Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Bad Call
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: SC
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2018091653 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018091653 |
| HEADING: | Scardino, Mike |
| 000 | 00597nz a2200169n 450 |
| 001 | 10797645 |
| 005 | 20180711073040.0 |
| 008 | 180710n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2018091653 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca11439704 |
| 040 | __ |a ICrlF |b eng |e rda |c ICrlF |
| 100 | 1_ |a Scardino, Mike |
| 370 | __ |e Elmhurst (New York, N.Y.) |f South Carolina |2 naf |
| 372 | __ |a Ambulance service |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a males |2 lcdgt |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Scardino, Mike. Bad call, a summer job on a New York ambulance, c2018: |b title page (Mike Scardino) jacket flap (native of Elmhurst, Queens ; lives in South Carolina) |
PERSONAL
Born c. 1947; married; wife’s name Barbara; children: three daughters.
EDUCATION:Vanderbilt University, B.A., 1970.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Chiat/Day NY, vice president and group head, 1987-88; Lord, Einstein, O’Neill & Partners, senior vice president/group creative director, 1988-1990; Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc., New York, NY, executive vice president and group creative director, 1990-93; Young & Rubicam/the Lord Group, executive vice president and chief creative officer, 1994-2000; Anderson Advertising, Charlotte, NC, executive vice president and creative director; 2000-02; AdvertisingRX, owner and president, 2002-07; BD&H Marketing (Barnhardt, Day & Hines, Inc.), Charlotte, NC, chief creative officer, 2008–.
MEMBER:Delta Kappa Epsilon.
WRITINGS
Editor of the Vanderbilt Commodore, 1970.
SIDELIGHTS
A native of Elmhurst, Queens, Mike Scardino s in advertising. However, for a summer job while he went to college in the 1960s, Scardino worked as ambulance attendant for St. John’s Queens Hospital.in New York City. The experience eventually led him to pursue a career in advertising rather than his initial career choice of becoming a doctor. In his memoir Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance, Scardino, who met his wife on his third day in college, recounts those life-changing summers working on an ambulance.
In an interview with Am New York website contributor Abigail Weinberg, Scardino recounted why it took him so long to write his memoir about that time in his life. He noted he often came up with excuses until he watched the German movie Wings of Desire. Scardino was impressed with the various storytelling techniques used in the film, noting it included “stream of consciousness, omniscient observer and everything,” as he told Am New York contributor Weinberg, adding: “I said, ‘You know, I can write this any way I want.’ So I decided to do a first-person narrative as if I were going through each call, as if I were talking to a roommate in college or my wife or one of my family members and telling them what had happened.” It helped that Scardino recalled many of the incidents because he had told stories about them over the years. As he began writing the memoir, more memories came back to him.
The memoir covers Scardino’s life from 1967 to 1970 over the summers he worked as an ambulance attendant to help pay for his college tuition. He especially needed the money because his parents insisted he attend Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee instead of the much cheaper Queens College in New York. His mother grew up in Nashville and wanted her son to attend a more prestigious school, albeit one they really could not afford. To help pay for Scardino’s schooling, Scardino’s father used his connections to get Scardino the ambulance attendant job.
Squadron writes in the memoir that it was the his exposure chaotic emergencies and medical traumas that made him change his career goals, causing him to leave the pre-med track he was on in college. As an example, at one point in the memoir Scardino describes attending to a horribly mutilated body with the scalp torn off and the face covered with maggots. Encountering so many horrible incidents led all interest in becoming a doctor to disappear.
Scardino’s job on the ambulance was a grueling one. He worked one thirty-six hour shift a week, often beginning his shift during the high crisis hours of nighttime. Scardino tells of adventures when he was caught in the middle of burgeoning riots and going to the scene of a plane crash at JFK airport. In addition, he provides a view into private lives all over Queens, where he ends up attending to a man who drank Drano and a woman attacked by rats. He is also on the job when a 400-pound, diabetic woman who has developed gangrene below the knees needs to be removed from her second story apartment and carried down the stairs.
At one point, Scardino’s own health and life is placed in jeopardy when he is nearly murdered. Throughout the memoir, Scardino recounts the many memorable characters he met during the job, including an ambulance driver Big Al who was known for his ability to quickly eat numerous hot dogs. A nurse he refers to as Boudicca, was the epitome of an Irish Catholic and had a fierceness about her that instilled fear in Scardino. “Some say that everybody has a book in them, and this author has found his in this memorable, often grim work,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Another reviewer writing for Publishers Weekly commented: “Scardino’s unsparing memoir offers an empathetic look at human pain and suffering.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Scardino, Mike, Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance, Little, Brown and Co. (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of Bad Call.
.
Publishers Weekly, May 21, 2018, review of Bad Call, p. 64.
ONLINE
AM New York website, https://www.amny.com/ (July 16, 2018), Abigail Weinberg, “Memoir Bad Call Revisits 1960s NYC, as Seen from an Ambulance.”
New York Daily News Online, http://www.nydailynews.com/ (July 14, 2018), Jacqueline Cutler, “Queens Man Remembers His Bloody Summer Job as Ambulance Worker in New York.”
Public Radio Tulsa website, http://www.publicradiotulsa.org/ (July 30, 2018), Rich Fisher, review of Bad Call.
New York Post Online https://nypost.com/ (July 18, 2018), Larry Getlen, “The Insane Tales of a 1960s NYC Ambulance Attendant.”
