June 14, 2022 • 31 mins
In the early 2000’s a failed salesman turned local Atlanta reporter was obsessed with finding a way to prove himself and to see how he might respond to pressure and danger. As fate would have it he was eventually given that opportunity in an almost comical way. His choice to follow his instinct lead him to a moment of self-actualization. Join your host, James Brown and the former Atlanta paramedic & acclaimed author, Kevin Hazzard for another episode of the unimaginable.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
In the early two thousand's, a failed salesman turned local
Atlanta reporter was obsessed with finding a way to prove
himself and to see how he might respond to pressure
and danger. As fate would have it, he was eventually
given that opportunity in an almost comical way. His choice
(00:29):
to follow his instinct led him to a moment of
self actualization. What he was really searching for the whole
time was a front row seat to the circus of life.
This episode features the former paramedic and acclaimed author Kevin Hazard.
(00:52):
After Kevin's story, we chat about things like living your truth,
change and how sometimes of things that used to be
so important aren't anymore. We also learned about his leadist book,
American Sirens, which tells the extraordinary story of an unjustly
(01:12):
forgotten group of black men in Pittsburgh who became the
first paramedics in America, saving lives and changing the course
of emergency medicine around the world. This is the unimaginable.
I'm your host and musician James Brown. One night in
(01:47):
two thousand and two, I find myself standing over the
edge of this enormous construction whole me. It's hundreds of
feet deep, several hundred feet wide. About an hour and
a half before or a half dozen workers were down
there in the scaffolding that they've been standing on collapsed
and they just disappeared into the earth. I was working
(02:11):
as a reporter this you know, small newspaper in North Atlanta,
and it was probably about maybe six or seven o'clock
when we heard over our police scanner that this had
happened and that people are being dispatched out to it.
And so the city editor looks around the room for,
(02:33):
you know, who is it, who's here that can that
can handle this. Mainly at that point in the evening,
there's sports guys because these games haven't finished yet, they're
not going. There's a bunch of copy editors they're not going,
and then there's maybe one or two political reporters, but
you know, that's all kind of shut down for the day.
(02:55):
And then there's me. And I was fairly new at
that point. I think I had been with a newspaper
for about eight months, and I was sort of this
I was technically a county reporter, but I was sort
of all purpose, and so I was there sort of
trying to dig up stories and come up with a
reason to justify what I was going to show up
the next day, and he sees me sitting at this
(03:15):
desk and he just hazard get out there. And I
had no idea what this even was. I had to
run to the corner of the news room and grab
the map book and kind of flip this thing out
and found out, oh, it's it's somewhere between you know,
South Cobb County and North Fulton County, and so I,
you know, I just jumped in my car and it
(03:36):
was speed across town. I get out there and that road,
South Atlanta Road is sort of this empty, desolate place.
There's some commercial buildings out there. Um, there's some construction building,
some some heavy industry, but there's not a lot of people.
And so you know, there's just sort of fences and
and abandoned lots and this sort of narrow winding lane
(04:00):
road just that just goes to nowhere. And I drive
down it and I finally find this this huge fences
on the left side of the road, this massive fence,
and I see people kind of clinging onto it, and
there's two or three fire trucks that are sitting up there.
So I all right, I'm here, and so I park
across the street and I run over and right about
(04:22):
then the local TV news shows up and they set
up their shot, and reporters from the big newspaper, the
A j C, arrive and they begin talking. And everybody
I noticed kind of knows how to do. Is say,
they're looking for the p I oh, which is the
public Information officer, and they're trying to get information from him.
But I wasn't really comfortable enough, well versed enough to
(04:47):
know what I was supposed to do, so I was
just sort of standing there listening to what everybody else
was saying. But the thing that I noticed while I
was standing there listening was the family members. And that
was the moment I realized, whoever is down there, and
these people are waiting for them to come up. And
if we all already think that the only thing that's
(05:10):
going to emerge from this massive tunnel our bodies, then
what must these people be thinking. You know, they're for us,
this is a story, this is something that we have
been sent here to catch and we're not supposed to miss.
But for these guys like this is the end of
the life that they have lived up to this moment,
you know, nothing will ever be the same after this
(05:31):
elevator comes back up. You know, whatever whatever is on it,
that's going to be all they'll have. And it was
incredibly powerful, intimidating moment to find myself out, especially as
you know, year old kids some kind of standing over
this yawning hole as the sun goes down, that I
(05:54):
decided to be a paramedic. So we go through this
class six months and get to the end of it,
We take our exams and I passed. The entire time.
Everybody's saying, you know, hey, you're not just stepping into
a job, You're stepping into a career or stepping to
a lifestyle. Medicine is this, you know, the sort of
(06:15):
escalator that goes on forever and and there's there's no
end to the opportunities of the possibilities, and no two
days are going to be the same, No two moments
are going to be the same. So I'm expecting to
come out and and see the gates fly open, and
there's gonna be this sort of trumpet and singing of angels,
and I'm gonna you know, this wonderful world of medicine
(06:36):
is going to open to me and I go to
my first interview, which is in this terrible part of town,
and it's in this incredibly rundown building and the walls
are sagging, and there's this air conditioning unit that's dangling
from a window, and there's one ambulance in the parking
lot and it's on blocks and it's got a tag
(06:58):
in the back of o stegin and back windows this
tag applied for. And I walk in and a cigarette smoke,
a cloud of it, like like like a casino, and
there's a woman. She turns me and she, you know,
kind of within differences, you know what, you know, like
why are you here? So I'm you know, I'm I'm
(07:21):
here for the interview. So this guy comes out of
his back room, sort of lumbers down the hall and
he takes up it means a small building, he takes
up the entire space. He brings me this little office,
which is these teetering stacks of old paperbacks, and I
sit down and I'm thinking, well, if nothing else, I'm
(07:41):
we're going to get down to business now. And he
just asked me if I've heard of the lawsuits. No,
I haven't heard, and he said, well, we've been investigated
multiple times for insurance fraud, but don't worry. They've never
found enough evidence to convict. So and that's how we
left it. That was my interview, is not are you
(08:03):
capable of doing this job? But don't worry. Working here
won't get you sent to jail. When can you start?
