Matters of life and death: Waco's ambulance services
By Terri Jo Ryan
Tribune-Herald staff writer
In the early 20th century, the same vehicles that took people on their “last journey” — to the cemetery — were often used to tote the living but injured to the hospital as well.
That’s because the community undertaker was usually the only business in town open 24 hours a day, said Jim Moshinskie, owner/operator of Oakcrest Funeral Home of Waco since 2001.
“And he was usually the first guy in town to get a telephone,” he added. “He had the vehicle that a patient could be laid down in, and the manpower to carry one.”
He said it was thus a natural transition for funeral homes to get into the ambulance business.
The red lights and sirens were added sometime in the 1920s, he said. Before that, emergency vehicles had bells that cautioned other drivers to get out of the way of the rescue squad.
Before the 1970s, ambulance service was largely unregulated, he noted. In some areas, ambulances were staffed by advanced first-aid responders, but in other places, the ambulance was a hearse and its driver generally a mortuary technician.
Moshinskie worked his way through mortuary school in Dallas in the 1960s as an ambulance attendant, he said. When he came to Waco in 1982, he said, he started the first paramedic-level ambulance service in the area. His company, Daniel EMS of Hillsboro, purchased A.D.’s Ambulance Service from A.D. Sherrill, who had been an ambulance driver in Waco since the early 1950s.
Moshinskie sold the company in 1988 to Rural/Metro Inc. of Arizona. He retired as tenured faculty from the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University in 2006.
tjryan@wacotrib.com
757-5746
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