“Firemen With First-Aid Kits”

“Ulysses Jones and Charles Crosby weren’t paramedics.”

I was told the other day that someone said this recently.

“1977, they weren’t paramedics. They were doing first-aid.”

Jones and Crosby were “firemen with first-aid kits.”

“That is a fact!”

No, it’s not a fact. No record on Crosby (he drove the ambulance), but Jones headed the resuscitation efforts. Jones’s paramedic license was issued by the state of TN in June 1976.

Have we reached a point in the Elvis community where people believe that the Memphis Fire Department in 1977 sent firemen without medical training out in the ambulance to try to save lives, equipped perhaps with only a box of Band-aids and a thermometer?