And I said, I said, I don't know. I guess tomorrow.
So he throws me this uniform shirt and he says,
all right, be here at eight. And I stay at
this little, tiny, strange place for a little while and
begin to learn that they are sort of tears to
(08:24):
ambulance work, and that the one home on is the
bottom tier and it's sort of you just take people
to and from appointments, and that there's this other tier
called nine one one where things really happen, and that's
where you know lives are, one are lost, and where
you know the people who are really doing this and
her good and passionate. That's where they are. And among them,
(08:46):
of all these places you can work, Grady is the best.
Grady is the place. It's all you hear is Grady.
And if you live in Atlanta, you know Grady. Grady
Hospital is as famous as notorious as infamous as any
place you could possibly imagine. Up to the late nineteen fifties,
(09:07):
it was segregated, and it's the building a sort of
shape like an age, and so one side is for
black patients and the other side is for white patients.
So this is great. It comes with this big, complicated legacy,
and its ambulance service is what serves the city of Atlanta,
the Atlanta proper, the actual city. So if you call
(09:27):
nine one one from many of the famous neighborhoods of Atlanta,
the good and the bad, it's Grady who's going to
show up. And so after a couple of years of
trying to get enough experience that they'll take my phone calls,
I finally get hired on at Grady. And all I
want to do from the moment I arrived at this
(09:47):
place is proved myself. And I don't really know if
I'm gonna be able to do this, and so I'm waiting,
you know, sort of desperately to get my call, my
my moment, you know, again, this is why I'm here.
And one evening, it's sort of that wonderful time in
(10:08):
the South just before horrible nous of summer kicks in
when the evenings are just they're warm, when they're perfect,
and it's probably seven eight o'clock and the sun is
getting ready to go down and it's not hot yet,
so everybody's outside and the streets are just alive. And
a call goes out for a shooting in northwest Atlanta,
(10:31):
this area known as the Bluff. It's a sort of
tiny warren of streets. It's only a few square miles total,
and very narrow streets, all intersecting, intertwining with each other.
It's hard to navigate, it's easy to get lost. A
lot of abandoned buildings and small apartments, and that's where
this shooting is. And before we even get the call,
(10:54):
the cops are racing out there. And so when we
are arriving to look for way this thing is, there
are cop cars that are sort of whizzing around, and
there's this police helicopter that's out there, and you know,
it's just sort of chopping up the dust, the clay
dust into the air. And we park our ambulance because
nobody's exactly certain where this thing is. And I'm leaning
(11:18):
against the hood kind of waiting, listening to see what's
going to happen, and this woman pops out of this
little sort of wet choked alley and she says, he's
this way there. At that moment, there's no buddy else around.
It's just me and my partner. So we grab our
bag and we run into this alley and she sort
of winds through this little grasp clay debris path and
(11:43):
brings us into the back of this two story abandoned building.
She and whoever she's leading us to live in what
they call a cat hole, which just like a little
living space that you carve out of an abandoned building,
sort of a home that a squat basically, And so
she's leading us up to her cata hoole and we're
(12:03):
going up the stairs and you know, it's like it's
dark in here. There's no power, no ceilings kind of
sagging in the walls or bowed, and the floors on
even And we go up these stairs and we get
the second floor. There's there's spot we actually have to
kind of jump over this part of the floor that's
partially collapsed. And she brings us around to this bedroom
(12:29):
and I around the corner and there's a single mattress
on the floor with this guy and he's lying on it,
sort of on the side, and you know, we again,
we have been sent here for this shooting, and there's
cops everywhere, and it's so much adrenaline leading up to
this moment, and we've just sort of picked our way
(12:49):
through this abandoned building. And so when I see him,
I just sort of rushed to him and I roll
him over and there is his gunshot wound underneath the
bandage that's about ten days old. And I turned to
the wife and the guy turns to me, and you know,
the three of us are sort of looking at each other,
(13:11):
and he says, yeah, I just need you to changes
The doctor said, I need need to change this otherwise
it's going to get infected. And so I hadn't been
brought out for a shooting. And by the way, the
cops are still out there. I mean, the helicopter is
still hovering. You know, I can hear it chopping up
the air. I've been brought out to change a bandage.
(13:34):
And so I'm sitting there thinking, you know, I'm supposed
to be this is supposed to be my moment. But
that night, I'm sitting in this little cat hole on
the second story of an abandoned building with this couple,
and and they're cooking hot dogs over this candle that
(13:55):
they have partially melted and stuck to the floor, and
they're kind of arguing over which cereal box to use
to cover a hole that's in the wall. And I'm
changing this guy's bandage. And it was the first moment
that I stopped worrying so much about why I was here,
(14:17):
which was to find a way to prove myself, and
kind of shifted my focus to the things that we're
going to keep me here, which was this totally unexpected
invitation to the mad circus of life, which is exactly
what this was. And it was an incredible growing moment
(14:41):
for me to look around and realize that it what
I what I had been hoping for or searching for. Wasn't,
you know, sort of blood and death and excitement, but
it was real experience, really being out in the world
and really being involved, alved and and that knowledge of
(15:02):
what is really important in what life actually is. It's
probably why those guys who emerged from that huge construction
hall that night carried themselves the way they did, not
because they could save a life or stop bleeding, which
no doubt they could, but because they knew what was
really important, and they knew the difference between Yeah, someone
(15:26):
who wanted to be somebody you could count on and
somebody who actually was. You had what seems like an
overwhelming feeling inside you to prove yourself or to test
(15:48):
yourself or make something of yourself. Where do you think that,
Kim from? Yeah, I mean, I think I think some
of that is the product of being the youngest child.
