I am a first responder; I’m soooo disappointed that those once-a-career calls don’t happen every week. 
Yeah, well, true, I guess. But an entire episode of Emergency! where the guys all sat around playing cards probably wouldn’t have been much of an audience-grabber 
I’ve heard the old cop show Adam 12 described in a similar way by real cops-- that it was a fairly accurate portrayal of what kinds of situations police dealt with, except that they had a month’s worth of calls in every episode.
I am sad. I loved and still love Emergency! I watched it as a kid and rewatched it about 10 years ago with my grandkids, who were 4 and 5 at the time. They absolutely loved it. Every time they were over, we’d watch a few episodes. A year or two ago, I started DVRing the episodes and watching one or two whenever I have nothing else to watch. One of the greatest shows ever.
As a kid I would get very excited when the climactic call can in and the tones went on for a long time. It was gonna be a good one.
Aerial views of which were used as establishing shots.
Set Historic Aerials: Viewer for aerial of 1000 W. Carson St., Torrance, California in '72.
51’s tone also turns up in other places. A third season epsiode of “The A-Team”, for example.
Even on shows like COPS! you know if they initiate a traffic stop the guy is either going to flee or get arrested as someone just getting a citation or, even more boring, a warning just doesn’t make for exciting TV. I’ve wondered how much footage they need to film to get an episode as very few traffic stops end in pursuits & even arrests from them aren’t a frequent occurrence.
When we get a dispatch at our firehouse, it’s 51 dispatch tones that play. I know a bunch of people have that on their personal phone / dispatch app as well. It’s kind of amazing how those tones live on so much decades later.
I agree with this, but I have serious nostalgia for the 70s generally. I believe our society peaked somewhere in there: before Reagan, certainly.
I STILL do! glad there are so many fans here.
Arrest as a result of a pursuit is not a frequent occurance IRL? I would think that trying to run from the police would automatically get a person at least an overnight stay in la casa de hoosegow, even if they had done nothing much else wrong.
ETA: never mind, I think I parsed that sentence wrong. You probably meant arrests from traffic stops aren’t a frequent occurrence, not from pursuits.
Yes. That had been my assumption, too.
Correct, a traffic stop that results in something other than a citation or a warning.
Then there’s the incident which was allegedly played up for the cameras of “Live PD”.
That’s the same sheriff’s office which was involved in the incident that took the program off the air.
Ah, another old fave gone. Had a good run, and it’s good to hear him being so well spoken of.
Despite the real locations (the reason they picked station 127 in Carson was it faced south, for good lighting), I just fanwank that the station (and Rampart Hospital) are somewhere in the valley. Responding to all those mountain calls makes more sense if you’re not coming from Carson. Lights and sirens for 30 miles of LA traffic isn’t going to get you there any faster. 
That doesn’t explain the Long Beach calls, but hey, whatever! I’m not complaining.
We still watch, and love when the shot has a street sign, or a valid address. Sometimes, even, IMDB has an exact address of the location. We look them up in google maps and check street view, see what’s changed. You’d never guess how many runs are within three miles of Universal studios!
Though I really like it when they work with Marina Del Ray station 110. That was “my” station when Iived there, drove past every day. I love looking at the location shots.
So does a good friend of ours, who grew up around Long Beach.
My college roomie’s father was a station Captain for LA City Fire Department. Who had a legendary bad blood rivalry with LA County Fire Department. They had a real love / hate relationship with Emergency!.
Doubly so since the City FD’s paramedic service was equipped with ambulances and did transport and patient life support enroute to the hospital too. Which was the model that eventually won out all across the USA over the LA County model where private ambulances just did basic transport after the government paramedics in their squad trucks had sorta stabilized the situation then walked away, leaving the patient to their fate.
Quietly raises hand…
The guy who was fixing my furnace a couple of years ago had the Emergency! alert sound as his ring tone, as I found out when his phone rang while he was giving me an estimate.
Emergency! always had a fairly regular pattern of rescues. You had the serious but fairly mundane rescue–heart attack, car accident, that kind of thing. You had the silly rescue–guy accidentally glues his head to the wall, or something like that. And then you had the big set-piece rescue–giant factory on fire, plane crashes into a school, and so forth. In between all those, Johnny tried to talk Roy into some kind of get-rich-quick scheme, or Chet pulled some kind of ridiculous practical joke, and it was all resolved by the end of the hour.
See Selective calling → Quick Call I - Wikipedia. That was a real system widely used in the fire services all over the country. The specific sequence of tones varies from station to station, but in one sense they all sounded the same.
Right now, FETV is showing the episode in which Johnny takes an overtime shift at Station 8. Front still looks largely the same.
ETA: FETV will run a memorial marathon on Sunday, 9 - 3.