The days of the vintage ambulance

[jimintoronto]

www.toronto.ca/city-government/accountability-operations-customer-service/city-administration/staff-directory-divisions-and-customer-service/toronto-paramedic-services/

Man, this brings back a lot of memories of my time with Metro Ambulance. I worked in the opposite end of the city from where this crew were based in Scarborough. The cable TV production was pretty accurate, in terms of the way the crews interacted with the patients, the Nurses and the public in general. Haggerty and Platt were typical guys on the job, cool and polite, but capable of doing the tough calls , too. The emergency runs were not staged for the camera, they were actual code 3 or code 4 runs. The drivers back then were a lot better about yielding to emergency vehicles, than they are now in 2026.

JIMB>

 

[nyctrasit5950]

When I first joined our volunteer fire department during the early 1970s the local ambulance service was a special vehicle that the director of the funeral home had rigged up with an oxygen tank and that was what took people 20 miles to the nearest hospital.
I guess it was like the pictures of the funeral cars. Looked a lot like that 58 Pontiac.
Then we started a real ambulance service with trained EMTs and Paramedics and have had one of those modern looking box truck type of vehicles ever since.
People used to say that our undertaker would take you dead or alive.

If I recall in the late 40's and early 50's in some rural areas that never had an ambulance available to them would transport their sick and injured neighbors to the nearest doctor using any type of vehicle "car, pickup truck, etc" that had wheels with a with a blanket, sheet and pillow thrown in, even horses. Before then the best and pretty much only medical treatment was a local doctor if they even had one and the mortality rate must have been disturbingly high.

 

[nyctrasit5950]

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