During the 1960s a Los Angeles cardiologist named Walter S. Graf became concerned about the lack of actual medical care being given to coronary patients during emergency transportation to a hospital. In 1969, while serving as president of the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Heart Association, he created a "mobile critical care unit", consisting of a Chevy van, a registered nurse, and a portable defibrillator. The same year his patient Kenneth Hahn, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, persuaded the Supervisors to approve a pilot program to train county firefighters as "Mobile Intensive Care Paramedics". A change in state law was necessary to allow personnel other than doctors and nurses to render emergency medical care. Hahn recruited two state legislators who wrote the Wedworth-Townsend Paramedic Act of 1970, signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan on July 15, 1970, despite opposition from doctors, nurses, and attorneys. Paramedic training began the next month at the Freeman Memorial Hospital under Graf's direction. It was the first nationally accredited paramedic training program in the United States.