Spine, http://spinemagazine.com/ (September 25, 2018), Susanna Baird, “The Writer’s Practice: Mike Scardino, Bad Call.”
Mike Scardino
Mike Scardino is a native of Elmhurst, Queens. In order to pay for college, he worked on a New York City ambulance as a teenager, which led to his decision not to pursue medicine as a career. Mike eventually found his way into advertising, where his ambulance experience proved to be an unexpectedly useful fit. He is married to the woman he met his third day at college and has three daughters. He currently resides in South Carolina.
Mike Scardino
Mike Scardino 3rd degree connection3rd
Book Author: BAD CALL: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance; Chief Creative Officer, BD&H Marketing
Charlotte, North Carolina Area
See contact info
See contact info
See connections (210)
210 connections
AUTHOR of Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance, Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group; to be released JULY 17, 2018; Google: Bad Call by Mike Scardino.
ADVERTISING:
AT&T, Ad Council [Drunk Driving], Advent, Alka-Seltzer, Bee MD, BestSweet, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of TN, Canon Cameras, Castrip Steel [Nucor], Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, Chock Full o’Nuts Coffee, Coca-Cola, Commodore, Computers, Continental Airlines, Crescent Communities, Eckerd Drugs, Emery Air Freight, FedEx, Gainesburgers, Gravy Train, Hefty, Hertz, IBM, Key Bank, Kodak, Lea & Perrins, MCI, Manulife, March of Dimes, Memorial Hospital Savannah, Microban, Miller Beer, Mita Copiers, MyTrack, New York State Tourism, Pentax, Premier Alliance, Pringle’s, RadioShack, Rockport, Saab, SAS, Seagram’s, Siemens. Skyline Medical Center, Spectracide, Sturm Foods, Sunbelt Rentals, Sunoco, Treehouse Foods, USAA, Veryfine, Windstream Wireless, The Wiz
Specialties: none: generalist
Articles & activity
285 followers
JUST IN TIME FOR HALLOWEEN?
Mike’s profile photo
Mike Scardino
Published on LinkedIn
BOO! Or more like boo hoo? http://hotsta.net/media/1863933151279519090...
4 Likes 2 Comments
Comment
See all articles
It's not that gross. Or IS it?
Mike shared this
4 Likes 2 Comments
View Mike’s profile
A Review 4 U
Mike shared this
2 Likes
Thanks to SPINE Magazine for this nice story on how BAD CALL came ...
Mike shared this
3 Likes 2 Comments
See all activity
Experience
Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group
Book Author
Company Name Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group
Dates Employed 2018 – Present
Employment Duration less than a year
Location Worldwide
Newly finished memoir BAD CALL: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance
Hardcover publication date July 17, 2018.
Google: Bad Call by Mike Scardino
i18n_media-proxy-image_icon
20180127_100445.jpg
20180127_100445.jpg
BD&H Marketing (Barnhardt, Day & Hines, Inc.)
Chief Creative Officer
Company Name BD&H Marketing (Barnhardt, Day & Hines, Inc.)
Dates Employed Feb 2008 – Present
Employment Duration 10 yrs 8 mos
Helped take national Windstream Campaign and adapt it for Windstream Wireless while still maintaining family "relationship"; buzzy website and [OMG] sock puppet video contest for Bee M.D.; ground-up rebranding for Premier Alliance; lots of food work for Treehouse Sturm; launching Grove Square coffee for Wal-Mart, new hush-hush products; stay tuned
AdvertisingRx
Owner/President
Company Name AdvertisingRx
Dates Employed Feb 2002 – Mar 2007
Employment Duration 5 yrs 2 mos
Advertising Communications Consultancy offered clients informed "second opinion" on agency communications and relationships; the idea was "no ads, just advice" [from someone other than golf partner or in-law] but would they listen? Nope...[they always wanted...ads]
Anderson Advertising, Charlotte, NC
evp/creative director
Company Name Anderson Advertising, Charlotte, NC
Dates Employed Nov 2000 – Feb 2002
Employment Duration 1 yr 4 mos
Amazingly, got local megabuck-home builder to advertise in WSJ when local buyer $$ well ran low...carpe diem pre-retirement campaign: "Your retirement strategy should include a place to retire." Steal a march on your compadres. Those boomers -- still SO competitive; anyhow, it worked great...
Young & Rubicam/The Lord Group
evp Chief Creative Officer
Company Name Young & Rubicam/The Lord Group
Dates Employed 1994 – 2000
Employment Duration 6 yrs
Insane, hotly-contested pitch to win RadioShack; repositioned brand as information resource rather than yet another electronics retailer; 4 years, 65 spots and You've got questions. We've got answers." later -- sales nearly double; pitched and won USAA; helped boil down 5"-thick Siemens brief into 30 second spots [simplification, indeed]; Key Bank made sound ... See more
Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc.
evp group creative director
Company Name Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc.
Dates Employed 1990 – 1993
Employment Duration 3 yrs
Lots of accounts, lots of fun; lots of chaos; MCI during rate wars; helped re-launch Continental Airlines [post chapter 11] with Business First product; Hertz bus and [unwilling] reprise of you-know-who for his last hurrah; Hefty; pitched U.S. Navy [never again]; Drunk Driving widely honored; the rest is a blur except for the wonderful folks in my group [hi]
Lord, Einstein, O'Neill & Partners
svp/group creative director
Company Name Lord, Einstein, O'Neill & Partners
Dates Employed 1988 – 1990
Employment Duration 2 yrs
Saab reprise; tried hard to get them to buy ad headline "The Cure for the Common Car" as their new tag; Nissan was smarter...
