:13):
like specific loan thing that happened at one point, they
needed to hire a white person. They needed one diversity higher. Yeah,
and so they hired one white guy who freaked out
about being the only white guy and he left, didn't
even come to his second shift. Oh come on, guy,
I know. Then they found this like working class kid
who had been the token white guy in his unit
(21:35):
in Vietnam, and he was like, I'm happy to reprise
the role. I don't give a shit. Yeah, And he
stuck it out to the very end, right on right.
So he would be the unfortunately main character in the
Hollywood version of this, But he probably didn't want to
be the main characteruse he was a decent fucker anyway.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Timothy shallow May's got that one on lock here.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
I am essentially blind to name of actors and don't.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Do not know, definitely has no idea who that is?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
No, I know like three and I use them a lot,
so I seem like I'm hip er and no things.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
But why is that one of the three?
Speaker 2 (22:13):
What's he in? He's in Dune and I like Dune.
Is he like the main guy in Dune? Yeah, he's
more ideep. Wait the guy who is also in Star Wars.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
No, no, no, no, no, no, he's the guy that's
in the new uh unnecessary Walker movie.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Oh yeah, no, that would be Yeah, you're thinking Oscar
Isaac's who was in the new Star Wars movies and
in Dune he played Duke a Triades. Yeah, okay, I'll
take your word for it. Yeah, it's been a while
since I've seen Dune. Even though the litany against fear
is like literally a mantra use on a regular basis,
that's a great line. Yeah, okay, So they got the
(22:50):
white guy and they're like it's cool because then they're like, oh,
that's good, and they don't like move to suddenly being
you know, they're like, well, this is for a black community,
so we're going to stick the way we have it.
You know. By nineteen seventy two, there's thirty five paramedics
fielding seven thousand calls a year, and the idea starts spreading,
like all across the country. National standards associations and shit
(23:12):
start coming together with totally memorable names like the National
Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians. The Freedom House folks start
inventing like new stretchers and shit that can go around corners.
And I didn't see any diagrams, so I don't really
understand them. Paramedics from Freedom House went all over the
country into Germany to teach their methods because it's not
just medical. I mean it is medical methods, but it's
(23:33):
also like how do you run paramedics?
Speaker 3 (23:35):
You know?
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah, because they are the world's experts. And like Saffer
absolutely did a ton, he came up with the initial thing,
but these are the people who actually did it, Yeah,
implemented it, and we're doing it and actually learned how
to do it. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
And they were calling it paramedics at the time. Yes,
that term they're using now.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah. Wow. And because Freedom House and Peter Saffer invented
half the cool shit ever, Saffer and the paramedics started
using Narcan to reverse heroin overdoses right on. It had
been previously done to reverse anesthesia. It's possible that other
(24:14):
I am not one hundred percent certain whether Peter Saffer
was the first person to start using Narkan to reverse overdoses,
but Freedom House was absolutely the first organization to start
doing that on the street.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Very cool, very here, very now, so very important.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
If you had asked me, I would have thought Narcan
was fifteen years old. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
My friend Ryan Marino is going to give me a
hard time for this, But I thought it was at
least fifteen to ten. I didn't think more than that.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Jeez. Yeah, I thought it could be older than like oxycon,
like the opioid crisis starting in the right right, you know,
couldn't be older than me because I'm so young. Yeah,
and because these guys were so obviously not cops when
they would show up to calls and they were from
the neighborhood and they didn't rat anyone out for anything,
(25:05):
like they just really weren't cops. They could do things
like go to the overdose victims dealer and find out
exactly what the person was on so that they could
treat that and also provide like other you know, provide
the hospital with like this is what this person is on.
That's so so so cool, so interesting. Yeah. I just
(25:25):
got really excited about all that part because I'm just like, God,
that's that's what a lot of the conversation around emergency
response stuff is now is like, don't send cops, we
have someone odine, send an ambulance, you know, yeah, right exactly.
So the result of all of this patients in Black
neighborhoods in Pittsburgh ended up with far, far better chances
(25:46):
of surviving accidents, heart attacks, gunshots, overdoses, all of it
than people in white neighborhoods.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah, oh wow, that's that's This is where I'm sure
it gets fascinating. This is probably where they're like, Okay,
what do they have there? We must live there. Let's
buy that area the hills now ours. They kind of
do sort of the opposite. They don't go into the hill. Instead,
they're like, how do we steal their thing? We're like,
we want the ambulance, but we don't want the ambulance driver.
