More than a dozen Lewiston Regional Technical Center students huddled around Ron Morin and his Squad 51 replica fire truck earlier this month as he talked to them about the history of paramedics in Maine. The group filled one vehicle bay in the new emergency services space at the technical center’s satellite location in Auburn’s new Edward Little High School.

Morin, of Wilton, showed the students several old rescue items that EMTs used decades ago, most of which have been phased out or replaced, he said.

He showed them a first-generation suction pump, a Handi-talkie two-way radio, a paddled defibrillator, a glass IV container, along with other outdated items that supported EMTs who helped establish Maine’s emergency medical services years ago. Some of the items and tools he actually made himself to help extract people in emergency situations, such ingenuity necessary at the time because extraction tools common today were not available or did not exist then.

The group was engaged, but any student who didn’t fully appreciate the moment can be forgiven. For while Morin talked about the past, the 78-year-old, who is affectionately called the grandfather of Maine EMS, is also quite possibly one of the people most responsible for bringing Maine’s emergency services into the future, saving countless lives along the way.

RESCUED BY THE NAVY

Morin acknowledges that as an adolescent he had a hard time staying in high school while growing up in Livermore Falls. So after moving to Connecticut with his brother and still struggling to stay in school, his brother tricked him into enlisting in the Navy to “straighten him out,” he said. It rescued him.

“My brother woke me up one morning and said ‘You’re 18, you’ve got to sign up for the draft,’” he said. “So, I went to the federal building and I signed some papers and when we left there my brother was laughing . . . and I said ‘What’s so funny?’ And he said, ‘You just enlisted in the Navy for four years.’ . . . Tricked me into the Navy.”

Working on aircraft injection seats in the Navy, he never had an inclination to work in the emergency services field, but then he was assigned to drive the ambulance stationed on base, though he had never driven one before, he said. It provided him with experience in an industry that he would come to center his life around after a painful accident just a few years later.

Ambulances back then were similar to Pontiac station wagons, he said. Because he was mechanically inclined, sometimes he helped extract service members from vehicles who got into accidents on and off base.

He was discharged from the Navy at 22 in 1968. After working at the Kennedy Space Center for just a month, he was laid off. So he came back to Livermore Falls and took a job pumping gas.

Shortly after returning to his apartment one day, Morin jumped in the shower while Crisco was melting on the stovetop for French fries, he said. When he got out of the shower there was a fire in the kitchen.

In a rush to put out the fire, Morin tried to move the pan full of Crisco off the stove but ended up slipping and dropping the flaming grease on himself, he said. He ran outside and rolled in the snow.

“But my Navy training said ‘Go back upstairs and fight the fire,’” he said.

He went back into his apartment, slipped again, and again covered himself in flaming grease. He ran back out to roll in the snow, he said. After a third attempt, he put the fire out with a wet blanket.

Driving himself to the hospital, he was overcome with pain and stopped at the police department for help. There was no such thing as 911 at that time and he had to wait for a while before the local ambulance responded. When he did get to the hospital he learned that 38% of his body was burned, requiring him to stay in the hospital for 10 days.

The experience made him realize there was a need for more ambulance attendance in the area, so he volunteered to drive for the local ambulance service. A year later he enrolled in a Red Cross training course for advanced emergency care and CPR and became licensed as an ambulance attendant.

In 1969 he started contracting with Sugarloaf Mountain ski area as a standby ambulance attendant on the weekends and school vacations through the local service, Area Ambulance, he said. When ski resort owners decided to operate their own ambulance service, they hired Morin for the new Sugarloaf Ambulance/Rescue. Using his mechanical skills and rescue knowledge, he built an ambulance for the ski resort and managed its ambulance service and first aid facility.

However, not too long after that, owners decided to get out of the ambulance service business. Morin, 25 at the time, found himself in the position to buy the service from the ski resort. Because he didn’t have enough credit history to get a business loan by himself, the ski resort cosigned with him.

Over time, Morin expanded the service to seven towns and 13 townships in northern Franklin County. Many of the accidents he responded to were in very rural areas and on Sugarloaf Mountain. He also worked to establish a good response system with other ambulance services in the area.

