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In the world of avocations, tales of double eagles or of squalls outraced by sail are certainly worthy cocktail-hour staples. But if Bryan LaMarca should happen to be in the room, you might want to hold off on that dramatic choice of the 3-iron or the critical tacking that stormy afternoon on the Sound; they will pale beside his adventures. As, for example, a recent day when, while going about his duties as a volunteer emergency medical technician, he had a hand in bringing a man back to life.
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“I had a cardiac arrest save with a paramedic a couple of weeks ago,” says LaMarca, who rides herd on technical problems dayside when not a Scarsdale EMT. “He was as dead as dead can be when we arrived. No pulse, no breathing. He had a pulse by the time we got him to the hospital.”
LaMarca, 31, spent two years at Scarsdale High School as a junior EMT volunteer. Three years ago, the now-White Plains resident re-established contact with his Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps cohorts. He undertook 110 hours of training and now volunteers on “up to 10 calls per week, but more typically it”™s three or four calls per week.”
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The donation-funded Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps in the last year moved into a new headquarters on Weaver Street. The old headquarters was on Heathcote Road at Five Corners. When the alarm comes in ”“ LaMarca is wired via a pager hooked to his belt ”“ the volunteers and a paid paramedic who accompanies the crew to every emergency scramble in either of a pair of Ford ambulance-vans that each cost, “in the $130,000 range.”
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“I love it,” LaMarca says of his volunteer duties. “It”™s one of the most satisfying things I”™ve ever done, probably will ever do. The thank you that you receive from someone you have helped is like no thank you you”™ve ever received.”
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The thanks come only after LaMarca, typically working with paramedic Toni-Ann Scherer, has arrived on the scene. “When we arrive, it”™s like a ballet,” LaMarca says. “The more you work with the other crew members, the better you get. You get better with the nonverbal communication. When you have a critical patient, stuff has to move very fast.” The Scarsdale ambulances respond to about a thousand calls per year, he said.
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LaMarca is now the ambulance corps”™ membership chairman for recruiting and training and is a member of its board of directors.
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For the past seven years, LaMarca has been a principal, along with co-founder Adam Karp, of KL Tech Consulting in Hartsdale. The company serves small businesses in Westchester and in New York City. Typical calls involve appeals for new servers, file sharing and print sharing capabilities, or to find lost documents or to fix crashed computers, according to LaMarca. “Last week in Manhattan we had a client with a massive hardware failure. We took the computer offsite and got it up and running by the next morning.”
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LaMarca grew up with computers and has always enjoyed their company. He has wired his home”™s lights and entertainment systems through his at-home computer. “It was always a hobby,” he says of computers. At age 12, he had displayed enough interest in computers that his parents hired a retired IBM employee to tutor him in the finer points of bytes and codes. LaMarca stuck with it and is today largely self-taught.
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LaMarca thought about entering finance when he graduated from the University of Delaware in 1995 with a degree in business administration, “but I wasn”™t really into it.”
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The twist of fate that would set him on a computer career was a billing problem at a Mount Vernon asphalt plant. The plant hired Karp and LaMarca to troubleshoot, “even though we weren”™t technically KL then.”
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Seven years later, “January was good. People still need IT.”
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LaMarca”™s wife is Jeanette LaMarca. They are expecting their first child in June. His parents, Fred and Patricia LaMarca, live in White Plains.
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KL Tech Consulting”™s Web site is www.kltc-ny.com. The Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps is funded by private donations; its Web site is www.scarsdalevac.com.
