When ambulance service was needed, Robbins stepped up

Former Mountain Lifeline Ambulance Service owner Larry Robbins recently passed away far too early at the age of 68. I hated hearing about his passing.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

I first met Larry around 1994. He was involved in emergency services, and was the fire chief at the now defunct Western Central Volunteer Fire Department. He was also a volunteer firefighter at the Williamsburg Fire Department.

We were both Lynn Campers so we bonded pretty quickly.

I started to get to know Larry really well long about September 1994 when Transcare Ambulance Service pulled out of Whitley County almost overnight leaving the county with no ambulance service whatsoever aside from what surrounding counties could provide.

It was a tense few weeks as Larry and his wife, Ginger, worked feverishly to get Mountain Lifeline Ambulance Service off the ground. This was their home. They wanted people in this community to have a quality ambulance service that they could depend upon. They knew it was quite literally a matter of life and death for many people, including their friends and neighbors.

Mountain Lifeline opened for business on Oct. 6, 1994. Larry and Ginger regularly worked long shifts and along with their employees responding to car wrecks, falls, cardiac arrests, and so forth.

For the first three months of its operation, the couple operated the ambulance service despite not being able to bill Medicare or Medicaid because the service didn’t have a certificate of need yet from the state.

Yet, Larry and Ginger kept working.

Initially their base was located about a block or so up the street from my Williamsburg office. Back then a lot of our coverage was accidents, fires and so forth, so I was over there often.

One thing that Larry really enjoyed doing was flying. Had he not opened the ambulance service, there is good chance that he probably would have gotten his helicopter pilot’s license, and maybe become a flight instructor.

I bring up flying because during one of the early year’s he owned the ambulance service we had a drowning in the Cumberland River. It was one of those where the body had gone under and it took two or three weeks for it to surface and be found, if I remember correctly.

Craig Vermillion was the disaster and emergency services director for the county at the time, and he, Larry, and another person, whose name I can’t remember right now, were planning to go up in Larry’s plane and fly over the Cumberland River looking for the body.

Neil Middleton, who is now station manager for WYMT, was a reporter at the station. Neil was going to go up with them, but the plane couldn’t handle the weight of Neil and his camera along with the other two passengers. The television reporter’s cameras were real big monstrosities back in those days.

Larry took just Neil up first so Neil could get some footage of the river. Then he was going to take Neil back to the airport and pick up his other two passengers so they could search the river more closely.

After they get up in the sky, the lone engine in the little plane quits.

Larry was working and working trying to get it to restart. As the story was told to me, Neil told Larry that he was going to quit filming and start praying. Larry told Neil that he though the praying part was a really good idea.

Larry had decided that if need be he was going to set the plane down in an emergency landing on the interstate, but fortunately he got the engine to restart before it got to that point, and made it safely back to the airport.

It is my understanding that poor Neil had a real aversion to flying for several years after this. I never did hear if he recovered from that. The same couldn’t be said for Larry though. He still loved to fly.

In February 2001 after about 42,000 ambulance runs, Mountain Lifeline ceased operations and Whitley County EMS went into existence. Larry and Ginger worked to make sure that it was a seamless transition.

I don’t think that Mountain Lifeline ever really recovered financially from not being able to bill during those first three months of operations.

Still, I don’t think that Larry and Ginger regretted starting the ambulance service.

I didn’t see the couple nearly as much after Mountain Lifeline closed, but it was always good to see them when I did.

RIP Larry. You will be missed my friend. My condolences go out to Ginger and the rest of his family.

Also let me extend my condolences to my co-worker and buddy Dean Manning, his mother-in-law, Brenda Woods, and the rest of their family. Dean’s wife, Sharon Woods Manning, recently passed away suddenly.

I didn’t really know Sharon all that well, but we attended a few Kentucky Press Association award’s banquets together, and it wasn’t hard to understand why Dean married her. She was a funny lady.

RIP Sharon.