You know. Um, everybody always looked at you as somebody
who who can't get things done, you know, or they're
doing things for you, and that always really bothered me.
(16:10):
And the other um is that you know, I I
don't know. I lived in what would probably be considered
a very normal suburban neighborhood, but my parents were divorced,
which not necessarily abnormal. But my dad worked on he
climbed telephone poles, and my stepfather drove a home heating truck,
(16:35):
like like a kerosene truck, and he did he did
local delivery routes, and so he would drive that truck home,
so you know, you'd have people's parents coming home, their
dad would come home from you know, whatever, business he
worked at, and he'd parked his car and maybe there
you know that their mom would be there already, you know,
(16:57):
and and sort of you know, making them a snack
or just sort of woking welcoming them in. And I
would come home to an empty house because my mother
also worked. And then when my stepfather came home, it
was in this huge like fuel oil truck, you know,
so it wasn't you know, it wasn't a car, it
(17:18):
was this this truck. And I remember he dropped me
off from dropping off at school one time, and uh,
I went to a private school, which is not terribly
expensive up there, Catholic schools or but it was still
you know, it was it was not the public school.
And he dropped me off one time, and I remember
this this kid made a joke about like, oh are
you you know, as he like dropping it off in
(17:38):
between runs. And I was trying to come up with
all these excuses for for what it like, why he
was doing that, and none of them really worked. And
and I think a lot of it really stems from that.
I mean, looking back, who cares? They were? You know,
they were people who were who are getting by and
they were making a living. But you know, as a
ten year old, knowing that you're different from everybody else, um,
(18:02):
in particular on the on the financial side or or
on the educational side. UM, it made me feel like, well,
then I've got to do a little something extra to
prove to everybody else that I am as good as,
if not better than the rest of them. So do
you think you've done that? Like, do you think you've
proven yourself? I mean, I think there's two answers to
(18:23):
that question. One is, uh, I think it no longer matters,
you know, I'm I'm not ten years old anymore, thankfully,
and I have a much greater perspective. And I think
the other is, yeah, you know, I think the moment
you take charge of your own agency and you steer
your life in the direction that you choose, than you've
(18:43):
proven yourself. You look back at who you were before
you jumped into this complete new existence in emergency medicine.
Now you have all these years of experience behind you,
what would you say is the most significant change in
you as a person. On the one hand, I feel
like I'm no different than I was when I was eleven.
(19:06):
I'm still making the same stupid jokes and and acting
as foolish as I ever have. UM, but that experience,
it gave me a tremendous amount of perspective. And you know,
knowing that every day there's somebody who wakes up and
doesn't know that today's the last day. And repeatedly, you know,
(19:29):
I would stand over someone who had just died, and
who and maybe there was nothing we could do for them,
or maybe when we arrived, um, we tried, and and
they were they were just going to remain dead. And
I remember standing over them and thinking, nobody they know
knows yet like their lives are still totally normal. And
this guy said, and I know, like I know, you know,
(19:50):
I'm looking at his license, I know who he is,
I know where he lives, but all the people who
are important to him have no idea. And and that
how quickly it can all be taken away from you.
That just that understanding, it gave me a perspective about
what was important, and at least what was important to me,
and then what was important about other people. You know,
we're kind of in this weird moment where um, people
(20:13):
are finally saying, look, yeah, I'm different than you, and
you're simply going to have to accept it. And I'm
gonna very vocally and and and uh, you know publicly
be exactly who I want to be. And having spent
so long in an ambulance, all I can say is
do it. Do it right now, because you are here
at this moment you might not be here at the
(20:34):
next time. Is the most precious asset we have. Do
not waste it because somebody because of what somebody else
may think or say. You know, whatever your truth is,
you gotta you gotta get to it. Yeah, No, I
totally agree. Um. I think when that moment hits where
we know with everything in us that it's time to
(20:55):
take a step into the unknown, that it's really important
to to act upon that, um, and not tick too
long to think about it. Um. And as you say,
just do it, um. And I think you're right at
by time being our greatest ouset because the reality of
it is is that we just don't know how much
we have left. So walk me through how it felt
(21:20):
for you to be id on an ambulance with Gritty.
That's where I wanted to be. You know, if you
there are a lot of people who get on an
ambulance and want to work in the suburban county somewhere
and you know, be able to sleep all night. But
I went to Grady because I wanted to be I
wanted to be in the middle of it. And there
was no place more than the middle of it than
(21:40):
Simpson Road or Bankquheat Highway, and you know, to be there,
especially in the beginning when I didn't know it, and
just to see the people and you know, how how
alive the people are that live there. You know, it's
a neighborhood of of of normal people who are living,
you know, amidst a very abnormal reality. You know, there's
(22:01):
there are working families there that are trying to get by,
that are surrounded by this madness um and there's just
a lot of energy that's there. And it was, you know,
it was exciting, it was it was a little bit
nerve racking, um. But I mean that was just the
only place I wanted to be. I know, when your
first book, A Thoughts and Naked Stringers, you talk a
lot about these experiences you had in the road in
(22:22):
Atlanta and the ambulance. But I'm interested to hear about
your new book, American Sirens, which tells the extraordinary story
of the beginning of paramedics on the organization Freedom Place.
What prompted you to write American signs? When when I
was in paramedic school, one of my my instructor was
one of the first six paramedics in the state of Georgia.
