lands were only cow pastures there was only one traffic light in the township and you could still get a bite with you at the hollywood medical emergencies were handled by the three man police force and the volunteer fire department hello i'm a grego and welcome to seeing your perspective today we will be telling you about a service held in peters township that seems to have been here service today we will be talking to one of the senior adults of peter's township who has helped to create the life changing life saving v f w ambulance service that we know today joining me is  cullen you have been involved with the v f w ambulance service for many years how did you have began as a volunteer well the fellows that decided that we needed this service also decided they needed first aid training and at the time i was active with three scouts and taught them their first aid merit badges and so they recruited me back at the very beginning and how did being your service get started was mainly because of people like chief barton chief of police at the time and bob mcmurray where the prime movers and a few other fellows went to the bank and said here's how much money we have put in the pot and we'd like to borrow the rest to buy an ambulance and provide the service and that's pretty much how it got started before the year of one hundred sixty three what happened what would happen if there was a medical emergency in peter's township where our people generally call the police department and quite often there was only one car in service and back then they had a station wagon for a police car it wasn't the favored car for the police to use they didn't like it in a sandwich you could also lay a patient down and then take them to the hospital the morticians didn't particularly want to do that kind of business they wanted to have the road it was hard on their vehicles and not to profitable and so they didn't really want to be in the ambulance business when there were other early vehicles or you backed our first vehicle was acquired from an a mortician over in  library p a and he wanted out of the ambulance business and made us a very attractive offer price wise that if we would buy one of his vehicles he would make the price right if we would continue to come over to our library for a short period of time until people became aware that he was not in that type of business and cover his his area which we agreed to do so our first was   looked like a hearse and was one of the long cadillac type vehicles but after we started doing more treatment in the units particularly c p r was almost impossible to do over top of  patient when there wasn't any headroom to speak of so we went then to the larger modular units which you're more familiar with the day i was reading somewhere that there was quite a concern when  women wanted to join the service memories you have of that got a lot of good memories on that when we have to start the ambulance service over and canons burned when we had been operating a while taking an elderly gentleman who had fallen out of a tree that he was promoting and was quite badly broken up his daughter in law thought that that was an excellent service and took the injured man offered her hands and took care of him and she thought that was wonderful and she wanted to know if she could learn some first aid so we enrolled her in one of our first aid classes which the ambulance service does provided then and still does provide to the community  training and after she got the training why i said are you going to join us as a volunteer and she didn't think she could drive one of those big things and i said well you drive the farm truck so you surely can drive an ambulance and with children or a female patient i think they're better a bit you see many changes in the last thirty one years and nine one one has only been here for a short time how do how do the ambulance crews get there called in the years before well years before if you wanted the police you dowered a three three two thousand and that got to the bethel police and they had a radio system and night and or that day and we then would call the other crew members and we would all scramble and get on board and go out and answer the calls years later chief martin finally got his own police radio dispatch and we prefer that system because that way the ambulance and the police are in the same frequency and can quite often help each other and we've had an excellent  radio snout in some cases and they can maybe arrive on the scene and give immediate aid until we arrive and it's been a very good cooperative thing the telephone was a main way and in the old days and after a while  teenage kids were tying up our telephone and the operator was trying to get through to us so we the ambulance service provided private phones for ambulance use only in some of our homes and then after that we went to the beeper that you  i'm not going out on as many as i used to but we we constantly coop in communications there's radio communications from our office to our units also i saw one of your rip programs from your twenty ten years or more on the ambulance service and every year so after about i guess i third or fourth year that we were in the ambulance business we thought these volunteers should be paid somehow or patted on the back so we've had dinners every year and after somebody becomes a ten year member even if they're no longer working on the ambulance service are still a life member and they can come to our banquets and we still consider them a for the flubs member of our service because they've given over ten years right there very many of those we have quite a few in fact we have some husband and wife teams that seen well i think training and communications the two major things that way back in the beginning were major worries or concerns to us we feel if you have the training even if you don't have the very latest equipment if you have the