(26:16):
You know, we don't want we want the thing that
black people invented, but we don't want the black people.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
How do we do this?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
But how do we say it make them more I
don't know, American colored.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is almost exactly what ends up
bringing down Freedom House. But before that, nineteen seventy two,
some like doctors at the hospital start auditing how different
ambulance crews, including the cops, were treating different people. Right
in nineteen seventy two, doctors found that paramedics provided the
right care eighty nine percent of the time as compared
(26:48):
with cops who provided the wrong care sixty two percent
of the time.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
God, I'm surprised it wasn't higher.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
I know so enemy of all things noble and good.
The police union starts getting really mad because they're like, well,
we don't want new training. We don't need new training.
All over the country paramedics are like starting to become
a thing, But the Pittsburgh cops are like, no, we
can't do that. They're not going to let some uppity
paramedics change how they've been doing things and enter the
(27:20):
main villain of the story. The cops weren't the only
folks who didn't like Freedom House. There was this new mayor,
Peter Flaherty. He was elected in nineteen seventy. He was
not one of the best things ever produced by the
Irish diaspor He was a populist Democrat who refused to
align himself strongly with the Democratic Party, which sounds fine.
(27:41):
He hated labor unions, which is less fine. He claimed
he hated public slash private partnerships, which seems are right
on its surface right because he's like, well, all public
infrastructure should be run by the government, is what he's
saying he is notably only saying this about Freedom House. Yeah. Right,
immediately after he takes office, he fires two thousand public
(28:03):
employees and then he turns his ire on an ambulance
service that's saving everyone's lives.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
The important thing is getting getting in to the important stuff, right.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah. All over the country, Freedom House, like Freedom House
is changing everything, everything about emergency medicine. Twenty four states
at this point had instituted better minimum EMS standards. Miami
started a paramedic class. As soon as Freedomhouse got going.
They were like, holy shit, that's amazing. But back at
home in Pittsburgh, he was hated by the city government.
(28:33):
Peter Flaherty was what you call a racist. Oh yeah,
he And it's funny because it's like all the journalism
takes are like he was often called a racist, you know,
because you have to hedge your bets.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
What is being called a healthcare crisis by some in Gaza.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, exactly. He opposed desegregating city buses, and folks involved
in the struggle around Freedomhouse were pretty blunt that the
main reason that Flaherty opposed Freedom House is because he
was an overt racist. So he at the very least
did racist things, but it seems very likely that he
was literally overtly like just an anti black person racist,
(29:14):
and he had actually kind of started off not that
way because he was a Democrat and he was like
playing to the base and all that shit, and he
just like shift, he just went further and further right
once he got in office. Weird again, the past crazy,
I know totally. I don't live in West Virginia with
mansion as my you know, anyway, Yeah, betterman? So, oh god,
(29:36):
he's even Pennsylvania too, isn't he. I think? So I'm
not a I know them slightly better than I know actors,
but not a lot better. Yeah, okay, So he cuts
Freedom House's city budget in half. They were getting one
hundred thousand dollars a year, which was not enough, and
he gives starts getting them fifty thousand dollars a year.
(29:57):
And he also says they have to provide just as
much service, and they somehow don't. Anywhere they don't provide service,
the cops will take over again. So Freedom House starts
fundraising everywhere they can, but a lot of grants, most
of the grants, and there were a ton of grants going
around for black businesses and stuff around at this time
required cities to match the funds, and so the city
(30:18):
wouldn't do it. So they got passed over for all
these grants, even though they are like setting the standard
nationwide and worldwide, because Flaherty was like, Freedomhouse has to
be financially self sufficient, even though he didn't ask that
of anyone else. Right, he was such a libertarian. In
nineteen seventy four, he won the Democratic primary he was
already he was the incumbent. He also won the Republican
(30:41):
primary as a right end candidate and the Constitutional Party primary.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
I don't know what the Constitutional Party is, but I
don't like it.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, I just don't like it. Yeah. I used to
know more about them, and now they're all blurred together
in my head. They're all a bad Yeah. Even though
he was giving nineteen million dollars a year to the
cops and he was giving one hundred thousand dollars a
year to the dog catchers, the dog catchers got twice
as much money as the ambulances. Oh my god. Now
(31:13):
I love dogs, yeah, but no, I love dogs and
I love catching them.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
But this is a that's such a that's such an
amazing jexposition.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yeah, and paramedics made like nine grand a year and
cops made like fourteen grand a year. It should be
about eight times that in modern money. And the ambulances
were way cheaper to make than the cop cars because
they were like purpose built and not full of people
taking the extra money off of shit, so financing the
(31:46):
whole thing for the whole city. If they had just
been like Freedom House or even other paramedics built on
the Freedom House model who aren't cops like, it would
have been so much cheaper for the city. Yeah, but
it was a it was an ethical thing for him.