(22:44):
Teas worked at a funeral homes and they drove horses
two calls and they would be embombing bodies one night
in transporting them the next. And I just became fascinated
by the idea of this world where you know, the
same person who comes out to save you as the
person who's gonna prepare you for the burial in case
they don't. And while I was sort of looking into that,
(23:06):
I found out about this organization called Freedom House. And
you know, the story of Freedom House is that in
nineteen a doctor in Pittsburgh teamed up with a a
guy who ran a medical nonprofit and together they sort
(23:30):
of dreamed up the idea of a fully trained paramedic.
You know, so as opposed to people who could just
show up and and sort of tossing in the back
of an ambulance and then whip you to the hospital,
they thought, what if what if the people who did
this could deal with all the emergencies and could give medications.
And you know, I had had advanced training, I mean
(23:51):
two hundreds of hours of advanced training and had practiced
in hospitals, and you know in the e er, the
I see you, the the O R. And so they
they out of whole cloth, they invented the paramedic and
the twist on it which sort of made it this
much larger story was at that time, Pittsburgh was widely
(24:12):
considered one of the most segregated cities in the North
and there was a particular neighborhood called the Hill District
um that had been hit pretty hard by renewal. You know,
half of it had been completely demolished and what was
left was the shell of its former self, and the
people living that were really struggling to get by. And
so they decided that all the people that would be
(24:33):
going through their paramedic program would be African Americans from
the Hill District, and so the world's first paramedics were
twenty four black eyes from the city of Pittsburgh. And
from that moment, everything immediately begins to change. And there's
a lot of doubt as whether or not Field is
something that can actually exist. Certainly a lot of doubt
(24:55):
that's whether or not these guys can do it. And
not only did they do it, but they do it
incredibly well, and within a couple of years they are
spawning copycats all across the country. UM. They become nationally
recognized as not only a great service, but as the
best service in By nineteen, when the Department of Transportation says, Okay,
(25:16):
this thing is now big enough that we actually need
to standardize it, Freedom House was selected to field test
and developed the nation's first standardized set of paramedic protocols
and instruction. So these guys were the national standard, and
yet they were never accepted in their own city. They
(25:37):
were fought at every turn by the mayor. And as
they're reaching their political zenith, you know, as they are
uh recognized on the national level, they're cut down at
home and the mayor shuts down the program and replaces
them with an almost entirely white paramedic service. And those
(25:58):
that remained, there were not very many of them. Those
that remained UM, the city program worked very hard to
weed them out. A handful of them held on UM
and went on to have very distinguished careers. But that
that story of how paramedics were born, of the people
who took this job that technically didn't exist when they
(26:20):
upended their lives to train for it. How long did
that program run for? Yeah, it started in sixty runs
from basically sixty six to seventy five is when it
gets shut down. Um, you know, they ran their very
first calls during the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.
Was shot. So they're they're they're in the midst of training.
(26:41):
Their city goes crazy in April four and these guys
are essentially dragged into work early and they jump on
ambulance is still making you know, a couple dollars a
week as their training pay, and they begin treating patients.
And the reason that they're brought in is because cops
(27:02):
can't get in, firefighters can't get in, the National Guard
is on its way, and so they said, well, well,
maybe the people living in this neighborhood, maybe the residence
of the Hill District, will look inside these ambulances and
see familiar faces or at least see similar faces, and
they'll allow them to pass. And sure enough, that's what happened,
and you know, this service wound up not only being
(27:23):
a point of pride for the people who rode the ambulances,
but also for the community. I mean, this is a
neighborhood that, up until that moment couldn't get a cab.
This was a neighborhood that, up until that moment did
not have a grocery store. This was a neighborhood that
certainly did not have adequate access to healthcare. And suddenly
the people sitting on the very tip of the spear
(27:44):
of this medical revolution, we're young men from their own neighborhood.
I mean, the amount of pride that came from what
Freedom House did was tremendous. Yeah, it's it's as truly amazing.
These local guys were basically able to find a way
to help their community when I guess essentially because of
(28:05):
the times no one else really could. Um who round
the ambulance service before was under the umbrella of the law,
Like where was the police? You know what was happening? Yeah, well,
you know, you bring up the police. That The interesting
thing was that, up until that moment, the police are
actually the ones who ran the ambulance system in the
city of Pittsburgh, and they did not do a very
(28:25):
good job. In In facting sixty six is very famous
example of a former mayor and governor of Pennsylvania who
dies at this public forum and the two police ambulance
drivers who arrive essentially kill him. They do nothing for him,
and in in the time it takes to pick him
up to time it takes arrived at the hospital, he dies.
(28:47):
And many of the guys who worked on the ambulance
who for Freedom House Um when they were younger, had
emergencies in which the police either didn't show up or
refused to help. One of the guys, who sort of
it was the highest in the organization, was actually forced
to carry his own mother to an ambulance because when
the cops showed up, they said, well, she's just drunk,
(29:07):
and he said, no, my mom doesn't drink, and they said,
she's drunk, we're not carrying her. And so he carried
his own mother to the ambulance and it turned out
she was having a stroke, and that was the last
time he saw his mother alive. So what they had
been subjected to up until that moment um was intolerable
by any standard um. And yet what they what grew
(29:29):
out of that void um from people who you know,
were commonly referred to as unemployables. I mean that's literally
how they referred to. Uh. You know, these young men
from from the Hill District, what they were able to
create out of that void with the whole world thinking
there's no way you can possibly do this, this can't
be done, and you certainly can't do it. And for
them to have achieved that despite tremendous odds, is it
(29:53):
truly remarkable story. Kevin's story is a reminder that anything
can happen. As he stud at that gapping hole in Atlanta,
observing family's reactions to the tragedy of sudden death, he
(30:17):
made a life changing decision to step into the world
of emergency medicine. I'm inspired by Kevin. It can be
difficult to observe a tragedy that isn't related to you
at all, that has nothing to do with you, and
let it change you in a way that leads to action.
