02/23/2026
🚑“Larry Underwood, a nursing assistant by day and jitney cabdriver by night, was talking with a fellow driver some years ago about their younger days. Mr. Underwood mentioned that he had worked for Freedom House.
It was a nod to a history that had been mostly forgotten: the working-class men and women, most of them Black, who were part of the Freedom House Ambulance Service and who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were among the most highly trained field practitioners of emergency medical care in the country.
They were performing CPR, administering IVs, inserting breathing tubes and transmitting EKGs on the streets of Pittsburgh well before such care became standard elements of emergency medical treatment.
And then they were gone, casualties of their own pioneering work, which helped lead to the creation of local emergency medical services, like the one that would essentially replace Freedom House.
In the 2000s, at the jitney stand, Mr. Underwood was surprised that his fellow driver had even heard of it. “Freedom House?” the man said. “You were one of them guys?” These days, Mr. Underwood, 76, is having a hard time managing all the speaking engagements.
The spotlight has finally found Freedom House. In recent years it has been the subject of documentaries, a book and even an episode of “The Pitt,” the Emmy-winning drama set in a Pittsburgh trauma center.
And on Friday, U.S. Representative Summer Lee, Democrat of Pittsburgh, is introducing a resolution to award Freedom House with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor a person or institution can receive from Congress. The resolution is being co-sponsored by Representative Mike Kelly, a Republican whose district is also in western Pennsylvania, along with more than a dozen members of Congress from both parties.”
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