He hated whatever piece of shit.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Do you get any sense of whether or not there
was public support for this at the time. Were people
like upset about it or did people not even notice?
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Was it flying under the radar, Like, oh it was
a big deal. Yeah, people started making it a big
deal because the other neighborhoods, including wealthier neighborhoods, were like,
can Freedom House please come here? I like not dying.
I'm a really big fan of not dying, like being
a live rules and cops suck at that particular thing,
you know. Yeah, but the funeral home industry at other
(32:33):
private ambulance services started fighting back against Freedom House too,
because that was like they treated more of like the
suburbs and the surrounding areas, you know. Yeah, and so
basically everyone running the ambulance services was like, no, fuck
you the private ones, you know, or the not Freedom
House ones. But yeah, and we'll talk more about the
activists who defended Freedomhouse in a little bit. So the
(32:54):
mayor was like, all right, what can we do cutting
their budget and have didn't destroy Freedomhouse? How do I
just a Freedom House? Because he's a fucking villain. He's
very highly remembered and his Wikipedia pages very balanced. The
budget and blah blah blah blah blah. He banned ambulances
from using sirens in downtown, so they were like, you know,
(33:15):
race to go save people and they're in the hill
and then as soon as they cross into downtown they
have to turn it off and they're allowed to like honk,
you know. And because they it was a noise ordinance,
it didn't want to be disruptive to the business community.
Yeah yeah, allowed to use sirens, Yeah yeah, I've heard
of that happening. Still.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
Actually mean, I don't know if it's common, yeah at all,
but I have heard of that that is amazing. I'm
sure like there are like building people like behind real
estate developers that sort of thing, who pushed for.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
That sort of thing. Yeah, and then he also ran
into racist patients as a big problem. And this was
actually part of because they started explanding to a few
more areas. I read a couple of different things exactly
about this, But they started going to a few more
places because people neighborhood councils would be like, we really
want them to come here. But individual rich white racists
would be like, what are you talking about. You can't
(34:08):
treat me that man is black. You know, I want
an actual doctor, not this black man. And so, and
especially in downtown, right, you have all this white flight
from the cities, but people still come into the town
to work. And so when they're working downtown, a lot
of their patients are white. And so they just had
(34:29):
to literally run around all day and save the lives
of racist who would physically recoil from their presence. Woh,
what a bummer.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Yeah, I mean again, like you talked to African American doctors,
Jewish doctors, lots of doctors of color, they all have
some story still of you know, treating some patient with
the swastika or something like that.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
That's very very common.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
But this is, you know, this was just the battle
days of it even worse. Not great still, yeah, but
even worse. It's so hard to do your job and
to be like in to have a tough gig, and
to have that on top fit is truly heroic efforts
(35:14):
to help those people.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
It really is. And on top of it all, all
these rumors started spreading around that they like sold drugs
and ran dice games and shit like that. And I
don't believe there's any basis to these particular rumors. That's
certainly no evidence was provided to back this up that
I've ever found. Right, cops started trying to beat them
(35:35):
to calls in order to get the money from having
you know, thrown someone in the back of the wagon
and driven them off or whatever. Yeah, And so when
paramedics would show up and the cops were already there,
they would like threaten to arrest the paramedics if they
tried to treat patients. My god, then so far. Yeah.
