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Long-Forgotten Heartmobile May Become Museum Piece: Former Doctors, Medics Among Those Raising Money for Vehicle's Restoration

Posted on: Saturday, 13 May 2006, 15:05 CDT

By Matt Tullis, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

May 13--Flat-lined since it went out of commission in the mid-1970s, the Heartmobile may be showing signs of life.

The country's first mobile coronary-care unit now sits rusting on a trailer in a warehouse on Columbus' South Side. It has a flat tire, and plastic covers a back window. Inside the large RV-size vehicle, all that testifies to the fact it once saved lives is a steel treatment table and an old EKG machine.

The vehicle's pulse is strengthening, though, as its owner, the Central Ohio Fire Museum and Leaning Center, is raising money to restore it, museum executive director William Hall said.

"We kept it because we knew it had some major significance," Hall said.

In 1969, Dr. James V. Warren, then chairman of the Department of Medicine at Ohio State University, and Dr. Richard Lewis, later director of the university medical center's cardiology division, developed the Heartmobile as a rolling emergency room designed to get care to heart-attack victims more quickly.

Originally stationed at the OSU Medical Center, the Heartmobile eventually became part of the Columbus Division of Fire.

Russell Young was one of the first medics trained to work on the Heartmobile. He said it was an exciting time, one in which Columbus was at the cutting edge of technology when it came to treating heart-attack victims.

"Columbus kind of pioneered this thing," Young said. "It was exciting because we were pretty much the original."

The Heartmobile was big and slow, though, barely able to top 50 mph.

Young recalled one ride when a deputy sheriff came across the radio "wondering what the Bookmobile was doing running with red lights and sirens up the freeway."

Even though the Heartmobile could get treatment to patients faster than an ambulance rushing a patient to the hospital, it was replaced after about four years by smaller, quicker medic vans.

Abandoned and stripped of much of its equipment, the vehicle made a few rounds as an educational exhibit in the mid-1970s. Then it was abandoned.

One day in the early 1980s, Hall said someone told him the vehicle was sitting in a police impound lot, awaiting public auction, where it likely would be sold for scrap metal. Hall said he went to the lot and, with a little help, hid the vehicle so it wouldn't go on the block.

"It's just kind of disappeared," Hall said with a smile. "No one really missed it."

The city eventually gave the Heartmobile to the museum. But without money to restore it, the vehicle has bounced from warehouse to warehouse for two decades. Just recently, Hall said the OSU Medical Center came forward and offered to help with the restoration.

The museum hopes to raise $100,000 through the Heartmobile Restoration Group. The group is made up of former Heartmobile doctors and medics, as well as current medics, the OSU Center for Emergency Medicine and the OSU Richard M. Ross Heart Hospital.

So far, $8,000 has been raised, Hall said. He hopes to have the Heartmobile up and running by this time next year.

mtullis@dispatch.com

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

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Source: The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

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