With the retirements of Assistant Public Safety Director Lee Eckles and EMS Director Doug Vickers, the vanguard who steered Bulloch County EMS forward from its origins as an appendage of the hospital to being a modern, county-backed agency steps aside after helping plan for further upgrades.
Eckles’ retirement officially takes effect on Dec. 31, and Vickers’ on Jan. 15. When family, friends, current and past employees of the Emergency Medical Service and other county agencies gathered to honor them with a retirement reception Dec. 21 in the main ambulance bay, the first person to speak up was Bulloch County Public Safety and Emergency Management Agency Director Ted Wynn, whose own retirement is scheduled for Jan. 31.
Since Eckles has served the county for 42 years and eight months and Vickers for 41 years and five months, Wynn, with 32 years and four months on the Bulloch County payroll, is the junior of the three in full-time county service, although the oldest, at 68. But since Wynn was hired in October 1991 to guide the creation of the 911 dispatching center, he has worked closely with Eckles and Vickers for decades.
“The two of them together have 83 years of experience and it’s heading out the door, and I admit that’s a little bit scary, but these two men have helped lay the groundwork for Public Safety and EMS to thrive going forward,” Wynn told the crowd. “I’ve got the privilege of serving with these two for the last 32 years of my career and will be joining them soon with the next chapter of our lives.
“I know from my experience of running calls in this county, you always felt good when you had Doug and Lee by your side,” he continued. “They always knew what to do in very difficult situations.”
Pivotal pension plan
The Bulloch County government’s launch of an employee pension plan effective this fiscal year played a decisive role in Vickers’ and Eckles’ decisions to retire now. The Board of Commissioners approved the change from the previous 401(a) defined contribution plan – in which the amounts employees accumulated for retirement varied with fluctuations in the stock market – to the defined benefit plan in November 2022.
“As far as the retirement, you know the county started the pension plan, and I’m 65,” Vickers said when asked about his reasons. “The pension plan is just wonderful. I didn’t think that Ted or Lee or myself would be included because we had so many years of service, but once they included us and all of us crunched the figures, you know, it just made sense, ‘Let’s go ahead. It’s time.’”
Meanwhile, Eckles’ decision to retire came as he faces the latest in a series of health issues he has encountered over the years.
Long an insulin-dependent diabetic, he received a kidney-pancreas transplant a decade ago, getting an organ-donor match after one day and one hour on the list when the average wait, he recalls, was 680 days.
“It was a God thing. It was a perfect match,” Eckles says, expressing his faith in miracles.
Then a couple of years ago what had begun as a skin cancer spread into his left hand. This was successfully treated by surgery and a seven-week course of radiation therapy, preserving his hand after he was told he might lose it.
Most recently, in the middle of 2023, Eckles began experiencing weakness in his legs and loss of balance. He now uses a cane. Doctors only recently diagnosed the cause as the autoimmune disorder CIPD, or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, in which a person’s immune system attacks the myelin that insulates their nerves.
So Eckles hopes to be able to start a course of treatment right after the first of the year.
“The treatment is not a cure, but hopefully that insulation will rebuild and these symptoms will go away,” he said.
Still, the county’s adoption and funding of a pension system played a critical role in his decision to retire, Eckles told the Statesboro Herald.
“I do have health issues, but they have never prevented me from being able to do my job. I have been very fortunate to have great healthcare providers…,” Eckles said. “But the pension plan is huge, not only for me, Doug, Ted, but for every county employee because it’s a defined benefit. You know when you retire what you are going to have available to you and how long you’re going to be able to have it.”
Overlapping careers
After growing up here and graduating from Statesboro High School, Eckles served four years in the U.S. Coast Guard. While based in Charleston, South Carolina, he completed the emergency medical technician course at a college and became one of the first EMTs to serve on a Coast Guard search and rescue boat.
Returning to Georgia, he had to take EMT training again because Georgia and South Carolina did not have reciprocity of training. He was hired part-time, in April 1981, by the Bulloch EMS, then based at the old Bulloch Memorial Hospital. He went through paramedic training, and then-EMS Director Chuck Taylor hired him full-time.
When Taylor retired, Eckles was promoted to EMS director in April 1983.
Meanwhile, Vickers, originally from Hawkinsville, had been licensed as an EMT in 1976 while still in high school.
After completing paramedic school in 1978 and working two years as a paramedic with a hospital in Athens, he came to work for the Bulloch County EMS in August 1982. Vickers was promoted to EMS director 12 years ago when Eckles left that position to be assistant public safety director, second to Wynn in leadership of the county’s multi-agency Public Safety Division.
The old days
In Eckles and Vickers’ earliest days with the EMS, it operated from a small office in the old hospital on East Grady Street. Only one ambulance crew was on duty at any time.
“You rested, if you could, in an E.R. room, until they needed that room,” Vickers recalled in an interview. “We had one truck staffed per shift, and we also had an on-call crew. Only one person may have come in, so it wasn’t that uncommon for that person and a nurse – you grabbed a nurse out of the E.R. – to run an ambulance call.”
There was no 911 service, so paramedics, EMTs or nurses answered phone calls for emergencies requiring an ambulance.
“Luckily, most of the nurses were local and familiar with the area, so if they took a call and said, ‘Go out 67 and turn left at the big oak tree,’ you knew what they were talking about,” Vickers said.
Saturday night departure
Both he and Eckles recalled how the ambulance service made an abrupt departure from the hospital to a temporary home of its own while Taylor was still director in the early 1980s. The county commissioners had agreed to allow the EMS to move to the old Statesboro police station – already a condemned building – on Siebald Street where the Judicial Annex now stands. But the county did not provide any funds for renovations. So the EMS employees worked to fix it up themselves.
Then – with apparently no communication with the hospital staff – the ambulance service moved away to Siebald Street on a Saturday night.
“We moved in the middle of the night,” Vickers said. “The next morning they called. You know what they were concerned about? Our time cards hadn’t been placed out, and also the snack machines had not been stocked; that was our job.”
A few years later, the county built the current EMS headquarters on West Grady Street.
Now the EMS staffs four ambulances there around the clock. Since April 2014, the service has also staffed an ambulance full-time in Brooklet from a station shared with the Bulloch County Fire Department.
In August 2023, the EMS began operating a substation out of a renovated space at the Portal fire station, and it stepped up to 24/7 status in November. Now, the county is renovating the BCFD station in Register in part to accommodate the EMS, with plans to staff this fourth station in early 2024.
So the EMS will have grown from staffing that one ambulance at the hospital to keeping seven staffed countywide.
The county also has a plan for an expansion of the Grady Street headquarters that will add a training room, new sleeping rooms and medical supply and records storage rooms. The county funded a full-time EMS training officer position beginning in July, and Ryan Jones, who was already a paramedic with the agency, is now employed in that role.
As previously reported, current Assistant EMS Director Brian Hendrix has been promoted to EMS director, effective with Vickers’ retirement.
Vickers called him “a terrific choice” and “the only choice.”