In nineteen seventy four, the mayor did a one to
(35:57):
eighty he suddenly loved ambulances. Maybe they should be city
financed after all, as long as there's not Freedom House
and it's cops. Oh god, so close. Yeah, So the
city canceled its contract with Freedom House and set up
a cop run paramedic organization. This is when the activist
(36:18):
groups were like, are you fucking kidding me? And the
activist groups were like, we want to be interrupted in
the middle of like sentences with to be sold things
that were like, that's what we demand. We demand that
in the middle of sentences someone comes in and says,
haven't you tried listening to this podcast or getting mental
(36:41):
health services through the following product? Because Zach, same thing,
here's the Zach same thing. Yeah, here's the ads. So
activist groups, both white and black, fought hard against what
(37:03):
was happening, which was the destruction of Freedom House and
the empowerment of the police. The NAACP, various neighborhood associations,
women organizations, a bunch of different Catholic organizations, youth organizations.
Even conservative papers were running opinion pieces that were like,
we already have a good ambulance service. What are you doing?
(37:25):
You know? Because it was so transparently about race, Yeah,
and that's why they kept being They're like, no, it's
that I hate private public stuff or whatever. You know.
But these activists might have changed the face of modern
emergency response across the US because they won cool and
(37:48):
the racist in charge of the city relented and funded
Freedom House for two more years. It was like fine,
nineteen seventy four, nineteen seventy five, you're getting funded again,
still at the like shitty rate, but they stop the
cops from being the paramedics, and that rules, and that
has like reverberating effects throughout history that have saved so
many people's lives, because even even if cops were fully
(38:11):
trained as paramedics, you still just run into the conflict
of interest about law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
And you know, absolutely, like for fens andal overdoses the
last thing. I mean, it's that's a whole im sure
of itself. Never call them, Yeah, I mean, what would
happen is one of them would touch like.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
A baggie, have a panic attack, and.
Speaker 3 (38:33):
Then they would add to the sentence of whatever guy
that they arrested because they would be like, well, this
person almost kills a cop. Yeah, we had to use
four narcans to revive him. Which, by the ways, how
narcan would work. But like it's it.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Would be terrible the concept. It gives me chills, literal
chills to think of cops running codes. Yeah. Also, can
we talk about the fact that, like people accept the
idea that cops are somehow wildly allergic to fentanyl, where
if they're in the same room as it, they all
die because, like it is, I don't do drugs. A
(39:09):
lot of my friends do drugs. Some of my friends
do fentanyl on purpose, which I think is not a
good idea, but the only way they die of it
is if they owe d on it, like not by
touching it, correct for being in visual contact with it.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
Yeah, fentanyl great in the hospital. I don't love it
use elsewhere. But yeah, I have to let you in
on a secret. I also understand this process because as
a doctor, not everyone knows this, but an apple will
destroy me, and for cops, fentanyl is their apple. An
apple will keep your doctor away. Sentinyl is the same thing.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
For a cop. I think I know where you're going.
I was wondering if that was going to work. I
was just I was like, Okay, you are specifically allergic
to apples, And I was like, oh no, yeah, I
realized that. To make that clear. Yeah, yeah, bad, my bad. No, Okay,
I'm going to start I dehydrate apples and give them
to people way too often, and I'm just going to
start calling them a doctor Baine, doctor, yeah, doctor pain. Yeah. No.
(40:14):
It it the fact that people believe, I mean, the
fact that people believe cops like full stop is like complicated,
but the fact that people believe all of these weird
cop lies about fentanyl is just so. I don't understand
why we as a society accept the way that cops
talk about fentanyl, even though again, yeah I love being sober,
(40:35):
you know, but whatever. Yeah. So the activists save Freedom House,
and I mean Freedom House also saves itself. They're part
of this process, you know, and they continue. They're underfunded
as hell, and they're honestly starting to fall apart from
the inside from their underfundingness. At this point, their organization
is starting to collapse. Their ambulance is barely run like physically,
(40:57):
you know, mechanically. And then they always had this doctor.
They would have like one doctor who's like their chief
medical director. It was, you know, a doctor's being everyone
else's paramedics. And this person I think was always white.
It was never mentioned otherwise, and I'm not one hundred
percent sure, but I think it was always a key.
