Freedom House paramedics and the 911 number

In 1966 a National Academy of Sciences report, Accidental Death and Disability, documented how little emergency care most Americans could get. In Pittsburgh, people who could not pay for a private ambulance relied on the police or on undertakers to reach a hospital. John Moon, later a Freedom House paramedic, described police loading the injured into the back of a paddy wagon with no one tending them.

Freedom House Ambulance Service began in 1967 in the Hill District, a largely Black neighborhood. It grew out of a partnership between the Maurice Falk Medical Fund, headed by Phil Hallen, and Freedom House Enterprises, founded by James McCoy Jr., with Peter Safar, a University of Pittsburgh anesthesiologist known for his work on cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Safar asked to train Hill District residents to give the care. He and Donald Benson, the first medical director, recruited residents who had been out of work for long periods, some with criminal records, and Vietnam veterans. Trainees took about 300 hours of classroom teaching and then spent nine months in the field. The first class began in June 1968, serving the Hill District and Oakland and later downtown.

A 1971 study of more than 1,400 patients brought to three Pittsburgh hospitals found inappropriate care on the way in 11 percent of those carried by Freedom House, against 62 percent of those carried by police and 78 percent by volunteer fire departments and private ambulances. Nancy Caroline, Benson's successor, extended the training and wrote the first paramedic textbook. The city's $100,000 in funding was halved under Mayor Peter Flaherty, federal money ran out, and the service closed in the fall of 1975. Pittsburgh then set up a police and fire department network on similar lines; 26 Freedom House trainees got city paramedic jobs, and a few months later 12 were still employed.

The emergency number came from a separate effort. The National Association of Fire Chiefs had recommended a single number in 1957, and on 12 January 1968 the Federal Communications Commission and AT&T chose 9-1-1. Bob Gallagher, president of the Alabama Telephone Company, set out to beat AT&T. At 2 p.m. on 16 February 1968 Rankin Fite, speaker of the Alabama House, called Congressman Tom Bevill at the police station in Haleyville, the first 911 call. Congress directed the FCC to make 911 the universal emergency number for all telephone services only in 1999.