Frank Muller retired as the county’s director of Cecil County Emergency Services in October 2007, after spending over forty years responding to car wrecks, heart attacks, barroom fights, fires, chemical accidents, and almost any type of emergency you might name. He got his start in a line of work that often stretched from dawn to dusk on good days and never seemed to end on particularly bad ones as a 16-year-old when he started volunteering with Elkton’s Singerly Fire Company. It was the exciting thing to do in rural Cecil County he said and his interest was in firefighting, but then he discovered ambulance work.
The emergency services world Muller came to know in the early ’70s as a teenager was far different than the one he retired from. “Back then you mainly loaded folks into the ambulance and rushed as fast as possible to Union Hospital,” he said. “If you had American Red Cross training you had the best skills available for the time for things like CPR were just coming into general knowledge. Now paramedics do just about everything.”
Over the years training requirements and technology changed and Muller was always at the forefront of leading Cecil County in the advances. He recalls that after graduating from high school, he learned that Ocean City was looking to hire summer help, so he and a few friends went down there, looking forward to an exciting summer as paid “ambulance drivers at the Maryland shore.”
Of course, the pace was different in the summer when the place throbbed with tourists and calls. While working there, Maryland started a pilot program to train Cardiac Rescue Technicians (CRT) or what was then called paramedics. Anxious to get out of Ocean City during the cold winters when time passed slowly at the beach and excited about learning the latest in pre-hospital care, Muller volunteered for the training program. After successfully completing the course, he returned to become the resort’s first advanced life support provider. But with the demand for more ALS personnel at the shore, Ocean City Mayor Roland “Fish” Powell asked him to return to the classroom to become a certified instructor, which he did.
After a four-year stint at the beach, he returned home, getting back into his old role as a volunteer with Singerly. In 1978, Muller taught the first class of advanced life support providers in Cecil County. When Frank’s five graduates from the Singerly Fire Company hit the road that year, they could push drugs, defibrillate patients and provide other advanced treatments under the supervision of the emergency room physicians at Union Hospital. This group of ALS caregivers, answering calls from Warwick to Rock Springs, supported Basic Life Support providers throughout the county. Of course, this was only the beginning as there were many more classes carefully mentored by Frank in subsequent years as things advanced to the national registry paramedic program in the decades ahead.
He also started working as a road deputy for the Sheriff’s office. This was about the time volunteer fire companies across the county struggled to find enough volunteers to keep answering the volume of calls they were facing. So Muller, certified as a CRT and a law enforcement officer, proposed an innovative idea, the Deputy-Medic program. Deputies were on the road 24/7 so why not have the officers certified as EMS providers support the fire companies he reasoned? Lots of local people agreed, including Sheriff John F. DeWitt and the fire companies, so one day in 1983 medics started prowling the county, but they weren’t in ALS Units. These medics, in patrol cars, answered police calls and responded as support units to the fire companies.
The Deputy-Medic approach at the Sheriff’s Office helped for years, but eventually, the county had to hire full-time paid technicians to deliver the service. Frank Muller, with his extensive experience as a field provider and instructor, was hired as the first person to head Cecil’s Emergency Medical Services program in 1988. As the coordinator for the medic units staffed by county employees, he reported to Rosemary Culley, the Director of the Department of Emergency Services. While working in that position, EMS took another big step forward when Muller became a board-certified national paramedic in 1990.
When Culley retired, he was appointed to head the entire department, which in addition to EMS is now responsible for the 911 center, communications, emergency planning, and hazmat response. When the paramedic first associated with the agency in the Cold War era, the staff dispatched the fire companies and worried about protecting Cecil County from nuclear attack.
Over the decades the department took on much more responsibility as public safety became more and more complex, and after the Sept. 11 attack, its work was significantly transformed. Muller has seen tremendous growth in Emergency Services as the agency evolved from being largely a county dispatch and emergency coordination center to a government unit that uses a wide spectrum of programs and information to respond to natural disasters and attacks. In this role, he was responsible for coordinating countywide responses to major disasters, and during the next 15 years, he saw his share of major emergencies, from train wrecks to hurricanes, tornadoes, and chemical releases.
With nearly 40 years of public safety work completed, he retired in the fall of 2007. Frank Muller was responsible for creating a modern, first-class Cecil County Department of Emergency Services. He taught over a generation of Cecil County emergency service providers sophisticated medical skills, such as how to give fluids intravenously and electric shocks to people who have heart attacks. The career of the seasoned public safety official concluded with a stint as the Director of the Department of Emergency Services, at a time when the agency modernized its communications systems and reacted to the changing world of threats and risks.