Chiat/Day NY
vp/group head
Company Name Chiat/Day NY
Dates Employed 1987 – 1988
Employment Duration 1 yr
Dumbest commercial I ever made ["Woof Train" for Gravy Train] shocks everyone & wins Cannes Gold -- proves that 8- year-old kid in us all is always just waiting to act up; Veryfine juice "cola" commercials = sellout on the shelves; lots of very weird work that never lived, probably for the best...we'll never know
J. Walter Thompson NY
vp/associate creative director
Company Name J. Walter Thompson NY
Dates Employed 1984 – 1987
Employment Duration 3 yrs
Worked on Miller's American Way campaign [fun spot with "Yaz"]; Emery's "Nine to Five" campaign; pivotal Eckerd Drug campaign bolstered pharmacist/management relations...worked 18 months on IBM "Marketing Image" campaign; mutual love fest; traveled all over the place and saw strange and wonderful IBM things; produced precisely ZIP; just goes to sh... See more
Ally & Gargano, Inc.
vp
Company Name Ally & Gargano, Inc.
Dates Employed 1980 – 1984
Employment Duration 4 yrs
Poached from Canon to help save Pentax account; Early FedEx print; first international FedEx tv [Canada]; helped make "turbo" a household word [Saab: The Muscle Car with a Social Conscience]; helped with international Saab 9000 launch; helped launch Commodore 64 PC [most successful PC to up to that time]; helped successfully pitch Polaroid; flew wi... See more
Dentsu Corporation of America
copy contact
Company Name Dentsu Corporation of America
Dates Employed 1974 – 1980
Employment Duration 6 yrs
Helped Canon move from #5 to #1 in 6 years; launched watershed AE-1; launched/named Sureshot; "So advanced, it's simple" line defined brand standing for newfound transparency in photographic technology...
Petersen's PhotoGraphic Magazine
East Coast Editor
Company Name Petersen's PhotoGraphic Magazine
Dates Employed 1973 – 1974
Employment Duration 1 yr
Helped move photography mag from quarterly special pub to successful monthly; hog heaven; a column and a feature every month; loved it...got me into advertising
St. John's Queens Hospital
Ambulance Attendant
Company Name St. John's Queens Hospital
Dates Employed 1967 – 1971
Employment Duration 4 yrs
Fifty-six hours a week of misery, horror and exhaustion. Great prelude to a career in advertising. Kidding, of course.
i18n_media-proxy-image_icon
20180127_100445.jpg
20180127_100445.jpg
Education
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University
Degree Name BA
Field Of Study English Literature; minors: chemistry, French
Dates attended or expected graduation 1966 – 1970
Activities and Societies: Editor, 1970 Vanderbilt Commodore, Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, Raven Society
Bayside High School, Queens, NY
Bayside High School, Queens, NY
Degree Name Academic Diploma
Activities and Societies: Most Likely to Succeed
Skills & Endorsements
Advertising
See 32 endorsements for Advertising 32
Endorsed by Pat Carella and 11 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 5 of Mike’s colleagues at BD&H Marketing (Barnhardt, Day & Hines, Inc.)
Brand Development
See 23 endorsements for Brand Development 23
Endorsed by Cheri Soukup and 2 others who are highly skilled at this
Endorsed by 5 of Mike’s colleagues at BD&H Marketing (Barnhardt, Day & Hines, Inc.)
Creative Strategy
See 22 endorsements for Creative Strategy 22
Pamela Moffat and 21 connections have given endorsements for this skill
Recommendations
Received (4)
Given (2)
Alison Gragnano
Alison Gragnano
Executive Creative Director
July 16, 2012, Alison reported directly to Mike
When I heard I was going to report to Mike, it was only mildly terrifying.
His name was on so much of the work that I had studied in all the annuals. It was akin to reporting directly to one of your gods. And then I met him and it was just like they say- the really big brains are often the biggest human beings as well. Mike was gracious and kind with the juniors, while quietly coaxing the far better work out of everyone. I remember him always pushing us in the gentlest of ways. Humble, big of heart, funny and everything you would like your icon to be. Crazy smart and talented, I loved working for Mike and to this day consider myself lucky.
Len Fink
Len Fink
Good Works_Art_Film_Advertising_Social Media
March 8, 2011, Mike worked with Len in the same group
Mike Scardino is one of advertising’s greatest creative talents.
His strategical thinking, concepts and writing skills are possessed
by only a rarified few. Years ago at Chiat / Day, I had the great privilege of being Mike’s Partner. And, we had as much fun as we had success. It was a joy to work with him. And, I truly believe that Mike’s very quick and funny wit is an extension of his brilliant mind.
Show more
Interests
Hachette Book Group
Hachette Book Group
28,936 followers
BD&H Marketing (Barnhardt, Day & Hines, Inc.)
BD&H Marketing (Barnhardt, Day & Hines, Inc.)
55 followers
Little, Brown and Company
Little, Brown and Company
4,555 followers
Scardino, Mike: BAD CALL
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Scardino, Mike BAD CALL Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 7, 17 ISBN: 978-0-316-46961-6
Ambulance work is not for the squeamish, and neither is reading about it.
