A young man has stopped breathing in a supermarket toilet. A pedestrian with a nasty head injury won't let the crew near him on a busy road. A newborn baby is worryingly silent. An addict urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix. This is the life of an ambulance paramedic.
Growing up during America’s worst economic depression brought unique challenges. This book tells of life before many of the things we take for granted today were available, e.g. refrigerators, television sets, clothes washers and dryers, bath tubs, enough to eat, and clothes that weren’t “hand-me-downs.” It was a time when playing baseball with buddies was time consuming and didn’t cost anything. One bat, one baseball, a few gloves and no parents to watch was all a bunch of youngsters needed to play for hours. Times were tough, but they were great!
In this book, Jake talks about his more than eighty years of life experiences. He takes the reader from America's great economy depression of the 1930s through an up-close and personal view of three American wars to a life of relative abundance in this century. His twenty-eight years of flying in the air force took him to beautiful places like Stavanger, Norway, cold places like Thule AFB Greenland, hot places like Sattahip, Thailand, and dry places like the San Joaquin Valley in California. He describes the details of losing fellow crew members in four different plane crashes and the personal hardship on their families. His most memorable events of his military career were in the 1960s when on three occasions he was involved in the work and decision making of President John F. Kennedy. He vividly remembers seeing and being close to President Kennedy just four weeks before he was assassinated.