The ripple effect of Kevin's choice to become a paramedic
(30:37):
is exponential. He not only proved himself that he could
handle pressure and danger, but more importantly, that he could
be someone to rely on. You've just listened to the unimaginable.
I'm your host, James Brown until next time. Now
In the early two thousand's, a failed salesman turned local
Atlanta reporter was obsessed with finding a way to prove
himself and to see how he might respond to pressure
and danger. As fate would have it, he was eventually
given that opportunity in an almost comical way. His choice
(00:29):
to follow his instinct led him to a moment of
self actualization. What he was really searching for the whole
time was a front row seat to the circus of life.
This episode features the former paramedic and acclaimed author Kevin Hazard.
(00:52):
After Kevin's story, we chat about things like living your truth,
change and how sometimes of things that used to be
so important aren't anymore. We also learned about his leadist book,
American Sirens, which tells the extraordinary story of an unjustly
(01:12):
forgotten group of black men in Pittsburgh who became the
first paramedics in America, saving lives and changing the course
of emergency medicine around the world. This is the unimaginable.
I'm your host and musician James Brown. One night in
(01:47):
two thousand and two, I find myself standing over the
edge of this enormous construction whole me. It's hundreds of
feet deep, several hundred feet wide. About an hour and
a half before or a half dozen workers were down
there in the scaffolding that they've been standing on collapsed
and they just disappeared into the earth. I was working
(02:11):
as a reporter this you know, small newspaper in North Atlanta,
and it was probably about maybe six or seven o'clock
when we heard over our police scanner that this had
happened and that people are being dispatched out to it.
And so the city editor looks around the room for,
(02:33):
you know, who is it, who's here that can that
can handle this. Mainly at that point in the evening,
there's sports guys because these games haven't finished yet, they're
not going. There's a bunch of copy editors they're not going,
and then there's maybe one or two political reporters, but
you know, that's all kind of shut down for the day.
(02:55):
And then there's me. And I was fairly new at
that point. I think I had been with a newspaper
for about eight months, and I was sort of this
I was technically a county reporter, but I was sort
of all purpose, and so I was there sort of
trying to dig up stories and come up with a
reason to justify what I was going to show up
the next day, and he sees me sitting at this
(03:15):
desk and he just hazard get out there. And I
had no idea what this even was. I had to
run to the corner of the news room and grab
the map book and kind of flip this thing out
and found out, oh, it's it's somewhere between you know,
South Cobb County and North Fulton County, and so I,
you know, I just jumped in my car and it
(03:36):
was speed across town. I get out there and that road,
South Atlanta Road is sort of this empty, desolate place.
There's some commercial buildings out there. Um, there's some construction building,
some some heavy industry, but there's not a lot of people.
And so you know, there's just sort of fences and
and abandoned lots and this sort of narrow winding lane
(04:00):
road just that just goes to nowhere. And I drive
down it and I finally find this this huge fences
on the left side of the road, this massive fence,
and I see people kind of clinging onto it, and
there's two or three fire trucks that are sitting up there.
So I all right, I'm here, and so I park
across the street and I run over and right about
(04:22):
then the local TV news shows up and they set
up their shot, and reporters from the big newspaper, the
A j C, arrive and they begin talking. And everybody
I noticed kind of knows how to do. Is say,
they're looking for the p I oh, which is the
public Information officer, and they're trying to get information from him.
But I wasn't really comfortable enough, well versed enough to
(04:47):
know what I was supposed to do, so I was
just sort of standing there listening to what everybody else
was saying. But the thing that I noticed while I
was standing there listening was the family members. And that
was the moment I realized, whoever is down there, and
these people are waiting for them to come up. And
if we all already think that the only thing that's
(05:10):
going to emerge from this massive tunnel our bodies, then
what must these people be thinking. You know, they're for us,
this is a story, this is something that we have
been sent here to catch and we're not supposed to miss.
But for these guys like this is the end of
the life that they have lived up to this moment,
you know, nothing will ever be the same after this
(05:31):
elevator comes back up. You know, whatever whatever is on it,
that's going to be all they'll have. And it was
incredibly powerful, intimidating moment to find myself out, especially as
you know, year old kids some kind of standing over
this yawning hole as the sun goes down, that I
(05:54):
decided to be a paramedic. So we go through this
class six months and get to the end of it,
We take our exams and I passed. The entire time.
Everybody's saying, you know, hey, you're not just stepping into
a job, You're stepping into a career or stepping to
a lifestyle. Medicine is this, you know, the sort of
(06:15):
escalator that goes on forever and and there's there's no
end to the opportunities of the possibilities, and no two
days are going to be the same, No two moments
are going to be the same. So I'm expecting to
come out and and see the gates fly open, and
there's gonna be this sort of trumpet and singing of angels,
and I'm gonna you know, this wonderful world of medicine
(06:36):
is going to open to me and I go to
my first interview, which is in this terrible part of town,
and it's in this incredibly rundown building and the walls
are sagging, and there's this air conditioning unit that's dangling
from a window, and there's one ambulance in the parking
lot and it's on blocks and it's got a tag
(06:58):
in the back of o stegin and back windows this
tag applied for. And I walk in and a cigarette smoke,
a cloud of it, like like like a casino, and
there's a woman. She turns me and she, you know,
kind of within differences, you know what, you know, like
why are you here? So I'm you know, I'm I'm
(07:21):
here for the interview. So this guy comes out of
his back room, sort of lumbers down the hall and
he takes up it means a small building, he takes
up the entire space. He brings me this little office,
which is these teetering stacks of old paperbacks, and I
sit down and I'm thinking, well, if nothing else, I'm
(07:41):
we're going to get down to business now. And he
just asked me if I've heard of the lawsuits. No,
I haven't heard, and he said, well, we've been investigated
multiple times for insurance fraud, but don't worry. They've never
found enough evidence to convict. So and that's how we
left it. That was my interview, is not are you
(08:03):
capable of doing this job? But don't worry. Working here
won't get you sent to jail. When can you start?