In the late 1960s, Scardino worked on a New York hospital's ambulance crew in order to pay for his college tuition. He started on the pre-med track, but by the end of his ambulance job, he had no interest in becoming a doctor. "The truth is, I don't want to be around the injured, sick and dying any more than I can help it," he writes. It's easy to see why the job soured his stomach for medicine. In one gruesome passage, he describes a body barely recognizable as such: "Where his hair ought to have been, there appeared to be long gray and white filaments of mold. Instead of a face, there was a flat, oval plane covered with maggots. No sign of a nose. Just one wet, gray surface with its seething, ivory-colored veneer of larvae." Readers may wonder if Scardino took detailed notes or wrote the entire book decades ago. The latter seems doubtful; it doesn't seem likely that an admittedly poor student would have had such command over his material as a teenager and then decide to let it sit for decades. Perhaps he told these vivid stories often enough that somebody persuaded him that there was a book in them and he re-created the stories from memory. The author claims that he could never forget them, and readers will have trouble doing so as well. There's a baby thrown from a window, a drug overdose, morbidly obese people who had to be maneuvered out of apartments and into ambulances, and one crashed-and-burned airplane. Scardino, who has since pursued a career in advertising, emerges as a different person at the end of these experiences than he was when he began the work. "Something in me had changed, not for the better, but surely forever," he writes.
Some say that everybody has a book in them, and this author has found his in this memorable, often grim work.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
1 of 3 9/24/18, 11:45 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
"Scardino, Mike: BAD CALL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538293846/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=c34a5b8b. Accessed 25 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538293846
2 of 3 9/24/18, 11:45 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance
Publishers Weekly.
265.21 (May 21, 2018): p64. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance
Mike Scardino. Little, Brown, $27 (304p) ISBN 978-0-316-46961-6
In this fresh and powerful debut memoir, Scardino looks back on his summers during college in the late 1960s when he worked as a New York City hospital ambulance attendant. Working 56 hours a week--"Nights and days, whenever they need me"--Scardino recounts in short chapters the many emergencies he witnessed and assisted in that showed him "the entire catalog of horrifying things that can happen to a human body. " From accidental deaths to suicides, Scardino writes with the detail of a crime reporter ("What had been his left side had grown into the carpet. Just coalesced with the carpet.... Instead of a face, there was a flat oval plane covered with maggots"). Scardino admits that what bothers him "more than seeing how people die, is seeing how people live": in one example, he describes a diabetic woman whose legs are gangrenous below the knees, who weighs over 400 pounds, and who needs somehow to be carried down from her second-floor apartment. "If there's one thing I've learned on the job," he writes, "it's that any call, anywhere, can always get worse." Scardino's unsparing memoir offers an empathetic look at human pain and suffering. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance." Publishers Weekly, 21 May 2018, p. 64.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012653 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6ad82315. Accessed 25 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541012653
3 of 3 9/24/18, 11:45 PM
Memoir ‘Bad Call’ revisits 1960s NYC, as seen from an ambulance
Queens native Mike Scardino tells tales from his summer job.
Mike Scardino recalls his summer job on a
Mike Scardino recalls his summer job on a New York City ambulance in his new memoir, "Bad Call." Photo Credit: Mike Scardino / Little, Brown
By Abigail Weinberg
abigail.weinberg@amny.com
Updated July 16, 2018 5:26 PM
Print Share
Mike Scardino spent his college summers working on an ambulance in New York City, where he encountered scenes too gruesome to forget. He recounts them in morbid detail in his debut memoir, “Bad Call,” out this week. The Queens native spoke with amNewYork.
The book takes place from 1967 to 1970. How did you remember the stories so well?
Most of them were pretty unforgettable, and I’ve been telling them to my friends and family for years. I also have a lot of letters that I wrote my wife, and a lot of the stories that are in there are almost identical to the way I wrote them in the book. When I finally found the letters, I found out they lined up pretty much exactly with what my memories of the calls were.
Why did you decide to write it after all these years?
I had been trying for quite a while, and it was one of these things — “Well, I need a new computer. Well, I don’t like that keyboard.” So one night I was watching this movie called “Wings of Desire” that “City of Angels” is based on, a German movie, and it had all kinds of techniques — stream of consciousness, omniscient observer and everything. Nothing in the movie specifically helped me, but I said, “You know, I can write this any way I want.” So I decided to do a first-person narrative as if I were going through each call, as if I were talking to a roommate in college or my wife or one of my family members and telling them what had happened. And the more I kind of visually took myself through each call, the more I actually remembered.
Which was your favorite chapter to write?
My favorite chapter is Spare Change. I was very much disturbed by a call we had where a woman had just been thrown out on the street by her family, and it just struck me that, what the hell is this person gonna do? You see homeless people all the time. You never really see them at the moment that they become homeless. Even Robinson Crusoe, when he washed up on shore, he looked back and said, “Oh, there’s the ship with all the stuff I need. I can go out and get that.” But this woman had absolutely nothing. She wouldn’t say where she lived, she wouldn’t say who threw her out. You would come into these people’s lives at these critical moments as it was with this woman, and as soon as you go, it’s like, what the heck is gonna happen to this person? And you know, it bothers you.
