Memoir

The Plaque On The Ambulance

Only some of us knew what it truly meant

My father was a smart and funny guy with the soul of a poet. He was a genuine family man. In his prime he was active in the community, owning a business in town and serving on the elementary school board. Dad was part of the generation that valued stepping up to care for one another. People trusted him, especially in a crisis.

When I was a pre-teen my best friend, Dianne, was a Girl Scout. Her mother, Mrs. G, was the Den Mother. They both convinced my mother that it would be a good thing to let me join the Scouts. Mom didn’t drive, but Mrs. G did and would help get me to and from meetings and activities, giving Dad a driving break.

Dianne and I worked on achieving the Girl Scout’s First Aid badge. My father was all about anything medical so I knew he would approve. He was the oldest son of a Sicilian immigrant and a first-generation Irish girl from Ohio. Had life treated him differently he would have been a doctor. Anything that might push one of his kids in that direction was a go.

To earn the badge, we attended a first aid course at the local Ambulance Corp. At the end of the course, the instructor did a pitch for volunteers. We were too young, but they told us to ask the adults we knew if they might be interested in volunteering with the corps. I spoke up and said my dad told us stories of driving a “meat wagon,” slang for an ambulance, in the Army. The instructor gave me his contact info and told me to tell my dad to call him.

Dad joined the Ambulance Corps. These were the years when CPR was just introduced and long before professional EMTs, though he earned the designation later. He would be on call on weekends when he wasn’t working. There would be severe injuries, usually related to car accidents, that he would give us some details about, but I can’t recall him ever talking about fatalities.

Dad took deaths hard. When he was seventeen, he lost his father in a work-related accident. He never fully recovered from that loss. He told a story about being behind the wheel sitting in his vehicle after his father died. The horn honked on its own and he believed it was his father saying goodbye.

It was about that time that Dad’s tenure behind the wheel began. He took a job driving a truck with the same trucking company his father worked for. Soon after WWII called him to duty. Then he married Mom, who he chauffeured everywhere.

His vehicle was his refuge where he could sit and listen to his beloved jazz uninterrupted. He wouldn’t go to Church, but he drove our devout mother to Mass every week. He’d sit in the car and wait. Same for weekly grocery shopping or trips shopping for clothes or school supplies. Add four kids who couldn’t drive until their teen years, and insurance sales agent jobs that required travel, and the man spent a good quarter of his life in a car.

He was doing his “chauffeur thing” one day in December 1978 when a major event happened. His mother’s youngest sister was a semi-cloistered nun. “Aunt Irene” came to visit for a couple of days and he drove her to the train station for her return to the convent. While waiting, he saw a young girl fall under a passenger train.

Dad ran to help. It had severed her leg above the knee. He used his belt as a tourniquet, which saved her life. Other help arrived. They secured her leg and carefully packed it. In a rare five-hour surgery the doctors successfully reattached her leg. They awarded Dad the state Emergency Medical Technician of the Year Award.

It was his most public act of heroism, but we knew his countless quiet, everyday heroic acts that good men rarely get recognition for. Ten years later, he left us too soon, dying on an operating table. Dad was 65.

He made it known over the years that he did not want a funeral and didn’t want our last memories to be of him in a coffin. We had to get creative. The Ambulance Corps allowed us to use their facility to hold a memorial service for him. Family and friends gathered to pray, play music, and share stories. I was sure he would approve.

A year later the Ambulance Corps invited us to another ceremony. They created a brass plaque in honor of Dad. They mounted it on one of their rigs. It stayed on the rig for a year after he died, then they removed it and presented it to us. In a most poetic way, Dad had continued to be present to those in need.

© 2022 Patricia Cascio Hodge. All rights reserved.

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Here’s another memoir you might enjoy. It’s by Catherine Dunn.