And I said, I said, I don't know. I guess tomorrow.
So he throws me this uniform shirt and he says,
all right, be here at eight. And I stay at
this little, tiny, strange place for a little while and
begin to learn that they are sort of tears to
(08:24):
ambulance work, and that the one home on is the
bottom tier and it's sort of you just take people
to and from appointments, and that there's this other tier
called nine one one where things really happen, and that's
where you know lives are, one are lost, and where
you know the people who are really doing this and
her good and passionate. That's where they are. And among them,
(08:46):
of all these places you can work, Grady is the best.
Grady is the place. It's all you hear is Grady.
And if you live in Atlanta, you know Grady. Grady
Hospital is as famous as notorious as infamous as any
place you could possibly imagine. Up to the late nineteen fifties,
(09:07):
it was segregated, and it's the building a sort of
shape like an age, and so one side is for
black patients and the other side is for white patients.
So this is great. It comes with this big, complicated legacy,
and its ambulance service is what serves the city of Atlanta,
the Atlanta proper, the actual city. So if you call
(09:27):
nine one one from many of the famous neighborhoods of Atlanta,
the good and the bad, it's Grady who's going to
show up. And so after a couple of years of
trying to get enough experience that they'll take my phone calls,
I finally get hired on at Grady. And all I
want to do from the moment I arrived at this
(09:47):
place is proved myself. And I don't really know if
I'm gonna be able to do this, and so I'm waiting,
you know, sort of desperately to get my call, my
my moment, you know, again, this is why I'm here.
And one evening, it's sort of that wonderful time in
(10:08):
the South just before horrible nous of summer kicks in
when the evenings are just they're warm, when they're perfect,
and it's probably seven eight o'clock and the sun is
getting ready to go down and it's not hot yet,
so everybody's outside and the streets are just alive. And
a call goes out for a shooting in northwest Atlanta,
(10:31):
this area known as the Bluff. It's a sort of
tiny warren of streets. It's only a few square miles total,
and very narrow streets, all intersecting, intertwining with each other.
It's hard to navigate, it's easy to get lost. A
lot of abandoned buildings and small apartments, and that's where
this shooting is. And before we even get the call,
(10:54):
the cops are racing out there. And so when we
are arriving to look for way this thing is, there
are cop cars that are sort of whizzing around, and
there's this police helicopter that's out there, and you know,
it's just sort of chopping up the dust, the clay
dust into the air. And we park our ambulance because
nobody's exactly certain where this thing is. And I'm leaning
(11:18):
against the hood kind of waiting, listening to see what's
going to happen, and this woman pops out of this
little sort of wet choked alley and she says, he's
this way there. At that moment, there's no buddy else around.
It's just me and my partner. So we grab our
bag and we run into this alley and she sort
of winds through this little grasp clay debris path and
(11:43):
brings us into the back of this two story abandoned building.
She and whoever she's leading us to live in what
they call a cat hole, which just like a little
living space that you carve out of an abandoned building,
sort of a home that a squat basically, And so
she's leading us up to her cata hoole and we're
(12:03):
going up the stairs and you know, it's like it's
dark in here. There's no power, no ceilings kind of
sagging in the walls or bowed, and the floors on
even And we go up these stairs and we get
the second floor. There's there's spot we actually have to
kind of jump over this part of the floor that's
partially collapsed. And she brings us around to this bedroom
(12:29):
and I around the corner and there's a single mattress
on the floor with this guy and he's lying on it,
sort of on the side, and you know, we again,
we have been sent here for this shooting, and there's
cops everywhere, and it's so much adrenaline leading up to
this moment, and we've just sort of picked our way
(12:49):
through this abandoned building. And so when I see him,
I just sort of rushed to him and I roll
him over and there is his gunshot wound underneath the
bandage that's about ten days old. And I turned to
the wife and the guy turns to me, and you know,
the three of us are sort of looking at each other,
(13:11):
and he says, yeah, I just need you to changes
The doctor said, I need need to change this otherwise
it's going to get infected. And so I hadn't been
brought out for a shooting. And by the way, the
cops are still out there. I mean, the helicopter is
still hovering. You know, I can hear it chopping up
the air. I've been brought out to change a bandage.
(13:34):
And so I'm sitting there thinking, you know, I'm supposed
to be this is supposed to be my moment. But
that night, I'm sitting in this little cat hole on
the second story of an abandoned building with this couple,
and and they're cooking hot dogs over this candle that
(13:55):
they have partially melted and stuck to the floor, and
they're kind of arguing over which cereal box to use
to cover a hole that's in the wall. And I'm
changing this guy's bandage. And it was the first moment
that I stopped worrying so much about why I was here,
(14:17):
which was to find a way to prove myself, and
kind of shifted my focus to the things that we're
going to keep me here, which was this totally unexpected
invitation to the mad circus of life, which is exactly
what this was. And it was an incredible growing moment
(14:41):
for me to look around and realize that it what
I what I had been hoping for or searching for. Wasn't,
you know, sort of blood and death and excitement, but
it was real experience, really being out in the world
and really being involved, alved and and that knowledge of
(15:02):
what is really important in what life actually is. It's
probably why those guys who emerged from that huge construction
hall that night carried themselves the way they did, not
because they could save a life or stop bleeding, which
no doubt they could, but because they knew what was
really important, and they knew the difference between Yeah, someone
(15:26):
who wanted to be somebody you could count on and
somebody who actually was. You had what seems like an
overwhelming feeling inside you to prove yourself or to test
(15:48):
yourself or make something of yourself. Where do you think that,
Kim from? Yeah, I mean, I think I think some
of that is the product of being the youngest child.
