THE FIRST PARAMEDICS

Written by former paramedic and author of the acclaimed memoir A Thousand Naked Strangers THE FIRST PARAMEDICS, chronicles the invention in the 1960s of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) and the deployment of the first EMS teams in the U.S. at Freedom House EMS in Pittsburgh, which trained the uneducated young men, all African American, who forged a new frontier in health care, while Freedom House battled racist attempts to shut them down.

The story is so dramatic, it's almost hard to believe. Peter Safar, the physician who created CPR, a three time Nobel Prize nominee, recognized the need to have medical professionals in a properly equipped ambulance available to respond to emergency medical calls. To develop his groundbreaking program he teamed up with Freedom House, a nonprofit with the mission to support Black run businesses in Pittsburgh. To create a doubly valuable program, it was decided that all the recruits would be tapped from the Black community.
Kevin will tell this remarkable story primarily through the lives of the three extraordinary people who were there at the birth of Emergency Medical Services. John Moon, the passionate young man who had worked in a steel mill, then as an orderly in a hospital and stumbled across the newly created Freedom House paramedics and realized this was his life's calling; Nancy Caroline, an idealistic young graduate of Harvard Medical School who came to lead the first EMS program, initially with trepidation and then will unbridled commitment (Nancy later moved to Israel to develop the country's EMS program) and Peter Safar, the brilliant, iconoclastic doctor, scientist and inventor, who conceived of the impossible and made it real. Each was driven by deep personal suffering making this story poignantly human and relatable. Moon, Caroline and Safar were all searching for ways to fill a void created by a tragic death in their lives —that journey led to Freedom House, where their unique contributions helped them find peace by offering care to those in desperate need and in the process, they changed medicine forever. But there were powerful forces allied against the success of Freedom House and the racism-scarred battles that were fought with the mayor and his cronies form a core of this narrative. As Kevin writes, this is a rich and troubling hidden history of heroes and villains, of brutal attempts to stifle hope and the resilience of a community that fought back.
A brilliant, inspiring story, it could not be more timely, as fifty years later we're still struggling with the primary themes of this book. As John Moon says, the key point of this book is telling the story of how everyone expected the Freedom House paramedics to fail, they were waiting for them to fail, but they soared against all odds, providing an invaluable service for the city and literally saving hundreds of lives. What killed the program was not the lack of talent and commitment, it was blatant racism. Moon feels it's time people heard the story. Knowing stories like this is the only way to understand our past and to have a chance to create a better future.
John Moon and others have specially entrusted Kevin to tell the story of the exploits and struggles of the Freedom House paramedics, because Kevin was a paramedic for ten years, having decided to follow his life's passion after spending a few years as a journalist after college. Kevin went on to write the acclaimed memoir, A Thousand Naked Strangers, about his years as a paramedic. The book received terrific reviews and endorsements, including high praise from Pat Conroy and has sold over 75,000 copies to date (despite the fact that at the time Kevin had no platform). Now he has valuable connections in place, as the book has been enthusiastically received within the EMS community and Kevin has built a strong network, regularly addressing EMS classes, appearing on industry podcasts and serving as a keynote speaker at EMS conferences around the country. Details are in the proposal.
Kevin now writes for film/TV, with work produced by Hulu, CBS, ABC and Universal. In 2019, he wrote an article about Freedom House for Atavist magazine called The First Responders, and earlier this year produced a podcast with Roman Mars on the subject for his show 99 Percent Invisible. The magazine piece had an incredibly wide reach when it came out and has had a second life due to the events of the past few months. Mars, whose podcast has been downloaded millions of times, reports that the episode on Freedom House was one of the most popular and talked about episodes they've done. Paige Williams of The New Yorker tweeted that she had planned on writing a book on the subject, but immediately realized the story would be best served in Kevin's hands.
This is the rare non-fiction narrative project that truly delivers all the elements - a dramatic true story that has never been covered before, a cast of richly drawn characters who genuinely engage the reader on a powerful emotional level and a timely theme for this moment in history - the unique yet forgotten African American origins of a special band of dedicated essential workers, who stand ready to serve day and night on the line between life and death for every one of us.