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Lewis Black looks at a sign recognizing his dedication and willingness to serve the county’s sick and injured.

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Rescue Squad member moving

by Don Johnson

One of Floyd County Rescue Squad’s oldest and most reliable members will soon be leaving the community and moving to Roanoke County to be close to family members there.

Lewis Black, who for the last decade has been one of the most familiar Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT) serving residents from the squad’s Station 3 in the Locust Grove area, and his wife, Betty, will be moving to the Cave Spring part of Roanoke County after their Floyd County home sells.

Lewis, when asked why he joined the county’s rescue squad, simply said he was a former EMT who’d been transported three times by local squad members to hospitals and he believed helping others would be a good way to pay back the county.

A major influence on his joining the squad, he said, was the late Nelson Hale who was running calls out of Rescue Station 3. “We had a lot of good times together,” Lewis remembers of the period when he and Hale ran a large percentage of workday emergency medical calls. That was before the county hired EMTs to run daytime calls.

He also recalls that he and Hale became ill about the same time. Hale with the pancreatic cancer that took his life and Lewis with the pancreatis of which he still suffers.

Lewis said the call that he most remembers was a bad motor vehicle crash when he was a new EMT in which two kids and their dad were killed. He says it was tough to load their bodies on the ambulance.

Lewis, who moved to Floyd County 13 years ago, said the rescue squad has “really been my second family here and that’s why I’ve tried hard to be dedicated to its mission and to earn my time here. I wish I’d moved here 10 years earlier.”
A lifetime member of the Floyd County Rescue Squad, Lewis also served as an EMT in Washington County, Va., from 1952 to 1957 while living in Abingdon.

Until the Blacks move, Lewis will continue to serve as Floyd County Rescue’s Station 3 leader and to run calls as necessary.