training and the know how you can help people an awful lot from the time you first reach him until you turn them over to the people in the hospital you mean like a first  training first they'll hear any and so on back when we started the service or you had to do is paint the word ambulance on the side of a vehicle put your name in the yellow pages under ambulance and we were in business you didn't have to have a first aid card or anything we'd never of operated that way i immediately got my instructor's rating in red cross first aid and everybody else that came on a service for the first seventeen years and since then we've had other people as training officers and the stoller pennsylvania finally caught on and came out with an ambulance attendant license and some of us were the first to be ambulance attendants in pennsylvania but that course didn't even have emergency childbirth and once in a while we get faced with that so we wanted something more and they developed them to the emergency medical technician which is a license just like a doctor's or nurse licensed by the health department of state of pennsylvania when that got more advanced why they then created paramedic that means just what it means met up means d para means they help or we the paramedic is the hands and the eyes of the doctor in the field and with communication i'm getting out of my head of the education the communications with good communications you communicate directly with the doctor and i at the hospital we can tend to communicate to the doctor what we see with that patient he can then tell us what treatment to give it and a we can even plug right into a telephone and he can probably use telephony and at the hospital and he can read right off the patient who's fifteen miles away their communications is really very very important i have in close communications with the police helped us to find people back before we had names on half of the streets in the didn't have a street number and it was an obvious one that we didn't know where it led to so i think i think those two things training and communications are the key to good emergency care you know i think you didn't have an experience with the baby being born in an ambulance yeah the first one we had was about for i was already over i'm five thirty or six o'clock in the morning fred carper and i were the crow out on sun our church road was the expectant parents and i guess that we had quite a bit of confusion because they called the grandmother and grandfather to come watch the children they already had round of who knew anything about margins she job birth were bringing the run out of the house upright and that was wrong because she was screaming the baby is coming so we as quickly as possible put her on a  if it's eminent and it's a lot less confusion and bouncing down the highway and everybody was asked me did i you know hit the ball be on the bottom of the food or slap its back and i give credit  twenty one so a lot of service at twenty one but we will take volunteers at eighteen and glad to have them we're glad to have any kind of alone here what are some of the requirements  volunteer and staying on the squad well just don't do anything great to be run in the you know are bad enough to continue with your training as a main thing if they come to us and they don't have any then we assist them in getting into the necessary training program so that when they are out there and we have a situation they know what the next piece of equipment is to give to the people we never let a new recruit  ride alone or anything we always put them in with experienced people so that they will get there on the job training as well as their emergency medical technician training and hopefully they'll go the her way for paramedic training but the service will assist them in getting that training i know to high school students that pleaders get involved with a project called oh right can you tell us something about that and that's the vision is of instant death program which is put on primarily for your seniors and juniors at the high school usually just be for prom time and it's so tragic when you hear of young people that have come that far along and then party a little bit more than they should possibly and that's tragic accident and despoiled of the whole graduation scene and everything else and read i want that to happen so in cooperation with our police and our fire department we have instituted this broad aid program which is a mock accident and we usually do it right in a parking lot there at the school and have the students on the other side so they can watch it and a car comes up and finds the situation and somebody goes for help and the police then arrive in the ambulance arrive and if necessary for extrication the fire department comes with the jaws of life and the last time we did it why my flight was very cooperative and they brought in their life flight ambulance and mr bergen the clinical director from over in canada's burg also cooperated very well and the last person to leave the scene i'm afraid left with mr bowden hopefully this makes a point with these young people that drinking and driving do not  on the following year instead of another mock accident sometimes we have a mock trial over of a paper from the accident the year before or go on trial and you find out just how marching in procession you have a community a sense of pride but that pride is nothing compared to the feeling of thanksgiving when the uniform of a trained attendant answered the call of me i'd like to thank you  and actually no training until we went to the red cross we got our first aid and then had to go to pittsburgh you get our advance first aid instructor here they've gone through all lat plus empties paramedics and everything else but it if i had to go back on it myself nah i've been off three years made after the show me the whole thing all over again they've had a lot of