By Paul Sisson
The San Diego Union-Tribune
SAN DIEGO — Asked to name the most transformative innovation impacting the quality of emergency medical services, Gordon Anderson is quick to respond: 911. He ought to know. His career predates San Diego’s emergency phone system by a solid 15 years.
Celebrating his retirement from American Medical Response with friends and family at La Mesa’s VFW hall Friday afternoon, Gordon recalled that things were very different when he started working for Ballard’s Ambulance service in 1967.
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“Back then, there was no 911 system, there were no emergency medical dispatchers, there was nothing,” Anderson said.
In those days, people who picked up ailing patients and hauled them to the nearest hospital were called ambulance drivers. It was not until the nation standardized this practice around those three emergency phone digits — 9-1-1 — that the profession began to become more medically professional.
San Diego County followed the lead of other big California cities, instituting its own 911 system in 1982.
Across 58 years, Anderson’s career followed the gradual increase in training and availability of mobile equipment, allowing those former ambulance drivers, now paramedics and emergency medical technicians, to give their patients a head start on the medical care they would get at the hospital. What many called a “scoop and haul” service evolved into a kind of immediate medical practice that trained practitioners in starting IV drips, administering some medications, clearing airways and performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
But the situation was much more ad hoc when Don Dodson began working as an ambulance driver for Hartson’s Ambulance Service in San Diego back in 1971. A long list of ambulance companies competed for patients’ business, and part of the responsibilities of drivers was marketing, handing out promotional material to doctors and nurses and others who might be in the position to make a recommendation. Patients or their loved ones generally had to take a look under “ambulances” in the yellow pages to find the phone number of the company they wanted to use and drop a dime into a pay phone to get picked up.
Dodson said he was assigned to work with Anderson on his first shift, driving a modified Pontiac station wagon to the scene of a neighborhood collision.
“I remember it was at the intersection of Massachusetts and San Miguel in Lemon Grove,” Dodson recalled. “A little Volkswagen Beetle was T-boned by a huge land yacht station wagon.
“The high school-aged kid in the driver’s seat went over into the back seat, so we had to get him out, stabilize him and transport him.”
Though it was only his first call, and he had only basic first aid training, Dodson said that Anderson, then a senior driver, ordered him right into that back seat. There was something about the confidence with which his supervisor gave those orders, he said, that immediately made him believe he could effectively handle the situation.
“He was just a great coach in those sorts of moments; he just had this ability to immediately get people up to speed,” Dodson said.
And that was the general sentiment of those who came to honor Anderson Friday, eating tacos and reminiscing about time spent together helping San Diego get through a never-ending series of personal crises.
Many who came out got to know him in the latter phase of his career when he became an emergency dispatcher for AMR. In that incarnation, many said he became known as “the voice” for his gravitas on the radio channels, guiding ambulances and sometimes even helicopters to the latest scenes of medical mayhem.
At the time of his retirement, he was AMR’s longest-serving employee. The company employs 30,000 people across 40 states.
Don Sullivan, AMR’s clinical manager, said he has gotten to know the voice over the past two decades. While Anderson’s technical skills allowed him to continue doing the job for nearly six decades, Sullivan said it was the man’s interest in his fellow humans, whether family members, co-workers or patients, that truly made him a legend.
“He was just the nexus of everything,” Sullivan said. “If you’re a friend of his, you’re part of his family.”
Sitting at a table Friday, catching up with many of those extended family members, Anderson, 75, said that it was the people who kept him coming back decade after decade.
Getting a little choked up, he recalled giving 29 rides early in his career to a San Diego patient undergoing cancer treatment. Though she was often in significant pain, getting to do something to help, he said, just felt good.
“I’ll always remember her,” he said. “You know, it was always the people: the people I worked with, the people I worked for, the people I cared for, they were always in my heart, and they always will be.”
That is not to say that every part of this career gets equal treatment.
In nearly 60 years of work, a guy, especially one rushing into emergency situations or guiding others there, tends to accumulate experiences that have to be set to the side in order to keep filling shifts.
He worked the Laguna Fire in 1970 and in AMR’s communications center during the Witch Creek Fire in 2007. But it was the 1978 PSA plane crash in North Park that left the deepest psychic scar. He was among the first professionals on scene.
“I never saw so much carnage in my life,” Anderson said. We couldn’t even do anything, because there was nobody alive.
“That’s the one I don’t want to remember.”
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