ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, June 10, 1996 TAG: 9606100049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MONTVALE
SOURCE: JOANNE POINDEXTER STAFF WRITER
If you ever lived here, chances are Jessie Richards would know you or someone related to you.
That's because she would have responded to your daytime emergency rescue call, sorted your mail or asked you to help out at her church.
Richards, who retired as postmistress in 1990, is known as "Mama Jessie" and is the unofficial mayor of Montvale. A lot of the Montvale residents, she jokes, "are related to me."
"She knows everybody and where they live, " says Carol Cook, an emergency medical technician for shock trauma.
Richards is also a strong advocate for the volunteer rescue system, which is under scrutiny in Bedford County because squads don't always have enough volunteers during the day.
When she defends the volunteer system, Richards talks about the cost of a paid service and the sense of community that comes with the volunteers.
At one time, "we were projecting a 13 cents raise in property taxes" if the county went to a paid emergency medical system, she says. "People objected."
Besides, a paid system "picks up just a person. We pick up family and friends," says Richards, secretary of the Bedford County Volunteer Rescue Association.
Richards, the last active charter member of the Montvale Rescue Squad, helped organize the crew in 1970, training as an emergency medical technician and working on a night crew because of her job.
"Women couldn't drive then," she recalls. One night, though, a call came in and no other driver was available: Richards took the ambulance and responded. She subsequently took the required training and tests to become a driver.
Richards, who didn't give her age, is the oldest of the 14 drivers on the 24-member Montvale squad, which includes five new cardiac care specialists. Five or six other drivers, all of them male, on other Bedford County crews are older than Richards.
She's hoping the state won't impose upper age limits for drivers. She wants to be able to stop driving an ambulance when she gets ready - not when the state tells her to.
Richards is behind the wheel on about 95 percent of the day calls that Montvale gets, says Dave Nichols, Bedford County's director of public safety.
She knows shortcuts to most places in Bedford County, but her directions might include "down the valley," "just up the hollow " or "over the mountain there."
Richards doesn't like to admit it, but she's been driving 58 years, starting at a young age on farm equipment.
She's never had an accident with the ambulance or any other vehicle, and, she brags, "no baby has been born in my ambulance. I get my mamas to the hospital before the babies come."
Her duty, she says, is to drive. She takes her orders from emergency medical technicians who are tending the patient.
It's not unusual for her to visit folk she's transported to a hospital or show up at a funeral with other crew members in an ambulance.
Wayne Armstrong, a paramedic, calls Richards "the Dale Earnhardt" of rescue squad because "she'll get you there!''
Safely, he adds.
"I would rather have her driving if I have a critical patient than anyone else,'' says Armstrong, who joined the crew after moving from Oregon.
"Jessie's a good-hearted, hard-working member of the crew," Capt. Geoff Trevilian says. "She's working four or five days a week - 12 hours - and that's a lot."
Richards lives within walking distance of the Montvale crew hall, and she's usually the first to answer a daytime call and notify other volunteers. It's not unusual for Richards to pick up other volunteers at their mailboxes.
Fortunately, says Trevilian, crew members are spread out within the district and can answer calls quicker than if everyone had to go to the crew hall and then respond. The crew's response time is seven to eight minutes in a district that covers 150 square miles and serves 3,500 to 4,000 people. Because of the county's mutual aid agreement, crew members respond to calls as far west as the Botetourt County community of Blue Ridge and throughout Bedford County.
Richards is as passionate about her rescue work as she is about her church, her four children, and her service as postmistress for 23 years before retiring in 1990.
After 48 years of marriage, Richards says, her husband, Cecil, still has to sit around the house and wait for her because she stays so busy.
In addition to driving, she helps plant and care for flowers at the crew hall, and works in Sunday school and with a few other Bedford County groups, including the Bedford County Volunteer Rescue Association.
One of her frustrations is people who are not specific about where they live. "Know where you live" and give clear directions, she advises.
She also has no patience for people who don't yield to emergency vehicles that have their flashers or sirens on. "All they have to do," she says, "is just move to the right."
Several times, she's been tempted to turn offenders' license plate numbers in to the police.
"We've had some pretty close squeak-throughs," she says of her runs. The one she'll talk about involves a patient who wanted to go to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem.
En route, the patient stopped breathing. Richards and the rest of the crew decided to go to Roanoke Memorial Hospital because it was closer and they could get emergency care there.
They way crew members tell it, the man had taken his last breath, but when Richards was backing the ambulance onto a ramp to the emergency room, she hit a curb and the jolt made the patient gasp.
He's now up and walking around.
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL/Staff Montvale Rescue Squad driver Jessieby CNBRichards knows not only the best routes but also where just about
everyone in town lives. Color.