Eat it. Drink it. Do it. Tackle the city, with our help.
Sign up
By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.
How were emergency services different 50 years ago?
Now they can do EKGs, they can transmit information to the hospital, they can give meds now. We couldn’t give anybody anything. Absolutely nothing. So a lot of it depended on speed. We could do things like try to stop hemorrhaging and things like that, but basically the key there was getting people back as soon as possible. I had no idea I would see so many dead people as I did. That was always kind of a shock, the enormous numbers of people every week that would die.
Who are your biggest literary inspirations?
I loved 18th-century prose, poetry and drama because it was a really humanist era and people just kind of looked at life with a very cold eye. I loved “Tom Jones,” for example. I love Shakespeare. I wish I could be a poet. I do quote William Faulkner in the book saying that a novelist is a failed poet, and when I read poetry and I see how concisely they can put an image on paper, I think, “Gee, I wish I could do that.” In lieu of that, I just try and write it normally.
By Abigail Weinberg
abigail.weinberg@amny.com
The Writer's Practice: Mike Scardino, Bad Call
Susanna Baird
The Writer's Practice: Mike Scardino, Bad Call
Photo: John Marshall
Photo: John Marshall
Half a century ago, Mike Scardino served as an ambulance attendant for St. John's Queens Hospital. In the late '60s, working an ambulance didn't require training beyond what the Red Cross (or in Scardino's case, the Boy Scouts) offered. The job paid better than anything else a young college student could earn on breaks, but it was brutal, physically and emotionally.
Scardino spent 50-60 hours a week, waking and half-asleep, dealing with thousands of emergency scenarios, ranging from massive, multi-vehicle car accidents to crib deaths, failed suicides, "psycho" calls, and a man tied to a chair and beaten to death by the mob. When he returned to Vanderbilt University (Nashville) each fall, he transitioned from trauma worker to storyteller, regaling his girlfriend (now wife) Barbara and friends with the most horrific or tragic or otherwise memorable calls of his summer.
The experiences, both the individual details and the larger issues surrounding life and death, crawled around Scardino's young mind. "I would go on all these calls, and I would analyze everything I was seeing and smelling." He and the other attendants and the cops occupied a strange, liminal space between the individual in crisis, their friends and families, the ER doctors, and the outside world; bearing witness to the often-surreal moments of dying and immediately beyond. His brain churned during his long shifts, during the stretches between, during the many years after, as he pursued a career in advertising and raised a family. But he never tried to grapple with his experiences on paper until a decade ago.
"I memorized them all," Scardino told Spine in an interview last spring. "I've told these stories over and over again." Even so, he couldn't make them come out right, though he tried again and again, over the course of ten years. "It always ended up being a seesaw between now vs. then. Now emergency medicine does this, and back then … ." The approach didn't work, Scardino said. "I look at it now, and I cringe."
Writers often talk about That Thing, which opened up their manuscript for them, allowing them to push forward in a direction that felt right. For Scardino, That Thing was the German film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), about invisible angels who come to earth and meddle in the affairs of mortals. The story was less the point than the mode of telling for Scardino, who was half asleep, only paying half attention, when narrative lightning struck: "I realized I could tell this thing any way I want."
Design: Lucy Kim
Design: Lucy Kim
Set free by the angels, Scardino wrote like the devil. His biggest challenge, once he'd figured out his approach, was returning to a mindset he no longer held. "These stories have got to reflect my ignorance at the time," he explained. "I was very naïve about a lot of things, and certainly about death and suffering, having not experienced it really up until that point."
Mentally returned to that place, with some help from a cache of letters to Barbara, Scardino settled into a conversational style and the stories flowed. "Once I started writing, it only took four months," he said. "It was 85-90 percent the shape it's in now."
Book nearly done, Scardino began "messing around with agents," a process he describes as "a pain. Everyone wants something different — three pages, ten pages, a synopsis." Formatting and re-formatting to meet each agent's preference, Scardino sent out between 30 and 40 submissions a week, all the while contacting old friends via LinkedIn and email. A friend from Scardino's advertising days suggested he contact a mutual colleague, the wildly successful author (and retired ad man) James Patterson. Scardino tells it best.
"I got in touch with Mary Jordan, Jim's personal assistant, to see if Jim might steer me to an agent and she said Jim wanted to read a couple of chapters. He did, and liked them, but said he didn't know how he could help — but to let him know if I came up with something. I thought about it for a week or so. Then I asked if he could maybe write a blurb when the book was done, provided he liked it, and he agreed.
"A year later, I sent him the manuscript and he gave me a wonderful endorsement and offered to pass it through to Little, Brown, and said it was only the second time he had brought them something. Not promising anything, he said, just getting it there. They wanted to buy it and he called with the rough details. Of course I immediately said yes. That's pretty much the long and the short of it.
Jean Garnett, Scardino's editor at Little, Brown, worked with him to fine-tune the book, transforming his collection of related narratives into a single, tight story, with a beginning, middle, and end. "A lot of credit goes to Jean in terms of the emotional build," he said.
During his Spine interview last spring, Scardino was looking ahead to the book's July launch, sounding a little like his summertime, college-era self, going wherever the ambulance boss sent him. "I owe them a minimum of 14 days, and I'll go where they tell me," he said. "I think it's in the contract."
