RVAC honors Betty Harris with ‘lifetime achievement’ award

The Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps had no headquarters during its first decade. Its ambulance was parked behind the old police station on West Main Street — at the time, a storefront that today houses a Chinese restaurant.

When Betty Harris joined the volunteer ambulance corps in 1980, two years after its founding, she was the working mother of four kids, employed as a clerk by the Riverhead Police Department.

A driver for RVAC for the past 20 years or so, Harris recalls resisting the idea of becoming a driver of the big ambulance rig.

“I fought it a long time,” Harris said. “The rig was out back and I’d sit there and wait. They’d tell me, ‘Betty, you’re right here. You could take the rig and just go.”

Eventually, she gave in — though not until after she’d changed jobs, after the town built a new police headquarters on Howell Avenue, and after it built a headquarters for RVAC on Osborn Avenue.

Driving the rig can be a scary, pressure-cooker experience — maneuvering in all kinds of traffic conditions, in all kinds of weather, many times knowing the life of the patient in the back hangs tenuously in the balance.

Harris says she often prays all the way to the hospital.

But drive that rig she does.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s two o’clock in the morning or if she’s got curlers in her hair, she still shows up,” RVAC Chief Joseph Oliver said last night as he announced the recipient of a special lifetime achievement award at RVAC’s 35th Anniversary Installation Dinner at the Sea Star Ballroom.

As soon as the word “curlers” left Oliver’s lips, the packed room erupted in shouts of “Betty! Betty!” and applause.

“I was really shocked. I had no idea, until he said that about the rollers,” Harris said afterward, laughing. “That’s a dead giveaway.”

The noise of a rousing standing ovation filled the banquet hall as the soft-spoken, good natured 33-year RVAC veteran, her face beaming and eyes glistening, walked to the podium to accept the award. It was only the second time in the history of RVAC that the ambulance corps bestowed a lifetime achievement award on one of its members, Oliver said. (Walker “Sonny” Turner was the first recipient.)

“People ask me when I’m going to stop [driving] but I enjoy helping people,” said Harris after the ceremony. The head cashier at Surrogate’s Court in Riverhead, Harris is now the grandmother of nine and the great-grandmother of four.

Harris said she’s seen “a lot of heartache” over the years — the kind that inevitably comes with being an ambulance volunteer.

“On a positive note, I helped deliver three babies,” she said. “One was in a doorway on Horton Avenue, another in a trailer on Hubbard Avenue, and the third in a West Main Street motel.”

And, she says, every time she sees Spencer Shea, the Riverhead boy an RVAC team saved following a car accident on Osborn Avenue in January 2010, she feels blessed.

Harris was the driver the night of the crash that nearly claimed the boy’s life.

“Every time I see him he tells me thank you,” she said. “I tell him he doesn’t have to thank me. I get enough thanks just seeing him. I really thought we’d lost him that night.” It was one of those calls, she said, where she prayed all the way to the hospital.

A longtime member of First Baptist Church of Riverhead, Harris said an incident in church years ago was her inspiration for joining the corps. A deacon fell ill in church and fell to the floor. People crowded around him, not letting him have enough room to breathe. She recalls feeling so helpless, not knowing what to do. The elderly gentleman subsequently passed away and she found herself wondering if the outcome might have been different had someone in church known how help him.

And for more than 33 years since, helping others as an RVAC volunteer driver has been a cornerstone of her life.

“I enjoy it very, very much,” she said. “It’s rewarding help others, especially to be able to help save lives.”