And then in nineteen seventy four they got a white
(41:17):
Jewish woman named Nancy Caroline who basically slept at the
office and helped organize the place and bring things back
together and improve the level of medical training even higher.
One of the big like things that they didn't do.
They did all of these different things. They would interpret kgs,
they would do all these like fairly high level things.
(41:39):
They didn't intubate patients on the street, And under Nancy
Caroline's training, they learned how to do that. Wow, were
they the first people to do that? They were the
first people. That's so rad Yeah, And I think they
were like the first people to like use shock paddles
and go clear and shit and like save people's lives
(42:00):
that way or whatever. But in the on the street
on the street, sure, yeah, Wow, that's so cool. And
that's what I was saying, was like, shit that even
I've heard of, like intubating and narcan and I call
them shock padals because I don't know what they're called.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah, that's all the shock We'll accept, all right, cool.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Thanks. So under her training, they're now intubating patients in
the street, which as hard as fuck and if you
do it wrong people die, but can be a very
important life saving thing. There's this like moment where they
bring in an intubated patient and they're like, Matt. The
doctor's like, who the fuck intubated is patient? And the
guy's just like, yeah, I did. I'm a paramedic. And
(42:42):
they were like, oh, okay, you know wow.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah, that must have been mind blowing at the time.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, absolutely. And Nancy was also frustrated by this other
thing that was defeating the organization that she worked with
the cops, and somehow she got a hold of a
police scanner. History does not indicate how she got a
hold of this police scanner, which means it was not legal.
That's right. Yeah, I assume either she stole it or
(43:09):
someone working with the cops stolen and gave it to her.
And so Freedom House started listening in the police scanner
and beating cops to medical emergencies to save people's lives.
Oh that's so cool, yeah, because the cops are already
doing that to them, yeah, but now they can do
it in reverse. And they would like tell stories about
being like, ah, I just was in the neighborhood and
(43:29):
happened to drive by and saw this person. You know, right,
that's so cool with their time today.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
I'm sure they got their faster because they probably cared
more to get their faster.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, that was it. Yeah, And so she actually ends
up writing the book on street medicine and emergency medical services,
and Freedom House at this point becomes the official model
chosen by the Department of Transportation about what ems should
be in the country. And so this is like they
have cemented their legacy at this point, not necessarily by
name and not by memory, but in terms of the
(44:02):
way that they've learned how to do things over these
seven years. Yeah. But the mayor, instead of being like, okay,
I give up, I'll listen to the federal government and
realize that Freedom House rules, he spent the last two
years when he gave them like the stay of execution
for two years. He basically just spent the time figuring
out how to copy it, expand on the model with
better funding, and then shut down Freedom House and replace
(44:25):
it with white paramedics, which is what he did. The
upside the thing that they won. Is that it wasn't cops. Yeah,
that's huge. Yeah, huge.
Speaker 3 (44:36):
In today's world, we look at like evidence based medicine.
That's sort of our mantra for everything. We tried to
have make sure there's evidence for everything. So I have
to think if that's the case, there's no way that
it would have held up. But the fact that it
might have taken an extra fifteen twenty thirty years, yeah,
(44:58):
to maybe get the police out, and how so many
people would have been killed in that process, yeah, is
really startling.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Yeah. Yeah, there's just like an objective body count to
doing better emergency medical services, you know. Yeah, like yeah, absolutely.
So these white paramedics who are going to take over,
basically it's like they're like, all right, we're starting up
this new city program. Freedom House is a few more
months to go. And so the white paramedics did their
(45:25):
training rides on Freedom House ambulances, but the black paramedics
weren't told that they were training the men who would
replace them. They thought that they were training guys from
the suburbs. Who was gross.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
That's fucking gross.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Yeah, it's absolute fucking worse.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
I mean, it's like more people having medical training, good
that gross.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah. They were like, all right, this guy from the
suburb is gonna go back from the suburbs where this
is great, where the teachers were the trainers, you know,
what a bummer. The city was like, well, we need
a medical director for this new program, someone with experience. Someone.
