Randolph Mantooth, who played medic on NBC’s ‘Emergency!’ series, dies at 80
In the beginning there was Johnny and Roy. The TV show Emergency introduced America to paramedics. Johnny and Roy were two genial guys who rescued citizens in distress and when they weren’t doing that they were hanging out at the fire station or in the emergency department where there was a beautiful nurse Dixie McCall, played by Julie London. Johnny and Roy were uncomplicated heroes, good guys whose days were filled with adventure, yet there were ordinary guys at the same time. You could imagine being them and it was more possible than your other boyhood dreams like playing right-field for the Boston Red Sox or being a United States Senator.
Like so many others who later became paramedics, Emergency was the start of my EMS origin story.
I was 13 years old in 1972 when the show first aired. Three years later, my state of Connecticut got their own paramedics. I remember standing on the side of the road watching a red van with Rescue 1 written on the side racing past. The University of Connecticut Health Center in the neighboring town of Farmington had started our state’s first paramedic program, and they were called on to assist local volunteer ambulances on critical calls. They did IVs and defibrillated patients in cardiac arrest out in the field just like Johnny and Roy did on TV.
My baseball dreams reached their zenith at 12 when I was on the Simsbury LL all-star team. In our first game in the playoff, I made a diving backhand catch at third of a seething line drive, and later ripped an RBI single to right. I had dreams of us making it to Williamsburg, PA and being on ABC’s’ Wide World of Sports for the televised championship game where we would all jump up and down and throw our gloves in the air and mob each other on the mound when we won the title. Those dreams ended in the local regional when a six-foot 12-year old pitcher who shaved every day and whose parents had to show the umpire his birth certificate in order for him to be allowed to play struck me out swinging in the last inning, sending me to tearful defeat so devastating I couldn’t eat any of the 20 cent McDonald’s hamburgers our Dads bought after the game to cheer us up.
At 17 in 1976 I went to Washington as part of a high school intern program where I worked for United States Senator Lowell Weicker. I ended up working on and off for him for the next twenty years both in Washington and in Connecticut when he was Governor, interspersing my time on his staff with my dreams of being a writer and working to support myself as a taxi driver, laborer, telephone solicitor and line cook. In 1988, when Weicker was unexpectedly beaten in his race for a fourth term in the Senate, I found myself out of work and declared rather than trying to get another job working in government for someone else (I knew by then, I didn’t have the desire, personality or sheer bravado necessary to enter politics myself), I declared I would become an EMT and help people with my hands rather than my pen (I had been a speech and policy writer) I would become like Johnny Gage, a paramedic hero who helped those in need and was a good guy.
I took an EMT class in Springfield, Massachusetts and three months later, I was working on an ambulance, responding lights and sirens, and walking into people’s homes and they looked up at me like I was the face of an angel, come to their rescue, even if I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing yet.
When Weicker recruited me to work on his Gubernatorial campaign in 1991, I agreed, but I still worked a couple nights a week on the ambulance. He was elected governor and I stayed with him as his speechwriter and executive assistant at his health Department. Not only did I keep working on the ambulance at night, I also went to paramedic school. The day after he left office was my first shift as a paramedic in the city of Hartford. That was January 4, 1995.
That was over thirty years ago. I worked 911 full-time for twenty-five years, and have been part time since. Though I have a desk job as an EMS coordinator(at the same UConn Health Center that had the state’s first paramedics), I still do 24 hours a month on the road in Hartford, responding lights and sirens and walking into houses where people (at least some) look up at me like I am an angel come to rescue them, and while I don’t always know what I am doing, I know a lot more than when I started. I always try to treat people like Johnny Gage did – with kindness, respect, and maybe a smile and touch of humor if called for.
For many of us in EMS, Johnny and Roy stood for all that was good in the world. They were role models for us in showing us a path to lead our lives as rescuers. And many of us, like me, met and married our Dixie McCalls, our beautiful ER nurses, who bore us children and made our lives even more rewarding.
I went to an EMS conference many years ago and Johnny Gage (Randolph Mantooth) was there signing autographs. I thought about getting in line and having my picture taken with him, but the line was hundreds long. I wish I had gotten in it. I would have liked to have shaken his hand and thanked him.