[Wvstaff] Women to the rescue on OurValley.org
Rob Logan
logan at vaems.org
Mon Nov 19 09:27:57 EST 2007
Please see article on women in rescue.. part of Salem Rescue Squad’s 75th anniversary series of articles in the Salem Times Register.
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Women to the rescue
Meg Hibbert
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Angela and Bob Lieb take a minute of down time on the crew truck used by Salem Rescue Squad in this photo made about 1973. Photo courtesy of Angela Lieb
When the Salem Lifesaving Crew was formed 75 years ago, it was all men. And even by the time B.J. Brickey became one of the first female paramedics in the Roanoke Valley in 1976, women were a rarity on crews.
Some men thought females couldn't do the work. Women were perfectly OK to support the rescue squad as members by raising money and providing meals.
In fact, when Judy (Smith) Harveycutter applied to be a junior member, her future husband voted against her.
Carey Harveycutter admitted nixing the idea of her being on the squad, but didn't remember why. At least, that's his official line.
"It was because I was a girl," his wife said, laughing.
Judy Harveycutter was the first female to become an emergency medical technician on the squad, joining B.J. Brickey Palmer – the first female on Salem's senior squad. Angela Lieb became the second female EMT.
This year, the squad marks its 75th year. On Saturday night, current volunteer – both men and women – life members, former members and guests will get together at a banquet to celebrate the accomplishments of the second oldest all-volunteer rescue squad in the world.
Nowadays, almost nobody blinks when the first responder who gives arrives to give vital CPR or start an IV at an accident scene is a woman. Thirteen out of the 34 volunteers are women.
It wasn't always that way.
Rob Logan, who joined the squad at 17 in 1971, recalled those days.
"Among the older members, the ones I would look up to, there was certainly resistance to female members. There were some agencies who actually had policies saying the members would be men. Salem did not. It was just practice," added Logan, who is now executive director of the Western Virginia Emergency Medical Services Council, and a life member of the Salem Rescue Squad.
He said it wasn't that the men believed women couldn't lift heavy patients or might faint at the sight of blood, "but I think then we just didn't have females who expressed an interest."
In 1977 when Smith and Brickey joined the squad, "there were more females who were dispatchers or who were in the Rescue Squad Auxiliary. There weren't as many women in the work force; you didn't see female police officers or firefighters. Now they are commonplace."
Palmer's interest goes back to her childhood, when she was 9.
"My mother (Evelyn Brickey) lost a leg to cancer in 1967," she recalled. "I kind of grew up in the old Lewis-Gale Clinic downtown with Dr. Dick Fisher, going once week. My brother, Darryl, and sister, Dana, and I got to play with the medical equipment."
Palmer became an EMT and joined the Cave Spring Rescue Squad in 1976 because Salem didn't let women members in.
She got an application in November 1977, after finding out Salem had a woman. It was Judy Smith who was on the junior crew, made up of younger people from ages 16 and up.
"Judy had been there a month. We had to prove ourselves, that we could lift and do the physical requirements," Palmer recalled. "There wasn't anything written down. There was no exam. It was trial by fire."
"Once they saw Judy and I didn't dissolve into tears at the scene, we were accepted. Being a woman wasn't a problem after that," said Palmer, who said Nancy (Lucas) Jones joined as a probationary member around that time, too.
Palmer remembered her favorite ambulance from those days.
"It was a monster, a big box of a truck that could carry everything, including the kitchen sink. It could carry multiple patients, too."
Rescue squad members spent their free time at the rescue squad hall, which was in the building that is part of the Salem Police Department now.
Judy Harveycutter said she and Carey never really had a first date, "we just hung out as a group of five or six of us."
Three years later the two got married. She had moved to Salem from her native Wisconsin after graduating from Mary D. Bradford High School in Kenosha to help out her sister, now Karen Foster of Wabun, with her business, Cakes and Catering by Karen.
She became a rescue squad volunteer, "because I really didn't have anything else to do in my evening time."
That soon changed. Harveycutter remembered the first call she went on: "A man was cleaning his gun and shot himself in the foot. It was at the trailer park that is Riverland now."