At that time, there were few full-time EMTs in Maine; the ambulance services were staffed mostly by volunteers. In 1971, Morin took a 40-hour Emergency Medical Technician course, the first in the nation, taught at Harvard Medical School and sponsored by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, he said. When he left the training, he was an EMT. “Jokingly I say I’m a Harvard graduate.”

Morin started thinking about how he could bring the EMT course to Maine. Before the first EMT course was brought to the state, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services issued licenses to people to be an ambulance attendant after they took a Red Cross first aid and CPR course, Morin said.

With permission from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, he partnered with local Farmington General Hospital surgeon Paul Brinkman to bring the very first EMT course to Maine, he said. He helped teach that course at the University of Maine in Farmington campus for the next 30 years.

In 1975, not surprisingly, Morin married a nurse, Becky McNeeland, on a sunny Sugarloaf summit. The resort gave free lifts to guests that day to the top of the mountain.

The only way the two could spend time together back then was when they were on the same shift for the ambulance service, Becky said. For many of the early years during their 48-year marriage the two operated the service together, while working other jobs.

Working as an EMT in a rural area is more challenging because EMTs are often caring for patients for a longer period of time, Becky said. The nearest hospital might be 40 miles away, and radio signals and cellphone reception tend to be spotty. Even as communications improved over the years, many times they were on service calls by themselves with little help.

“(When) something happens out here, you have all the towns around here that can send help,” she said, referring to the more populated area around Wilton and Livermore Falls. “We were on our own pretty much up there (in northern Franklin County). You had to wait for a long time if somebody was going to come up.”

As time went on, the two started advocating for the idea of expanding the amount of care EMTs could provide in the field to injured patients, with the hope that they could decrease the occurrence of death on the way to the hospital, Morin said. The meant offering paramedic training.

The difference between EMT and paramedic training is the depth of care that can be administered, Morin said. EMTs are trained in basic life-saving skills, while paramedics can do more advanced life-support intervention and administer certain drugs.

When the first paramedics course was introduced in the state, Morin was among those first EMTs admitted into the class.

‘SQUELCHING’ THE HEROISM

One of the people who helped grow Maine’s EMT expertise is Larry Hopperstead, a respected, now-retired emergency and trauma surgeon who worked for many years in Lewiston as well as other locations in Maine.

Hopperstead taught that first paramedics course in 1982 and he recalls being impressed by Morin and that first “very eager” group of local EMTs gathered for the course.

In a recent interview with the Sun Journal, Hopperstead remembers telling the group about the sacred responsibility they were taking on, as well as the importance of learning from the positive and negative moments they would face in the field.

“I think it’s important to squelch from these risk takers — which they tend to be in general — squelch from them of any reality of heroism … (and to view their work) as a responsibility to the human being that they’re trying to treat and trying to help,” he said.

Hopperstead recalls also emphasizing that paramedics should not provide more care than what is medically required, because it can potentially have negative effects, he said. The best chance of helping a patient survive is to only administer the care that is needed, he said.

That first group of students were eager to take the knowledge they learned and use it to help their communities, Hopperstead said. There was a sense of responsibility and culpability among them.

Hopperstead remembers Morin being disciplined, wanting to learn, asking many questions and contemplating how he could better serve people. “I remember Ron as a student with an endless yearning for even more knowledge and for understanding the ‘why’ of every event we were trying to teach,” he said.

Morin would travel to Central Maine Vocational Technical Institute in Auburn (now Central Maine Community College) two times a week and on some weekends for class, he said. When he completed the course there was uncertainty among medical professionals about allowing rural EMTs to perform the kind of advanced life-saving care that paramedics were allowed to provide, Morin said. Because rural services received fewer calls, many felt those paramedics would forget their training. However, it was not long before everyone realized how important paramedic services were in rural areas.

As more Maine first-responders received more training, Hopperstead said, he noticed that people were coming into the emergency room by ambulance in better condition. The medical interventions paramedics performed on the way to the hospital reduced patients’ chance of death and increased the potential for resuscitation once they arrived at the hospital.

