In a town of nearly 10,000, Rochelle Fire Department paramedics often see former patients that they’ve helped in the past in chance encounters around the community.

“I tell the new firefighter/EMTs that they need to keep a journal on the people they’ve helped,” RFD Chief Dave Sawlsville (RFD 1980-present) said. “Because you have an impact. You can’t go to the post office or the store without seeing someone from a past call. You leave an impact on your community. You made somebody’s really bad day a little bit better. That’s huge.”

Sept. 1 marked 50 years of RFD providing ambulance service to the Rochelle area. Before that, ambulance service was offered by three funeral homes in the community. In 1974 there was a movement locally toward a full-time ambulance in Rochelle. When Don Horner, owner of Unger-Horner Funeral Home, came to the city and offered to provide a full-time ambulance for $16,000, the city council decided RFD could take on the responsibility for a lesser cost.

On July 16, 1975, the city council approved RFD taking over ambulance service and the changeover took place in September of that year. Rick Kasmar, Loren Edwards and Dennis Hooley were the personnel on the first RFD ambulance call. The city’s first ambulance arrived on Sept. 7, 1975, and Flagg Township later bought a second ambulance for the city and the city then bought a third ambulance for transfers.

From September through the end of 1975, RFD ran 104 ambulance calls. In 1976 the department ran 400-500 calls. From Sept. 1, 1975 to Aug. 28, 2025, RFD has run 65,138 total ambulance calls. The department now averages over 3,000 calls per year.

“I wonder where the time went,” retired RFD Firefighter/EMT Arlen “Buzz” Harms (1972-2002) said. “I want to give credit to the funeral homes for the work they did before 1975. Unger-Horner and Cluts Funeral Home both did a fantastic job with what was available at the time. And then RFD took it over. A good group of people have worked here over the years. The level of care improved over the years. I feel like what we did with what we had in the beginning was good.”

Ambulance calls by RFD have increased every year since 1975 with the exception of two years, once during COVID-19, and the year when RFD stopped handling non-emergency transfers for Rochelle Community Hospital. Sawlsville said EMS calls are “easily 80-90 percent” of RFD’s operations.

RFD has always operated three ambulances. The State of Illinois has three ascending levels of EMT certifications: basic, intermediate and paramedic. RFD started out employing EMT basics on the ambulances before personnel’s qualifications advanced to intermediate and all paramedics today. In 1975, RFD EMTs could offer trained CPR, oxygen, glucose, splinting and spine stabilization. RFD paramedics now can administer 38 different kinds of drugs and have access to high-tech monitors and defibrillators.

“From 1975 to now, the care for patients in the ambulance is night and day,” Sawlsville said. “There was a day when most adults would die of heart attacks. That isn’t the case now. We started carrying defibrillators, which increased our save rate considerably. We added Narcan and the use of it went up greatly. We added IVs for glucose for diabetic patients after using oral glucose before.

“And these improvements are still happening. We have monitors and can transfer the readings to the ER and they can see what they’re dealing with before it. We have good teamwork with RCH and the other hospitals that offer a higher level of care. We tie first responders, the local hospital and advanced care all together and working and talking together. Patients’ outcomes have gotten a lot better.”

Due to rising call numbers in recent years, RFD recently underwent an expansion that saw six new firefighters hired. The newest three firefighters will be funded by a $919,368 Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grant RFD recently received. Amid the expansion, RFD also established a new model that established the rank of captain, with the department seeking to have more safety during fire incidents and leadership during busier EMS operations. Each shift now includes a captain, a lieutenant and four firefighters.

“Your typical firefighter would always rather go on a fire call than an ambulance call,” Sawlsville said. “Not every EMS call is life or death, but you can bring compassion to that call and make that person’s day a whole lot better. Sometimes it’s an elderly person that had a seizure and you get them to the hospital and we do something like finish cutting their grass. Or someone is on their way back from the grocery store and has a medical issue and we take them to the hospital and one of us puts their groceries away. That’s just as important as anything we do.”

Former Rochelle Fire Chief and current Flagg Township Museum Historian Tom McDermott (RFD 1978-2009) said EMS calls can be both difficult and gratifying for RFD personnel.

“One of the proudest things is seeing people in the supermarket and thinking about the fact that they might not be there if not for the ambulance service,” McDermott said. “And it can be sad too if you see someone that lost someone in an accident, but they survived. It gives you a sense of pride. Within a year, there won’t be a firefighter here that hasn’t saved somebody’s life. It’s a small town. You’ll see grandkids and kids of people that you kept alive for an extra two months or two years.”

RFD also responds about three times per day to lift assists, where patients are just helped to their feet or into bed with no hospital transport or charge. Sawlsville said that service is offered due to proven better quality of life for people that live in their homes versus care facilities.

On calls that involve death, RFD personnel still provide a service.

“Sometimes it isn’t life or death, it’s just death,” McDermott said. “You get there and the patient is gone and has been gone. You still have someone to help. We’ve all seen calls that ran an hour just because of the paramedics staying with the family and helping them through what to do until someone else can get there to be with them. People need the compassion. You still put the time and effort into making sure that person can grasp what is going on and that they’ll be alright.”

RFD personnel have seen healthcare and diseases change, rise and fall. Sawlsville, McDermott and Harms recall working when it wasn’t uncommon to see EMS personnel not wearing gloves. They saw HIV and AIDS come into focus along with hepatitis and COVID-19. Mental health calls are the newest focus shift for EMS personnel, Sawlsville said.

In the future, the RFD chief expects EMS call numbers to continue to rise, with less people having family doctors and more people utilizing ambulances and emergency rooms, which is a newer phenomenon. He expects education and training requirements for EMS personnel to continue to increase.

“The first EMT basic textbook was about 200 pages,” Sawlsville said. “The paramedic textbook is over 2,000 pages. Your EMT basic class was a semester of college. Now it’s over a year because of technology, information and expectations. I assume that will continue to evolve. You have to do 100 hours of continuing education every year as a paramedic to keep up with new changes. Illinois saw a big drop in eligible paramedics after COVID-19 and that has bounced back well. Staff isn’t as hard to find as it was. But the next thing is coming. We’ve seen a huge spike in mental health calls. That will likely be the next thing. We’re trying to adapt and react to that as best we can.”

For RFD paramedics, 50 years of helping the community and making saves also comes with 50 years of seeing sadness, injury and death. In the role of chief, McDermott and Sawlsville have been in the position of lending a listening ear to those paramedics after they come back from hard calls.

“When your firefighters/EMTs go out on the job, they’re going to see people die,” McDermott said. “Every one of those leaves a little bit of a scar. You see some pretty horrendous stuff. It’s a grind. You’re trained to save everyone you can. And honest to God, you’re not going to save everybody. Some people digest that and move on quickly, and sometimes you hit one call that leaves a scab and every time you see something close to that, you’re ripping that scab back off. A lot of the chief’s job is trying to save their EMTs when they come back from trying to save someone. So they can go out the next day and save someone else.”

Despite carrying those scars and stories with them, for 50 years, RFD paramedics have heard the call to duty, and went out that door.

“There’s times you’re beat when you’re going out the door,” McDermott said. “But firefighters/EMTs will never admit they’re beat. They’ll throw everything they can at the wall to help someone. And then when you pull them aside later they’ll say they knew they were doomed when they started. They do not like failed rescues.

“They don’t like getting there and having nothing to do. That’s why we push working with the family. You might have failed on the initial call, but if you can spend an hour with the kids or the spouse making it easier for them, then you come back and know you did something. There isn’t a person who’s worked on that ambulance that doesn’t carry some of the scars with them through life. It’s a small town.”