You know. Um, everybody always looked at you as somebody
who who can't get things done, you know, or they're
doing things for you, and that always really bothered me.
(16:10):
And the other um is that you know, I I
don't know. I lived in what would probably be considered
a very normal suburban neighborhood, but my parents were divorced,
which not necessarily abnormal. But my dad worked on he
climbed telephone poles, and my stepfather drove a home heating truck,
(16:35):
like like a kerosene truck, and he did he did
local delivery routes, and so he would drive that truck home,
so you know, you'd have people's parents coming home, their
dad would come home from you know, whatever, business he
worked at, and he'd parked his car and maybe there
you know that their mom would be there already, you know,
(16:57):
and and sort of you know, making them a snack
or just sort of woking welcoming them in. And I
would come home to an empty house because my mother
also worked. And then when my stepfather came home, it
was in this huge like fuel oil truck, you know,
so it wasn't you know, it wasn't a car, it
(17:18):
was this this truck. And I remember he dropped me
off from dropping off at school one time, and uh,
I went to a private school, which is not terribly
expensive up there, Catholic schools or but it was still
you know, it was it was not the public school.
And he dropped me off one time, and I remember
this this kid made a joke about like, oh are
you you know, as he like dropping it off in
(17:38):
between runs. And I was trying to come up with
all these excuses for for what it like, why he
was doing that, and none of them really worked. And
and I think a lot of it really stems from that.
I mean, looking back, who cares? They were? You know,
they were people who were who are getting by and
they were making a living. But you know, as a
ten year old, knowing that you're different from everybody else, um,
(18:02):
in particular on the on the financial side or or
on the educational side. UM, it made me feel like, well,
then I've got to do a little something extra to
prove to everybody else that I am as good as,
if not better than the rest of them. So do
you think you've done that? Like, do you think you've
proven yourself? I mean, I think there's two answers to
(18:23):
that question. One is, uh, I think it no longer matters,
you know, I'm I'm not ten years old anymore, thankfully,
and I have a much greater perspective. And I think
the other is, yeah, you know, I think the moment
you take charge of your own agency and you steer
your life in the direction that you choose, than you've
(18:43):
proven yourself. You look back at who you were before
you jumped into this complete new existence in emergency medicine.
Now you have all these years of experience behind you,
what would you say is the most significant change in
you as a person. On the one hand, I feel
like I'm no different than I was when I was eleven.
(19:06):
I'm still making the same stupid jokes and and acting
as foolish as I ever have. UM, but that experience,
it gave me a tremendous amount of perspective. And you know,
knowing that every day there's somebody who wakes up and
doesn't know that today's the last day. And repeatedly, you know,
(19:29):
I would stand over someone who had just died, and
who and maybe there was nothing we could do for them,
or maybe when we arrived, um, we tried, and and
they were they were just going to remain dead. And
I remember standing over them and thinking, nobody they know
knows yet like their lives are still totally normal. And
this guy said, and I know, like I know, you know,
(19:50):
I'm looking at his license, I know who he is,
I know where he lives, but all the people who
are important to him have no idea. And and that
how quickly it can all be taken away from you.
That just that understanding, it gave me a perspective about
what was important, and at least what was important to me,
and then what was important about other people. You know,
we're kind of in this weird moment where um, people
(20:13):
are finally saying, look, yeah, I'm different than you, and
you're simply going to have to accept it. And I'm
gonna very vocally and and and uh, you know publicly
be exactly who I want to be. And having spent
so long in an ambulance, all I can say is
do it. Do it right now, because you are here
at this moment you might not be here at the
(20:34):
next time. Is the most precious asset we have. Do
not waste it because somebody because of what somebody else
may think or say. You know, whatever your truth is,
you gotta you gotta get to it. Yeah, No, I
totally agree. Um. I think when that moment hits where
we know with everything in us that it's time to
(20:55):
take a step into the unknown, that it's really important
to to act upon that, um, and not tick too
long to think about it. Um. And as you say,
just do it, um. And I think you're right at
by time being our greatest ouset because the reality of
it is is that we just don't know how much
we have left. So walk me through how it felt
(21:20):
for you to be id on an ambulance with Gritty.
That's where I wanted to be. You know, if you
there are a lot of people who get on an
ambulance and want to work in the suburban county somewhere
and you know, be able to sleep all night. But
I went to Grady because I wanted to be I
wanted to be in the middle of it. And there
was no place more than the middle of it than
(21:40):
Simpson Road or Bankquheat Highway, and you know, to be there,
especially in the beginning when I didn't know it, and
just to see the people and you know, how how
alive the people are that live there. You know, it's
a neighborhood of of of normal people who are living,
you know, amidst a very abnormal reality. You know, there's
(22:01):
there are working families there that are trying to get by,
that are surrounded by this madness um and there's just
a lot of energy that's there. And it was, you know,
it was exciting, it was it was a little bit
nerve racking, um. But I mean that was just the
only place I wanted to be. I know, when your
first book, A Thoughts and Naked Stringers, you talk a
lot about these experiences you had in the road in
(22:22):
Atlanta and the ambulance. But I'm interested to hear about
your new book, American Sirens, which tells the extraordinary story
of the beginning of paramedics on the organization Freedom Place.
What prompted you to write American signs? When when I
was in paramedic school, one of my my instructor was
one of the first six paramedics in the state of Georgia.
(22:44):
Teas worked at a funeral homes and they drove horses
two calls and they would be embombing bodies one night
in transporting them the next. And I just became fascinated
by the idea of this world where you know, the
same person who comes out to save you as the
person who's gonna prepare you for the burial in case
they don't. And while I was sort of looking into that,
(23:06):
I found out about this organization called Freedom House. And
you know, the story of Freedom House is that in
nineteen a doctor in Pittsburgh teamed up with a a
guy who ran a medical nonprofit and together they sort
(23:30):
of dreamed up the idea of a fully trained paramedic.
