PHOTOS: John Moon stands on the 2000 block of Centre Avenue in Pittsburgh's Hill District. He's in front of a building that houses the Hill District Federal Credit Union, but he points to a plaque affixed to the stone façade commemorating the Freedom House ambulance service, widely acknowledged as the first paramedic program in the United States.
A half-century ago, Moon was a Freedom House paramedic, and he remains fiercely proud of it: The service, staffed overwhelmingly by Black men from the neighborhood, revolutionized emergency street medicine on the same blocks where many were underemployed, or even believed to be "unemployable."
"We were considered the least likely to succeed by society's standards," said Moon, who was 22 and a hospital orderly when he started training to join Freedom House.