This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies, Infra Terry Gross.

In most of the United States today, if you have a medical emergency, you can dial 911

and count on an ambulance arriving with a crew who have the equipment and training to perform

CPR and provide other critical care before getting you to a hospital. But as recently as the 1960s,

that just wasn't the case. Back then, your call for help would at best get you a ride to the hospital,

perhaps in a police van or a curse from a funeral home, but no medical treatment until you reached

the emergency room. Our guest today, Kevin Hazard, is a writer whose new book, is the remarkable

story of a community organization called Freedom House Enterprises and a black neighborhood in

Pittsburgh that became an incubator for modern emergency medicine. With the help of an innovative

physician, the organization trained a cadre of men as paramedics, a term then just coming into

existence and sent them in newly equipped ambulances on life-saving missions that earned a national

reputation and spawned similar programs in other cities. Kevin Hazard is a journalist, a TV

writer and author of a previous book called A Thousand Naked Strangers that was about his 10 years

working as a paramedic. His new book is American Sirens, the incredible story of the black men who

became America's first paramedics. Kevin Hazard, welcome back to Friendshare. You write about the

history of ambulances. I mean, there were ambulance corps in the first and second world wars that

were effective at getting medical care to wounded people right away and speeding them to higher levels

of care. This story unfolds in the 1960s and by then, you know, most cities had, you know,

services. They had police and fire and sanitation departments with full-time employees. What was the

state of ambulance service in America's cities and towns then? I mean, you could almost describe it

as criminal, to be honest with you. In fact, there's a paper that's published in 1965. It's

known now in the EMS community as the white paper. Essentially, what it says is that, you know,

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