equipment padded since three years ago and everything we've got the same thing as you see on one nine nine nine one one on television buyers buyers i'm concerned i said i'd trust them better and i  the other words i don't know offhand what the r s are but the schedule is right behind their it's all scheduled for the whole week the staff time an is a charter member and a fool and is also a charter member so tonight why don't you start when i can see you can tell us some of your things about the ambulance corps i'll start wit paid for themself by four hundred dollars and that's our analysts who actually got started the other members that were instrumental in starting the service  but the township has really been support really support the whole services we've got donation from different organizations different people and  anyone that actually wanted to help help on their i have a few names that were way back there for the first ten years mcmurray lion's club gave us two tires peter sonship protective association donated us twenty five hundred dollars when they had to give up their charter and that was in their fund so that they gave it a different but we ended up with the major major changes it's this progress from what was basically a group of volunteers to the point now that we have certainly some volunteers but it's basically a paid service we have staffed twenty four hours a day with  state certified paramedics an e m t running about three thousand troops a year so three thousand three thousand troops a year in one thousand nine hundred four so you can see what's happened in the twenty five or so i guess it's almost thirty years now and  very well respected and well thought of right and it's not a lot of help to a lot of people and you have a lot of i know that all of you have had some very nice experiences and something that you want to remember is there anything that any of you can remember and i think bob maybe should elaborate we started out with the old candle and hers type bam billons right now i think bob knows more about the vehicles we have been very instrumental in the order time have been for a number of years a matter fact supported by the township who provides a donation to the to the animal service every year to the extent that they buy a subscription if you will for out of the senior citizens and peter starship so that all of the seniors in peter's  you get free anyone's carer thanks to the township where they buy a subscription for the senior citizens in the township which is again a very unique thing and something that i think doesn't get enough publicity really right i know that i was speaking to my mother today she'll be ninety three in may and she was up in hickory but she was saying that if they have to do anything they have to pay her even though they i she is a senior man of course through medicare but you know they don't we're looking at a big investment regime but they do of course we run them for over a hundred thousand miles and you have to in order to get your get your money's worth so to speak we're quite happy with the with the situation today both from a personal standpoint from a support standpoint and i feel very good about it i want to thank everyone for the support that we do get talking about support i'm going to make this man here  the largest amount of funds that have been raised by any one person or organization in recent i guess in the whole history of our organization has been the gr and they we had a dinner he said he played golf with three other guys and he said boy would be nice if you would start a golf outing and i said well what would i do it for how why or what should i do it for  often you know when i go by or something and see that and often wondered why that was we can generally have urgency character a person within two or four minutes of the call coming in because it pleased being able to respond to one of the new programs we found that we had to be penned on our neighbors to work together and we formed a cooperative as well as enhanced to aid with several of our surrounding services and with this it shortens our response time where in communication with all the surrounding services and we share training we share some equipment and it's just being able to work together with the other people in the business around this which is when we have mutual aid agreements with every community that time in conjunction with the police very interesting i mean i didn't realize that you can schedule everyone's cars unfortunately so if you're a feast or famine type business and the bottom line of the really isn't hands mutual aid situation where we're expecting help more quickly and we're getting help more quickly it's a communication thing it's an improvement on what really was in force before but it really pumps is a larger area i think relatively cheap investment whether it was think that my gripe was as far as the subscription rate is that many people will comment that they don't have to be subscribers because are covered by insurance but they may never have a trip but our expenses go on all the service going all these years of being able to do that that ongoing subscription campaign that's one of the questions are asked me all the time how do you get into the how do you get a subscription and i always sa but it's hard to get the e m t training that's one hundred twenty hours which takes three or four months it's quite a commitment as was the mosque but if someone would like to run as an observer just to get a feel for it they're always welcome to go as on a volunteer basis it's  we've come a long way since one thousand nine hundred eighty three a senseless tragedy promoted action and the beginning of the lifesaving and life changing v f w ambulance service would like to thank all the men and women who continue to make this a safer community and we thank you for joining us i've seen your perspective i my my grego thank you for watching