Founder/Owner of Hartson Ambulance Passes Away

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http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/obituar...m17hartson.html

Robert Hartson, 86; founded ambulance company

By Leslie Berestein

UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

January 17, 2008

As the founder and president of his own ambulance company, Robert Louis Hartson wasn't one to delegate from a window office.

His daughter, Carol Jensen, remembers a childhood living in a commercial business zone in Mid-City – the only place they could live, she said, considering that her father kept his fleet of ambulances downstairs.

“We lived upstairs, and all the ambulance drivers lived downstairs, and the ambulances were in front,” Jensen said, recalling the fledgling days of her father's business. “My brother and I used to wash the ambulances, and my mother answered the phones. It was truly a family business.”

Mr. Hartson, a former Army medic, co-founded Air City Ambulance in 1946 with his brother, Paul Hartson. After selling that business in the mid-1960s, Mr. Hartson founded Hartson's Ambulance Service, a private ambulance service that grew to serve the San Diego area from a dozen locations.

Mr. Hartson retired in 1982 after selling the company to two employees, who eventually renamed it Hartson Medical Services. That company won a contract with the city of San Diego in 1983 that lasted several years.

Mr. Hartson died Jan. 7 from complications of pneumonia at San Diego Hospice and Palliative Care in Hillcrest. He was 86.

A resident of Indian Wells for the past 17 years, he called for family members to pick him up and take him to San Diego after feeling ill Christmas Eve. He was later taken to Scripps Mercy Hospital.

Mr. Hartson was born July 5, 1921, in San Diego at his family's home at 41st Street and Orange Avenue, just a short distance from the ambulance company he would eventually found. He was the sixth of seven children. While a student at Hoover High School he met his wife, Juanita, at a dance downtown.

“They were together for almost 70 years,” Jensen said. “He took care of her until Christmas Eve.”

After high school, Mr. Hartson joined the Army and enrolled in flight training school. While in training in the Midwest, he attended teachers college in Wisconsin, his daughter said. He had hoped to become a pilot, but by the time flight training was over, so, almost, was World War II. He became a medic instead and was assigned to duty in Okinawa.

He returned from field hospital duty there in 1946 and started the ambulance company with his brother, who left after two years to become a police officer. In the early days, Mr. Hartson worked out of the top floor of a two-story house off El Cajon Boulevard.

“We always had to live near El Cajon Boulevard, because that is where the ambulances had to be parked,” said Jensen, who by the age of 12 was typing bills for her parents. “You couldn't park ambulances in the middle of a residential neighborhood.”

Even when her parents moved the company to a three-story office building on 47th Street, they lived on the top floor, Jensen recalled.

Those who worked with Mr. Hartson remember his insistence on a comforting personal touch:, offering extra blankets to elderly patients, using pillowcases to shield the eyes of patients emerging from the hospital into bright outdoor light.

“He always asked us to think of the patients as though they were our mother or father, and to treat the patients that way,” said former employee Phil Ayres, who started as an ambulance driver in 1972.

In a letter to Hartson's Ambulance Service dated Sept. 8, 1971, a Dallas attorney expressed thanks to the crew that picked up his wife, who needed emergency surgery, from the La Valencia Hotel.

“I certainly compliment you on the type of associates you have if the two gentlemen who handled this call are typical of your personnel,” the man wrote.

Employees were provided with daily sack lunches at no cost – prepared at first by his youngest daughter, Bonnie – which became a company tradi tion. Another time, Mr. Hartson bought new shoes for his ambulance crews.

Mr. Hartson sold the company in the early 1980s to Ayers, another employee named Tom Morgan and two investors, and it was renamed Hartson Medical Services. Eventually, it was bought by a national transportation firm.

Mr. Hartson was an avid golfer and a longtime member of the San Diego Country Club in Chula Vista, the now-defunct Stardust Country Club in Mission Valley, and the Desert Horizon Country Club in Indian Wells.

Mr. Hartson is survived by his wife of 65 years, Juanita Hartson, of San Diego; daughters, Carol Jensen of San Diego and Bonnie Hartson of San Diego; son Gary Hartson of San Diego; and four grandchildren. Another son, Michael Hartson, died in 1969.

Services are scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Joseph's Cathedral, 1535 Third Ave. in downtown San Diego. A parade of ambulances is planned, Carol Jensen said.

Donations are suggested to St. Joseph's Cathedral Restoration Fund, 1535 Third Ave., San Diego, CA 92101 or the Robert Hartson EMT Scholarship Fund, c/o P. Cook at Wells Fargo Bank, 510 W. Washington St., San Diego, CA 92103, (619) 682-5180.

This company was the predecessor of MedTrans, then AMR. Mr. Hartson fortunately, got out of the business before the mom and pop companies were bought out by conglomerates like AMR, MedTrans and Rural Metro. He still came around our offices when in town. If you look at today's leaders of Fire Department based EMS in San Diego County, there are more than a few Chief Officers in each department who started at Hartson's.

Unfortunately, most companies have gotten away from the personal touch Mr. Hartson instilled in his employees, who then taught new hires not just what being an EMT or Medic was all about, but the little things that separated Hartson's from other companies in San Diego County. He was an innovator, starting the first private ambulance paramedics in SD County, the first modular ambulances in the county, the first private company with a CAD in the county. He will be missed.

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My condolences to his family and friends, as well as all whose lives he touched. Sounds like he was a remarkable gentleman. I know he will be missed, but he is at peace, now.