John Moon was unqualified.
Adopted by a Pittsburgh family in 1963 after living in an Atlanta orphanage, Moon found work cleaning up what other people left behind. He was an orderly. He changed sheets. He changed bedpans. He did the kind of labor that keeps institutions running but rarely gets applauded. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was honest. And at the time, it was one of the few jobs that would have him.
In 1971, Moon was moving through the fluorescent-lit choreography of hospital routine when two Black men walked in. While they weren’t loud or demanding, they exuded authority without apology, competence without permission. They weren’t doctors or nurses; they were paramedics. Still, the air seemed to stand up straighter and everyone—even the white employees—listened to them and did everything they said. John didn’t know their names. But he noticed the patch stitched on their uniforms.
Freedom House Ambulance Service.
After they left, he went hunting through the Yellow Pages like a man chasing a rumor of possibility. When he realized the company was located at a hospital directly across the street from where he was scrubbing bedpans, he applied for a job.
In Moon’s mind, he was qualified. He worked in a hospital around patients. He’d done the dirty work, so hard could this be?
“I’m here to apply for a job,” Moon told the man behind the desk
“If I showed you a picture of the lungs,” the man asked, “could you diagram the respiratory system?”
No.
“If I showed you a picture of the heart, could you diagram the circulatory system?”
No.
“Well,” the man said plainly, “you’re not qualified to work here.”
To Moon, the man was not cruel or condescending. It was worse; he was right. “I took that not with a grain of salt because it was rather shocking,” Moon would later explain. “What it did is it unleashed a part of me that put me in a mindset that there isn’t anything that I can’t accomplish, and that followed me all the way up to where I am now. It may take me a while to get through it, but eventually, I will.”
When Moon retired in 2009 as assistant chief of Pittsburgh Emergency Medicine Services, he had been telling that story for 34 years.
That’s when he started telling an older story.
“Once I retired after 34 years at Pittsburgh EMS, I went on a personal journey to bring this history back to the forefront or resurrect it from the unknown,” says Moon. “The foundation of every EMS system in this country, which we often take for granted and see glorified on television and in literature, started in an underserved, neglected neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s Hill District by a group of visionaries and innovators.”
Today’s reading list:
How Pittsburgh’s Freedom House Pioneered Paramedic Treatment by Ericka Beras
Race, Policing, and History — Remembering the Freedom House Ambulance Service by Matthew L. Edwards, M.D.
Peter Josef Safar: The father of cardiopulmonary resuscitation by Jeanne Lenzer