You know, so as opposed to people who could just
show up and and sort of tossing in the back
of an ambulance and then whip you to the hospital,
they thought, what if what if the people who did
this could deal with all the emergencies and could give medications.
And you know, I had had advanced training, I mean
(23:51):
two hundreds of hours of advanced training and had practiced
in hospitals, and you know in the e er, the
I see you, the the O R. And so they
they out of whole cloth, they invented the paramedic and
the twist on it which sort of made it this
much larger story was at that time, Pittsburgh was widely
(24:12):
considered one of the most segregated cities in the North
and there was a particular neighborhood called the Hill District
um that had been hit pretty hard by renewal. You know,
half of it had been completely demolished and what was
left was the shell of its former self, and the
people living that were really struggling to get by. And
so they decided that all the people that would be
(24:33):
going through their paramedic program would be African Americans from
the Hill District, and so the world's first paramedics were
twenty four black eyes from the city of Pittsburgh. And
from that moment, everything immediately begins to change. And there's
a lot of doubt as whether or not Field is
something that can actually exist. Certainly a lot of doubt
(24:55):
that's whether or not these guys can do it. And
not only did they do it, but they do it
incredibly well, and within a couple of years they are
spawning copycats all across the country. UM. They become nationally
recognized as not only a great service, but as the
best service in By nineteen, when the Department of Transportation says, Okay,
(25:16):
this thing is now big enough that we actually need
to standardize it, Freedom House was selected to field test
and developed the nation's first standardized set of paramedic protocols
and instruction. So these guys were the national standard, and
yet they were never accepted in their own city. They
(25:37):
were fought at every turn by the mayor. And as
they're reaching their political zenith, you know, as they are
uh recognized on the national level, they're cut down at
home and the mayor shuts down the program and replaces
them with an almost entirely white paramedic service. And those
(25:58):
that remained, there were not very many of them. Those
that remained UM, the city program worked very hard to
weed them out. A handful of them held on UM
and went on to have very distinguished careers. But that
that story of how paramedics were born, of the people
who took this job that technically didn't exist when they
(26:20):
upended their lives to train for it. How long did
that program run for? Yeah, it started in sixty runs
from basically sixty six to seventy five is when it
gets shut down. Um, you know, they ran their very
first calls during the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.
Was shot. So they're they're they're in the midst of training.
(26:41):
Their city goes crazy in April four and these guys
are essentially dragged into work early and they jump on
ambulance is still making you know, a couple dollars a
week as their training pay, and they begin treating patients.
And the reason that they're brought in is because cops
(27:02):
can't get in, firefighters can't get in, the National Guard
is on its way, and so they said, well, well,
maybe the people living in this neighborhood, maybe the residence
of the Hill District, will look inside these ambulances and
see familiar faces or at least see similar faces, and
they'll allow them to pass. And sure enough, that's what happened,
and you know, this service wound up not only being
(27:23):
a point of pride for the people who rode the ambulances,
but also for the community. I mean, this is a
neighborhood that, up until that moment couldn't get a cab.
This was a neighborhood that, up until that moment did
not have a grocery store. This was a neighborhood that
certainly did not have adequate access to healthcare. And suddenly
the people sitting on the very tip of the spear
(27:44):
of this medical revolution, we're young men from their own neighborhood.
I mean, the amount of pride that came from what
Freedom House did was tremendous. Yeah, it's it's as truly amazing.
These local guys were basically able to find a way
to help their community when I guess essentially because of
(28:05):
the times no one else really could. Um who round
the ambulance service before was under the umbrella of the law,
Like where was the police? You know what was happening? Yeah, well,
you know, you bring up the police. That The interesting
thing was that, up until that moment, the police are
actually the ones who ran the ambulance system in the
city of Pittsburgh, and they did not do a very
(28:25):
good job. In In facting sixty six is very famous
example of a former mayor and governor of Pennsylvania who
dies at this public forum and the two police ambulance
drivers who arrive essentially kill him. They do nothing for him,
and in in the time it takes to pick him
up to time it takes arrived at the hospital, he dies.
(28:47):
And many of the guys who worked on the ambulance
who for Freedom House Um when they were younger, had
emergencies in which the police either didn't show up or
refused to help. One of the guys, who sort of
it was the highest in the organization, was actually forced
to carry his own mother to an ambulance because when
the cops showed up, they said, well, she's just drunk,
(29:07):
and he said, no, my mom doesn't drink, and they said,
she's drunk, we're not carrying her. And so he carried
his own mother to the ambulance and it turned out
she was having a stroke, and that was the last
time he saw his mother alive. So what they had
been subjected to up until that moment um was intolerable
by any standard um. And yet what they what grew
(29:29):
out of that void um from people who you know,
were commonly referred to as unemployables. I mean that's literally
how they referred to. Uh. You know, these young men
from from the Hill District, what they were able to
create out of that void with the whole world thinking
there's no way you can possibly do this, this can't
be done, and you certainly can't do it. And for
them to have achieved that despite tremendous odds, is it
(29:53):
truly remarkable story. Kevin's story is a reminder that anything
can happen. As he stud at that gapping hole in Atlanta,
observing family's reactions to the tragedy of sudden death, he
(30:17):
made a life changing decision to step into the world
of emergency medicine. I'm inspired by Kevin. It can be
difficult to observe a tragedy that isn't related to you
at all, that has nothing to do with you, and
let it change you in a way that leads to action.
The ripple effect of Kevin's choice to become a paramedic
(30:37):
is exponential. He not only proved himself that he could
handle pressure and danger, but more importantly, that he could
be someone to rely on. You've just listened to the unimaginable.
I'm your host, James Brown until next time. Now
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