Joking aside, Scardino's been impressed with the results of publicity efforts —as of May he'd already received a positive review from Kirkus and a coveted star from Publisher's Weekly. "They seem to be getting some good exposure," he said.
Bad Call hit bookstands last month. Find Mike Scardino at his Goodreads author page.
Queens man remembers his bloody summer job as ambulance worker in new book
By Jacqueline Cutler
Jul 14, 2018 | 3:00 PM
Queens man remembers his bloody summer job as ambulance worker in new book
Mike Scardino sits in an ambulance circa 1967-1970. (Photo courtesy of Mike Scardino)
Mike Scardino heeded his siren call.
As a teen, the Bayside, Queens, resident dreamed of being a doctor. And so, to pay for college, he worked summers in St. John’s Queens ambulance corps, caring for and listening to people on the worst day of their lives.
He recounts the best of his war stories in “Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance” a fast-paced memoir of what ambulance workers in Queens dealt with from the summer of 1967 until the fall of 1970.
"Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance."
"Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance." (Mike Scardino)
Some of it is truly nasty — like the old woman who tried to speak with Scardino in his ambulance. As he leaned in to hear her, she vomited into his mouth.
This book — like the job — is clearly not for the squeamish.
Initially, Scardino wanted to attend Queens College, but his parents insisted on Vanderbilt University. His mom was from Nashville and she wanted him to attend the prestigious school. Problem was they couldn’t afford it — so they insisted he get a good job to cover the tuition.
Without conferring with his son, dad used his connections from his gas station to land the ambulance gig. It wasn’t a cushy job, one shift a week for 36 hours straight, usually starting at night.
Technically, Scardino should not have gotten the job since the legal minimum age was 21 and he was just 18. Turns out this was a job that would age anyone.
Calls would come in as a “possible DOA,” even though it was usually pretty clear if someone were dead or alive. Since only a physician could declare someone dead, ambulance workers brought bodies to the hospitals or, if directed, the morgues. Their focus was on the immediate; get there first, alert the hospital to what was coming and perform basic first aid.
Often, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do, such as the time Scardino responded to a call at an unlicensed nursing home. At least it was clean and someone called 911 to help a woman bellowing in pain. Like so many of the calls, this one was up four floors.
An obese woman was “making animal noises. No words. No screams,” he recalled
She was half off the bed. The other half was wedged against a roaring steam radiator – in the summer.
It’s rare for the ambulance crew to know what ultimately happens to the patients.
In the case of the woman who was roasted by the radiator, Scardino writes, “I wonder if she’s going to make it. God forgive me but I hope she doesn’t.”
The empathy, though not discussed among co-workers, is always there. How else could they do this job?
He describes a cast of characters, such as a driver, Big Al, who could challenge Joey Chestnut in wolfing down hot dogs. And a nurse he refers to as Boudicca, the fierce, first-century queen of the British Celts.
“It simply is not possible to be more Irish/Catholic/Celtic than she is.”
A sign for LaGuardia Airport is seen from the window of an ambulance in the late 1960s.
A sign for LaGuardia Airport is seen from the window of an ambulance in the late 1960s. (Courtesy of Mike Scardino)
Scardino mentions he’s a big fellow, helpful when carrying dead weight. He was justifiably afraid of Boudicca, St. John’s E.R. supervising nurse, and a fierce enforcer. Yet one day when a disturbed man, completely coated in excrement, showed up in the E.R., she summoned Scardino to stand by as she tenderly took care of him, getting him showered and in fresh clothes. Even after cleaning him, her uniform remained blindingly white.
Those who work on the ambulances must be tough. Fred, a driver, was “smart as a whip. Skinny as a snake. Mean as a mink. His eyes and cheeks are sunken and his nose was huge and hooked. He looks like a large raptor, in profile. Maybe a turkey vulture. Check that. He actually looks like a dead man,” Scardino writes.
Scardino should know. He saw so many bodies. Every so often, though, someone was not quite as dead as presumed. One elderly man shot a .38 through his head.
The cops, the man’s family, Scardino and his partner stared at the body in a pool of oddly colored blood. Scardino explains in great detail how different shades of blood come from different parts of the body.
In case you needed to know, “very bright and frothy, it’s from the lungs.”
The man, however, was not quite dead, but in this case the attending doctor at Elmhurst General lets Scardino know nothing can be done for him.
Fifty years after walking into some homes, Scardino still reels remembering how some of them reeked.
Once, the squad was called to a basement apartment in Rego Park to deal with a “bleeding psycho.”
The cops pushed open the door, which was ajar, but met resistance.
“Inside is a sea of empty beer cans. Hundreds and hundreds. Maybe thousands. They’re at least a foot deep on the floor and rise gradually as they meet the walls, going up at least three feet in places.”
One of the ambulances Scardino worked on.
One of the ambulances Scardino worked on. (Courtesy of Mike Scardino)
Scardino could barely make out the shape of furniture under the beer cans. Bill, covered in puke and bleeding profusely, sat on a hill of empties. He looked as if he was stealing on the job – Bill was a beer truck driver.
Beer, though, was not the immediate problem. Bill had drunk Drano, a particularly horrific way to go.
As Scardino is well aware, dispatchers try not to send ambulances unnecessarily. While most of the calls were miserable – car accidents, suicides, shootings, stabbings – there was the occasional joy of a birth.
For the most part, though, it was far grimmer, and often surprising. Like the motorcycle accident that did not appear all that bad – the victim was chatting – until Scardino, saw that the victim’s foot was sliced off.