Fortunately Nancy Caroline met those requirements and they offered to
hire her. And she was like, God, I don't fucking
(46:07):
know about that. So she went to talk to everyone
and I think this was like functionally a democratic decision
of Freedom House, but I'm not She certainly included them
in her decision making. Yeah, And she came back and
she said all right, because they knew Freedom House was done,
she was like, all right, I will do it. I
will be the medical director for the ambulance program if
you hire everyone from Freedom House who wants it. And
(46:30):
the city was like, no, we're good. And then she
was like okay, then I'm going to the press and
the city was like, okay, we'll hire everyone from Freedom House.
Good for her. Yeah. On midnight at midnight on October fifteenth,
nineteen seventy five, as it turned over to October sixteenth,
Freedom House shut its doors and actually the token white
(46:52):
guy like stayed until morning to like lock up. So
it's like you have the fucking movie moments.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
Every symbolism, there's some symbolism there, know what it means,
but there's like that's a symbolic sort of like last shot.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Yeah, and uh, I don't of you knew this. The
US government routinely breaks the agreements it makes with people
who are racially marginalized. What I know, I know that
was my face when I learned this. One of the paramedics,
one of the black paramedics, had actually been offered second
in command of the new Ambulance Corps, but the city
changed its mind and didn't offer to him, and he
(47:25):
just was a guy on an ambulance. So none of
the people, none of the black people from Freedom House,
had any kind of standing within the new organization, even
though they are literally the world's first paramedics and they
have seven years of experience, so this is so wild.
Most of the Freedom House people took the paramedic jobs
(47:48):
that were offered, but they were treated like pariahs. They
would like show up and people be like, oh, your
Freedom House and would like stay away from them. Even
the token white guy was treated like shit by the
new staff for having been part of the quote goon
squad and for having been quote white only on the outside.
Oh yeah, So then the people who had literally invented them,
(48:11):
which is sort of a compliment that I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Yeah, absolutely, it's sort of a compliment. I like, I'm
sort of I'm undercover too, I'm off white.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
Yeah. Yeah, like so I kind of get it. Yeah,
kind of.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
I think that'd be a cool, like, it's not a
bad title.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
No, I doubt he had a problem with that, you know. Yeah.
So then the people who had literally invented the profession
of paramedics had to be mentored by the less trained
new recruits because they were new to that particular job.
So they had to be mentored, and the city had
promised to hire them, the city did not promise to
keep them on, so the organization set about icing them
(48:47):
out to get them to quit or finding excuses to
fire them. They weren't allowed to touch patients, just observe because
they're the new kids, you know. They had to take
classes that were beneath their level, that didn't even meet
national standards which they themselves had set set. Yeah, and
they were like given like constant pass fail tests and
I'd be like, oh, we don't get one hundredercent, you're
(49:09):
fired just tomorrow, you know. And about half of them
quit within the first year, including Nancy Caroline. She was like,
this sucks, fuck you, you so demoralizing, and she she left.
She went to Israel to set up emergency services there,
and some of the paramedics, the first paramedics in the world,
(49:32):
ended up tow truck drivers and taxi drivers and shit.
At least one ended up homeless soon enough, and Pittsburgh
paramedics became an overwhelmingly white profession, though a few of
the original paradomedics rose in the ranks of the new
organization and became supervisors and stuff eventually, and then the
(49:53):
history was almost completely forgotten until now, until this episode
of the podcast. I am the one who's breaking this
story by having read a very best selling book by
Kevin Hazard. I will tell you this.
Speaker 3 (50:07):
You are breaking this story to me, and I'm going
to be sharing this with every medical professional that I
have contact or range of Yeah, because it is just
amazing and it's one of the few ones where I
feel like it's still not too late to give the
right people their credit.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Totally or flowers as kids call it.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
Like, I feel like that, like there, I mean, unfortunately
some of them have probably passed away, and probably some
of them will never be able to get it, but
like just I feel like there's still at least a
little opportunity. And it's funny too because like just like
with the Tuskegee stuff, Yeah, people assumed that was the distant,
distant past, right, We're talking about things that ended in
the sixties seventies, things that people who train people like
(50:52):
me were alive for and very much like practicing at
the time. So it is it is so important to discuss.
I think this is such a good such a good topic,
and I'm so happy that you did it. I've learned
so much from this.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Yeah, no, thank you for being the guest you were
you were, I knew, I was, like I had that.
