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06/21/2017 04:00 AMSam O’Donnell is used to riding in an ambulance, but that’s not where she will be at the Ivoryton Fourth of July parade, even though members of the Essex Ambulance Association will be in the line of march. Sam will be in the front of the parade in an open car as grand marshal.
According to Leslie Barlow, who with her husband Cotty, has long been involved in the parade, the designation of Sam as grand marshal honors the entire ambulance association, which is marking 40 years of service to the community. Sam is one of the association’s founding members. She was president for 10 years, and after long service as a board member, in May she was named board chair emerita.
The Fourth of July parade down Ivoryton Main Street steps off at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, July 4, with a mixture of local groups including a color guard provided by the Veterans Hall, the Essex Fire Department, and the Ancient Order of Essex Weeders, the group that maintain the landscaping on the traffic islands on Route 154 at Exit 3 off Route 9.
Laura Copland will serve as master of ceremonies, Samantha Barlow will sing the national anthem, and Norm Rutty will recite the Declaration of Independence. The New Horizons Band from the Community Music School, led by Patti Hurley, will perform as will bagpiper Aaron Lindo.
As always, the parade committee encourages decorated cars, bikes, and tractor floats. There is no need to register in advance. Those who wish to participate need only show up at 9:30 a.m., a half hour before the parade begins. Motorized vehicles gather on Cheney Street; cyclists and marchers on Walnut Street. According to Cotty Barlow, leashed animals that have been vaccinated are also welcome with their minders to march.
On a recent afternoon, the T-shirt Sam was wearing paid tribute to the early days of the local ambulance service with a group picture of the first volunteers. It would have been difficult to predict from Sam’s history that she would be involved in emergency medicine—she dropped out of nursing school.
“I freaked out in the surgical rotation,” she recalls.
But some four decades ago, a serious car accident in front of her house in Centerbrook convinced her to get involved. In those days there was a very long wait for an ambulance, which had to come from Middletown, even though the clinic to which the seriously injured victim would be taken was then on Main Street.
“I was furious. I thought it was ridiculous to wait that long for an ambulance. I remember the heat and the poor man lying out there in the road,” Sam says.
Later, a local volunteer fireman who had been at the scene asked Sam if she would be willing to take training to be an emergency medical technician (EMT). She agreed to do it. The fireman owned a feed store where Sam was buying supplies for her menagerie of sheep, geese, chickens, ducks, and even a pig.
The EMT training, Sam remembers, was in the basement of the Grange Hall in East Haddam, and the conditions were not ideal.
“There were 13 of us and we had to straddle all the puddles on the floor,” she recalls. “Sometimes I would laugh and say to myself that I quit nursing school and now I am doing this.”
She says training has grown more complex over the years, with new equipment and more sophisticated technology.
“A lot of computers, and they don’t thrill me,” she says. “Everything is so much more advanced.”
The Essex Ambulance Association began service in 1977 in what is now the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Shell gas station on Route 154. In that same year, the association bought its present building, which has undergone considerable expansion and renovation over the years. Previously it had been in turn a pizza parlor, a pool hall, a country store, and a blacksmith shop.
Today, there are two paid EMTs on service during the day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Essex volunteers work nights and weekends. Sam describes the members of the association not simply as volunteers, but as a family and says the association is always eager to increase its numbers. In former days, when ambulance volunteers responded in particularly difficult situations, members would get together to talk through what had happened as a kind of emotional relief. Now, Sam added, there are statewide teams that visit and talk with EMTs after a notably trying call.
She recalls the flood of l982 that turned calm streams into raging torrents as a time when the Essex Ambulance Association rose to the challenge.
“We worked day and night,” she says.
During bad snowstorms these days, Sam says that younger association members spend the night at the ambulance station so there is no problem of them driving to the station before going out on calls.
Today, Sam no longer goes out on calls, but she remains as involved as ever in the ambulance association. One of the jobs she has taken on is maintaining the garden in the front of the building.
Sam grew up in New Britain, but in those days she used her given first name, Sabra. She wasn’t called Sam, a combination of the initials of her maiden name, until nursing school. She and her husband Charlie, a retired guidance counselor at Valley regional High School, have been married 57 years. For three years before she dated him, however, she confesses she dated his roommate.
“It’s a running joke. He can’t complain because he already knew all about me,” she says.
Sam and Charlie used to own So and So, a notions shop once in Essex. For her, chatting with the customers was the best part of the retail experience. She says when the store started carrying newspapers, there was even better conversation.
Today, Sam’s hair is cropped short, close to her head. It was a style born on necessity. She discovered a breast lump three years ago, and has undergone surgery and chemotherapy, which caused her hair to fall out. Before it fell out, she says it actually hurt her.
“I used to call it angry hair,” she says.
Her experience as an ambulance volunteer played a part in her cancer surgery. One of the young doctors she had met on ambulance calls went on to become a surgeon, and when it came time to have her own cancer surgery, Sam wanted that doctor, Kristin Zarfos, to perform the operation. (Zarfoos became nationally known for her successful fight against drive-thru mastectomies, in which patients were released the same day as the surgery.)
“Kristin said she couldn’t believe I had remembered her,” Sam says, “but I said, ‘How could I forget you?’”
Her cancer treatment complete, Sam still didn’t grow her hair long.
“One of my grandsons said, ‘Grammy, I like your hair like that,’” she reports, so now they have their hair cut together.
Volunteering as an EMT can be stressful, but Sam says the rewards are worth the effort.
“If you can help a neighbor, if you can help a family, help somebody out of pain, help them in their last hours, it is all worthwhile,” she says.
To learn about volunteering for the Essex Ambulance Association, call 860-767-1730.
Fourth of July Parade
The Ivoryton Fourth of July Parade is at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, July 4 along Ivoryton Main Street. Marchers and bicyclists meet at 9:30 a.m. on Walnut Street; motorized vehicles meet at 9:30 a.m. on Cheney Street.