Writing on a photo of an ambulance interior shows where medical equipment was located.
Writing on a photo of an ambulance interior shows where medical equipment was located. (Courtesy of Mike Scardino)
Scardino saw enough by the time he was 21 to have a well-honed philosophy.
“The point is that life itself is a fatal condition,” he writes. “And real accidents, over which we have no control, happen every day. So why invite the end of life through simple arrogance, laziness or denial.”
During those summers, as friends were going off to Vietnam, Scardino was climbing to the top floors of walk-ups, never completely sure of what he and a partner would find, but he wasn’t judgmental.
While there was not that much medically Scardino could do, other than sop up blood, collect the body parts, calm people down and help get them to the hospital fast, he provided a service that’s tough to quantify.
Scardino is compassionate.
Genuine sympathy comes easily when a toddler falls three stories out of a window onto his head. But not everyone would have as much compassion for a 600-pound woman who could not get out of bed or a man who left his gangrene go untreated until his arms rot.
At the end of every summer, Scardino would return to Tennessee, having earned enough to pay for the year’s tuition. Though he nearly flunked out of school – pre-med was harder than he expected – Sacrdino graduated, and ended up marrying the woman he fell in love with on his third day of college.
When he thought about the next step, he looked back on the thousands of ambulance calls, and what it had taught him about the rigors of medicine, Scardino decided to go into advertising.
A promotional image.
The Daily News Flash Newsletter
Weekdays
Catch up on the day’s top five stories every weekday afternoon.
"Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance"
By Rich Fisher • Jul 30, 2018
StudioTulsa on 89.5-1
Aired on Monday, July 30th.
Aired on Monday, July 30th.
Our guest on ST Medical Monday is Mike Scardino, whose debut memoir, just out, is "Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance." The book details his experiences working an ambulance job in Queens, New York, in the late '60s and early '70s. As per a starred review in Publishers Weekly: "Fresh and powerful...Scardino looks back on his summers during college...when he worked as a New York City hospital ambulance attendant. Working 56 hours a week...Scardino recounts in short chapters the many emergencies he witnessed and assisted in that showed him 'the entire catalog of horrifying things that can happen to a human body.' From accidental deaths to suicides, Scardino writes with the detail of a crime reporter ('What had been his left side had grown into the carpet. Just coalesced with the carpet.... Instead of a face, there was a flat oval plane covered with maggots'). Scardino admits that what bothers him 'more than seeing how people die, is seeing how people live': in one example, he describes a diabetic woman whose legs are gangrenous below the knees, who weighs over 400 pounds, and who needs somehow to be carried down from her second-floor apartment.... Scardino's unsparing memoir offers an empathetic look at human pain and suffering."
Listen
Listening...
28:59
Tags:
Ambulance service
EMSA Ambulance
Hospitals
Medicine
Health Care
Memoir and Autobiography
New York City
John Henning Schumann
Metro
The insane tales of a 1960s NYC ambulance attendant
By Larry Getlen
July 18, 2018 | 10:36pm | Updated
Modal Trigger
An ambulance.
An ambulance that Mike Scardino worked in as an attendant. Mike Scardino
More On:
ambulances
Woman arrested after police chase in stolen ambulance with patient inside
Lawyers say man drawing swastikas on FDNY ambulances is an 'artist'
Cops arrested me for being black business owner: lawsuit
Ambulance window smashed, equipment stolen during emergency call
In 1968, college sophomore Mike Scardino was working his second summer as a New York City ambulance attendant. He took a call from a woman in Jackson Heights, Queens, about her mother, an old, religious Italian woman who wasn’t taking her pills and, according to the caller, wasn’t acting right.
The daughter had legal paperwork stating that if she felt her mother needed to go to the hospital, the woman legally had to go. She couldn’t refuse help.
But walking into the house filled with religious iconography, Scardino found a strong-willed woman too proud to be seen by her neighbors riding away in an ambulance.
Scardino and his partner eventually walked the reluctant woman to the ambulance, prying eyes seeing all. Once inside, he began asking for her personal information when she suddenly spoke to him in “a firm, loud” monotone.
“I AM THE VOICE OF JESUS CHRIST. LET GO A THIS WOMAN RIGHT NOW. SHE AIN’T GOT NOTHING WRONG WITH HER. LET GO A THIS WOMAN RIGHT NOW.”
Scardino attempted to continue.
“Dear, when is your birthday?”
“I AM THE VOICE OF JESUS CHRIST. DO NOT INTERRUPT.”
As his partner unsuccessfully attempted to stifle his laughter, Scardino tried again, asking her age. The woman, noticing they were passing under an elevated subway track, doubled down.
“I AM THE VOICE OF JESUS CHRIST,” she said. “IF YOU DO NOT LET THIS WOMAN OUT I GONNA MAKE THESE TRACKS FALL DOWN AND KILL ALL A YOU.”
At that point, Scardino lost it, completely breaking down in laughter — but not before throwing a quick glance at the subway tracks, just to make sure they were staying where they belonged.
Modal Trigger
The interior of an ambulance. The interior of an ambulanceMike Scardino
Scardino’s new memoir, “Bad Call: A Summer Job on a New York Ambulance,” (Little Brown) recounts his days working on an ambulance for St. John’s Queens Hospital from 1968 to 1971 on summer breaks from studying medicine at Vanderbilt University.
