STEVEN MAYER
The Bakersfield Californian
(TNS)
It was around the turn of the 21st century when John Surface, now president and CEO of Hall Ambulance, approached company founder Harvey L. Hall with a proposal.
“I walk into Harvey Hall’s office one day (and say), ‘Hey, man, I got a crazy idea.’
“He kind of sits back in his chair, like, ‘OK, I’m listening.’
“I said, ‘What if we had our own EMT school?'”
By 2001, the Harvey L. Hall EMS Academy was born, a place where the burgeoning ambulance company could recruit and train the men and women who would serve as entry-level emergency medical services employees before moving up through the ranks of a company that now has 450 employees and 107 ambulances at 17 bases in 15 Kern County communities.
On Tuesday afternoon, more than 70 people crowded into the Collective event center in downtown Bakersfield to support and celebrate the 11 members of the academy’s 46th graduating class.
“It’s a tough program,” said Surface as he stood before the gathering of family, friends and Hall employees. “You have to put in effort to pass.”
Indeed, when the class started weeks ago, it numbered 18. These 11 were the survivors.
“The strength that it takes, and the focus and perseverance it takes to continue this program, be part of it and stay with it requires lots of hours studying on your own time,” said Mason Albitre, 21, one of the 11 graduates.
“We were reading a chapter a day, so in a five-day week we would have five chapters,” he said, “and every Monday we would have an exam including all five chapters.”
Julie Hayes traveled from Orange County to support her nephew, Seth Hayes, one of the graduates.
“The best quality Seth has, along with his big heart, is courage,” Hayes said. “He is that person you want next to you, that person that you can count on.”
Another family member, Mary Jo Sawyer, was there to support her grandson, Andrew Hollman.
“I’m also a nurse,” Sawyer said. “So to see him going into the family business is just so great. We are so proud of him.”
The academy may have been tough, but Surface said the challenges for the graduates do not end here.
“Of the 11, statistically, three of them will be gone within six months,” Surface said following the ceremony. “They’ll move on and do something else.
“The first time they see a dead baby or blood and guts or one too many homeless people, uh, no, not what I signed up for.”
Often someone in the group will go on to be a school teacher, he said. There might be a nurse or two in the group.
“There’s also some people who are going to be here 10 years from now as a paramedic,” he said. “We’re going to send them to paramedic school next, and once they become a paramedic, we turn them into supervisors, managers of our operations management group.”
It helps build the company from the ground-up, he said.
“We don’t have any managers that didn’t start at the bottom.”
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