As prehospital care evolved , he said, he continued to notice improvements right up to the point he retired as a trauma surgeon and critical care physician in 2019.

AN AMBULANCE BUILDER AND EDUCATOR

For much of the period that Morin operated his ambulance service and enhanced his medical skills, he also designed and built ambulances. He started building them in the early ’70s using Chevy and Ford cube vans, because he felt that many manufactured ambulances at that time did not have an efficient layout. Building his own ambulances allowed him to develop a design that was laid out better for EMS personnel and their medical services.

It wasn’t long before area ambulance services asked him to build them one as well, he said. Back then he was building about six a year, but he said demand got so great that he founded his own company in 1990, working with New Jersey-based PL Custom Emergency Vehicles to design the vehicles.

In the mid-’90s, he sold his ambulance service to focus his talents on selling, building and repairing ambulances at a new business, Sugarloaf Ambulance/Rescue Vehicles in Wilton.

A good ambulance design takes into consideration the individual needs and wants of the customer, he said. Now he creates the design on a computer program, but when he first started designing ambulances, he had to use a pencil and paper.

In the last roughly 33 years, he has sold more than 650 ambulances in Maine and New Hampshire, he said. Though his title remains salesman, he considers himself a facilitator for his customers.

“People call me a salesman. I say ‘Hey, what’d you say? I am not a salesman. I will facilitate your needs,’” he said.

After about 50 years of thinking about other peoples’ needs, however, a career-altering medical event made Morin think about his own — and be extra grateful for how far emergency medical services have advanced in Maine.

In 2020, at the age of 75, Morin crashed his vehicle on Maine Mall Road in South Portland. Within minutes, emergency personnel were on the scene, with one South Portland police officer giving him CPR for a cardiac arrest and EMTs using a defibrillator twice before getting a pulse. Morin had suffered a “widow maker.”

He said he has no recollection of the event. It was not until he woke up in the hospital that he learned he had survived a type of heart attack that kills almost anyone who experiences it.

“I had 51 years of EMS angels hanging over me,” he said.

The event made him rethink habits and consider what he will leave behind after he dies, he said. He decided to sell his business to a former employee, in part so his wife will have fewer responsibilities to handle after his death. He still manages the business, he said, but now he can spend more time on educational and philanthropic efforts.

In the time since he started “slowing down,” he founded a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called the Squad 51 History and Education Project. He started focusing more of his time on educating young people about EMS and its history in Maine. At the center of his efforts is a Squad 51 ambulance replica from the former television show “Emergency!” that he built himself.

Airing from 1972-1979, the show inspired many people to pursue a career in EMS or paramedics, according to Morin. He brings the replica to events, where he uses it to educate. He has heard from countless people over the years who credit the show with inspiring them to become a paramedic or EMT. The replica truck also helps grab kids’ attention, pulling them away from their modern devices.

“For their hour with me, they’re attentive. . . . Preserving history and having fun,” Morin said.

He hopes he will one day find a home for the replica truck in a museum or some other public space so it can continue to educate after he is gone, he said. Though the effort to preserve the history of EMS in Maine has been slow, he said, it is important to know how the industry has evolved from a first aid course to the paramedics and advanced live-saving skills and vehicles of today.

Morin, who founded the Maine EMS Honor Guard,  recently donated an ambulance to Lewiston Regional Technical Center’s EMT program to be used for educational purposes. Instructor Thomas Williamson, who was there during Morin’s presentation to students earlier this month, said he feels it’s important that his students understand the history of an industry they are considering as a profession.

“I think understanding history, the history of anything, is fundamental to understanding it,” he said. “You need to know where something came from to measure its current value, relevance, and importance, and to predict its future impact. That’s what Ron delivered to my students.”

As Morin prepares to write an autobiography looking back on his career — one that saved lives, inspired new EMTs and helped create a system he is proud of — he said there is nothing he would do different. “Yep, I’d do it all again.”

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