He once took a call in Elmhurst from an elderly couple whose 30-year-old son had a history of psychiatric commitment and was refusing to speak or eat. They wanted him brought in for observation.
The young man was “at least 6-foot-6 or even taller,” weighing not much more than 130 pounds by Scardino’s estimate.
“He looks like the pictures of the guys who were on the Bataan Death March,” Scardino writes, adding that the man’s fingernails were “grotesquely long . . . all curly and [with] alternating light and dark growth bands.”
His name was Jimmy, but his mother asked Scardino to call him “Little Jimmy.”
At first, Little Jimmy was too weak to even walk. Scardino propped him up by one arm, and a cop on the scene took the other.
“We help him get up, very slowly and gently,” Scardino writes. “He feels brittle, like something could break off if we don’t handle him right.”
As they slowly walked him through the house, the policeman released his grip on Jimmy for just a second so they could fit through a narrow door. At that moment, Little Jimmy showed he wasn’t so brittle after all.
“Jimmy, in one fluid motion, reaches on top of the fridge to my left and grabs a pair of editor’s shears — the kind with the really long blades that people use to cut out newspaper articles — and raises them over his head,” Scardino writes. “Holy s–t. Little Jimmy’s going to kill me, right here in his mom’s kitchen.”
Modal Trigger
Mike ScardinoMike ScardinoMike Scardino
Scardino saw, in what felt like slow motion, “Jimmy’s hand go up high and then start down, headed right for where my neck meets my chest.”
Noticing a sickly grin on Jimmy’s face, Scardino had the door frame at his back, so he was trapped. He did his best to compress himself, and the shears sliced his left shirt pocket. Jimmy’s limited energy now depleted, the police officer subdued and handcuffed him.
Called to a motorcycle accident just off Queens Boulevard, Scardino arrived to find a calm scene. Two Harleys were neatly parked off to the side and two policeman were there, but there was no obvious sign of any crash or trouble.
One of the motorcycle riders, Hank, was sitting in the street. He recounted the night’s events for Scardino in such a leisurely manner that Scardino started to believe he was called for nothing.
Hank said it was such a lovely night that he and his friend decided to ride around the city, taking in the night air.
He said that as they came to a stop, he bumped against his friend’s exhaust pipe and thought he might have bruised his ankle.
“I couldn’t have been going more than two or three miles an hour, max,” Hank said. “It was just a tap. It don’t even hurt that much. But I don’t think I oughta walk on it, do you?”
‘What do I have to show for it . . . all the grief and the lost sleep and the isolation and the tears. All the horror.’
Scardino began filling out his paperwork and took Hank’s vital signs, which were normal. Then he was ready to look at Hank’s ankle, to see if they would need a splint or if Hank could just walk it off.
But when Scardino lifted Hank’s pant leg to look at his ankle, he saw that Hank’s foot was, basically, off. “Not completely off. It is held on by the thinnest pedicle. Even so, it is essentially amputated,” Scardino writes.“There’s almost no blood. He’s in almost no pain. He has no idea what has happened. Jesus, he wants to know how it looks. What am I supposed to tell him.”
“We’re going to have to put a splint on this, Hank,” he said.
“Is it broken?” Hank asked.
“Yes, it’s broken,” Scardino replied, leaving the horrible truth for the ER doctor to share with him.
Scardino writes that working on the ambulance, seeing misery and death at every turn, took its toll. His grades suffered, his drinking increased and he changed his mind about a career in medicine, eventually going into advertising.
While he certainly saved lives and helped people along the way, the job was too heavily geared toward misery for him.
He recalled a man he found dead who had apparently been lying on his couch and had fallen onto the floor on his left side. It had clearly been awhile since he died, and he was just being discovered now.
Modal Trigger
Ball Call book cover.Mike Scardino
“He had no left side,” Scardino writes. “What had been his left side had grown into the carpet.”
Another time, he was called to a multicar, multiple-fatality crash in a hilly area hard to reach by a conventional vehicle. After surveying the corpse-filled scene, he and his partner found a woman who was unconscious and severely injured but alive. They were about to lift her onto a stretcher when two firemen — who had jurisdiction at the site — usurped their effort, claiming that stretcher for another body instead. A body that, Scardino saw, was obviously not alive.
The firemen, though, who were charged with making a split-second decision, believed he was. So Scardino and his partner had to race the obvious corpse to the hospital while a woman who might have been saved was left behind. Scardino never heard what happened to her. Once he was off a case, he rarely learned the result. Once he was done with a patient, he was on to the next one.
Scardino witnessed every facet of human tragedy. He saw every possible way a human body could be mangled or distorted. He saw a woman at the precise moment her life fell apart and she realized she was homeless, and saw a man lose his leg due to the careless way a thoughtful neighbor had patched him up.
By the end of four summers plus various shifts on breaks and holidays, Scardino was done. He said goodbye to the ambulance in January 1971 and was finished with medicine forever.
In the end, outside of helping him pay for school, he took no benefit from the experience, saying it left him more fearful and pessimistic about the world.
“What do I have to show for it . . . all the grief and the lost sleep and the isolation and the tears. All the horror,” he writes.
“Did it make me understand more about life, other than how bad it could be? How could it? If anything, life is more an enigma to me now than I ever imagined it could be.”