I've been wanting to do this for a while ever
since I found this book because I was blown away
by the story of it. And yeah, I was like,
saved it for when I had my when I had
my doctor, guest.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
That's me so but yeah, and then cool, very cool.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
So the just to shouted out. Kevin Hazzard wrote a
really good book called American Sirens. I did pull from
some other sources, but honestly not as many as I
sometimes do, because he covers contexts better than most people,
most authors I've read. And it turns out American Sirens
is not about women in the ocean learning sailors to
their death. So a little bit of a disappointment there.
(51:49):
But you you are a writer, Yeah that's true. And
titles aren't copyrightable. Totally you could you can make like
Syle with the Z at the end. Yeah, yeah, totally.
That'll be a totally good thing to do to an
author I respect. But speaking of podcasters I respect. We're
(52:11):
here at the end. Do you want to plug anything?
Speaker 3 (52:14):
I would like people to listen to my podcast.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
Go and do that.
Speaker 3 (52:19):
Anywhere you get your podcast. It is called the House
of pod You will hear all the people from the
Cool Zone, media world, the universe, the c Z m
u H and they'll all be there, including Margaret if
she is willing to come on. And it's going to
(52:41):
cover a lot of similar stuff. We're going to talk
about inequality, We're going to talk about equity issues in medicine.
We're going to cover some random stuff. Too, like where
the spartans really as cool as everyone makes them out
to be answers No, So we're kind of all over
the place. But I think you'll enjoy it. Give it
a shot. There's something in there you're going to like.
(53:01):
And thank you so much for having me on. This
is super fun. I feel like I want some sort
of contest to get on the show. Its super cool.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
Yeah. Well, you know there was the Golden tickets and
then everyone else died horribly accidentally.
Speaker 3 (53:17):
I had nothing to do with it, Margaret Ye.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
Interesting thing about working in the medical field and ability
to understand forensics totally unrelated. Well, if you want to
know more about I also have a podcast called cool
Zone Media book Club every Sunday where I read fiction
and it is on this very feed as well as
(53:43):
the feed of it could happen here. And you probably
already know this because if you listen to this you
probably subscribe. I mean, if you don't, I don't know
what you're doing with your life. And so every Sunday
you get a notification about me reading you a new story,
and what do you got to shout out, Sophie? Just
follow at.
Speaker 1 (53:59):
Cool Zone Media on social media. If you do use
social media still because we have a lot of upcoming
projects that were releasing this year that you should look
at for a lot of good stuff.
Speaker 2 (54:10):
There's a new Jamie Loft is going to drop nice
pretty excited there is.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
We're really really really really really excited about that one.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
I've been finally listening to raw Dog on audiobook. Yeah
it's so good, so fun. Yeah, it's so fun. Yeah,
that's the book about hot dogs. Yes, Jamie's Jamie's book
about hot It is about way more than hot dogs. Yeah,
that's secret.
Speaker 1 (54:30):
That's secretly about like labor and you know, health, health
rights and just.
Speaker 2 (54:36):
Really cool but also just like entertainingly written and about
the way that Jamie. It's great, but hot dogs are
in it. Correct, Yes, correct, there's enough hot dogs that
I as a vegan, I was partly. That was partly
why I kept putting it off. And you know, and
then but several points throughout it, Jamie is like, vegans,
(54:56):
you're right and I'm wrong. Anyway, let me talk more
about me. That's so I'm like, I feel seen.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
Well, I'll also tell you, as a Gaston trologist, you know,
when I hear hot Dog the first thing I think
about is somebody who went to like a barbecue or cookout,
was in the hot sun, not hydrating, well, eat a
lot of hot dogs, and they got stuck in their throat,
and I'm coming into the hospital like three in the
morning to try and dislodge.
Speaker 2 (55:21):
That's so, that's the thing that pops in my head
when I hear hot dogs first, even above how delicious
they are, they are delicious, amazing that. Yeah, I have
a weird job. My job is so much easier than
your job in some ways. Yeah, but it's kind of fun.
I got to do some fun stuff. Yeah. No, the
(55:42):
people who I just described in this episode are fucking heroes,
and I I'm very grateful for people who do that work.
All Right, we will see everyone next Monday.
Speaker 3 (55:53):
Bye bye.
Speaker 4 (55:57):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 2 (56:09):
You get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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