TL D> "> t was late fall. The air w;as a touch too cold with the approach of winter on November 30, 1982 as Belleville resi- <*m« dent Stephen LaMorre, a full-time employee of the Hastings-Quinte EMS -- then known as City Ambulance Service Ltd. -- was busy at work responding to calls around the city. For the tall, sturdy paramedic, it was something that he has been doing since 1967. The day was business as usual until that evening. At about 9 p.m., a frantic caller asked for urgent medical help. LaMorre and his colleague, Harry Hitchon, boarded their ambulance and within minutes were standing in front of an East Hill house where the call originated. LaMorre, then 36 years old, did not know it then, but as he stood there in the evening chill assessing the situation, it wras one that he would remember. For it was this incident that would explain the title, M.B., that accompanies his name today. The call came from a house on Forin Street in Belleville. A woman had reported a youth about 16 year old bleeding heavily in her home. The evening's event, he humbly noted, would turn out to be "really neither more or less threatening" than all the others that he had experienced throughout his career. "When we got to her house, the youth was nowhere to be seen. As we approached the house we noticed that two windows in the house have been broken. We saw blood trail throughout the house, down the driveway, up the sidewalk, back down the lawn and to the side of the house and found him on the roof. He was drunk and high on drugs and had lacerated his wrists when he broke the windows." In the gathering dark of the night, the youth stood on the roof seemingly unaware, he added, of the immediate danger of falling from the roof of the two-storey home. Leaving his partner on the ground, LaMorre began to climb up the side of the and held him between my '^s until the police got there," he said. Meanwhile, a young resident on the street named William Thrasher joined LaMorre soon afterwards and helped him in his rescue efforts When the firefighters and the police arrived, the subdued youth was lowered to the ground and given medical attention before being whisked away to the local hospital. LaMorre grimly noted that the youth ended up with about 1.00 stitches on his wounds. That was that. Or so he thought until three months after the incident, when he was informed that he was being recom- mended by the Belleville Police Department for a national Medal of Bravery for his part in the Nov. 30 incident. A letter came to him from the office of the Chancellery7 of Canadian Orders and Decorations in Ottawa in December of 1983 formally announcing the honour. j LaMorre had never expected. In the letter he found that he had been granted the right to wear the initials M.B., which stands for Medal of Bravery, after his name. Since it was instituted in 1972, the medal is awarded for acts of bravery in hazardous circumstances. On June 22, 1984, LaMorre received his medal in a ceremony held at the Government House, official residence of the Governor General who was Jeanne Sauve at the time. Although, he modestly denies having done anything more than what others in his profession had done, LaMorre recognizes the dangers that paramedics often meet in their line of duty. "It's d fairly dangerous job. I've been shot at. I've been beat up. I've had butcher knives pulled on me. You just go to go out and do what you got to do," he noted wryly. Many like LaMorre had been serving the city in this profession since 1932 when La Salle Ambulance Service began its operations. This service was taken over by the late Stu Meeks in 1958. Its competitor, the City Ambulance Service Ltd.. which hired