The hundreds of calls she answered until she left the squad in 1985, when she was pregnant with their first of three daughters, Amelia, blur together in her memory.
"I remember launching boats at Willow River Apartments during the Flood of '85, and lots of wrecks. I remember having to start an IV in the middle of a dark road with the flashlight between my teeth."
Harveycutter, who is a now a respiratory therapist at the Salem Veterans Affairs Medical Center, ticked off the names of many of the members who were volunteers then in addition to her husband and Rob Logan – Gary Lautenschlager, Pat Counts (now chief of Salem Fire and EMS), Ken Gibson, Danny Hamlin and Bob Leib.
"It was B.J. Brickey who talked me into joining the Salem Rescue Squad," Angela Leib remembered. "I had just taken an EMT class."
An undated old photo shows her in an all-blue uniform and Bob in orange coveralls, sitting on the crash truck the squad used then to run calls.
"It was so small," Lieb said, "maybe one-fourth the size of the new ones."
She grew up around the rescue squad. Her dad, Lewis "Gob" Garrett, was a member.
"He started the Fort Lewis First Aid Station when he came out of World War II," she said. "We were a rescue squad family. Then Bob joined in 1960 when he was 18, the year we got married. Volunteering for the rescue squad was kind of in your system."
Her husband, who was captain in the 1970s and again later, started the junior crew, she said.
"The juniors grew up to be Carey Harveycutter, Joe Cuningham, Lee Hale, the seniors who did all the active work in the 1980s," she said.
Lieb recalled Dave Wiley, too. "He was a great paramedic. He was killed on a truck on the exit to Troutville. I was on a call to Roanoke Memorial when I found out they had just taken him in and he was pronounced dead."
She remembered a particular rescue call on Hawthorn Road in Salem.
"We all came from different directions, and when we arrived we found the husband of the household had fallen in the bathtub. The wife was performing CPR on him, keeping him going until we got there. It turned out the wife was one I had taught CPR to. Her husband made it. She thanked us over and over. We were so thankful she had taken that class."
Before she became a crew member, she helped out in other ways.
"The girls of the rescue squad raised money for the new building in 1973 by running Bingo. All the senior citizens and others went to the Salem Civic Center Community Room and played Bingo."
Angela Lieb volunteered about seven years, she said, until she and Bob and their daughter moved to Durham, N.C., with his work. Her late husband was a life member, a designation reserved for those who volunteer for 20 years.
"When Bob was captain, Salem Rescue Squad answered 100 percent of their calls and everybody else's," his wife recalled.
"We would meet the rescue squad from Catawba at Orange Market at Hanging Rock, and we'd go way over that mountain, too, as far as Blacksburg Road."
"There were no paid paramedics then. We were a small group of volunteers, who ran calls not only in Salem but all over the Roanoke Valley. It was very exhausting," recalled Palmer, who was one of the first women hired in 1985 when the City of Roanoke started its paid paramedic program. She was already working on Lifeguard 10 EMS helicopter. "We were paid by the trip," Palmer remembered.
She continued to volunteer with the Salem squad until 1986, when she went back to school.
The Flood of '85 "pretty much sealed the deal on a lot of us who were volunteering here and working. I was volunteering, working with the City of Roanoke, flying with patients on Lifeguard 10 and going to school at the College of Health Sciences. It was too much. I gave up the crew a year later," she said.
By then, B.J. had married Dave. They met through mutual friends when he volunteering with the Vinton crew and working for United Ambulance Service. Today he is a paramedic-firefighter for the City of Roanoke, and on Carilion's Patient Transport Service, and they live with their two sons in the Bonsack area.
"The community support in Salem is incredible. The city government always provided money to make sure the City of Salem had the very best."
Volunteer rescue squads have fallen by the wayside in some communities, as employers became less willing to let employees off to answer calls, and people work farther away from home today.
But Lieb doesn't think volunteers will ever disappear from Salem. She emphasized how dedicated Salem Rescue Squad volunteers are, and the continuing need for them even though Salem has paid firefighters-EMTs.
"I think Salem will always have dedicated volunteers who will go out there and help people on a moment's notice. If you're at the dinner table or doing something else, and somebody needs you, you drop whatever and you go."
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