New bus driver brings joy to CW route
by Leah Szarek
Carrboro Commons Writer
Locked in a battle with the wind to collect the most leaves, the sweatshirt-clad man looked up from his rake with a start at the beep of the bus’s horn.
“Go to my house and rake mine when you get through,” the bus driver ordered him through the closed window, prompting a chorus of laughter and “yes, ma’ams” from the handful of passengers occupying the blue bucket seats behind her.
Photo by Leah Szarek
Joyce Wilson, better known as “Miss Joyce,” has been driving the CW route from the Jones Ferry Park and Ride Lot to the Pittsboro Street Credit Union for only four months, but she is already a Carrboro institution. The Merritt Mill Road resident said she loves the town and her route.
“I have a mix of people—students, elderly, little children,” she said, contrasting the CW line with her former route while deftly making the left turn from West Main Street onto Weaver Street one February morning. “On the T, it’s mostly just students.”
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MISS JOYCE
Miss Joyce dispenses a running stream of advice on cold cures (“Drink plenty of fluids. Orange juice is the best.”), the Carolina basketball team (“It took them two losses to make them stronger. Hold your heads up, boys.”) and fine dining (“You going to Country Junction today? Try their Chuck Wagon — it’s delicious.”). Her pronouncements are often punctuated by one of her cell phone’s several sing-along ring-tones, including the Black Eyed Peas’ anthem to the female body, “My Humps.”
Miss Joyce said it’s impossible to get bored on her 16 runs between Carrboro and Chapel Hill.
“I always have somebody on the bus with me,” she said. “We get to talking and laughing.”
Second-year public health graduate student Genee Smith from Fayetteville said she rides the CW from the Health Sciences Library to her home in Carrboro about three times a week. Like almost every frequent CW rider, she has a bus story to tell.
“Occasionally you get homeless people and people who are somewhat inebriated on this route,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “One time—Miss Joyce wasn’t the driver then—this fairly young woman who was kind of agitated gets on. The driver finally had to ask her to get off the bus.”
Photo by Leah Szarek
Smith said the woman complied, but then she positioned herself in the median “like she was Jackie Joyner-Kersee and she was going to race the bus.”
“It was kind of funny, but also a little scary,” Smith recalled. “There was traffic coming from the opposite direction, and there she was in the middle of the road.”
THEY’RE HER BABIES
Ronald Miles, a 52-year-old Chapel Hill native, rides the CW with Miss Joyce almost every day. “Everything she say is right,” Miles said, laughing. “Don’t doubt it.”
Miss Joyce said she loves all her regulars, but she does have two little favorites.
“I got two girls,” she said with a grin. “One gets on at Jones Ferry and the other gets on on Main Street proper. They are my babies!”
One other little girl has a claim on Miss Joyce’s affection. The widowed mother of one son said her 6-year-old granddaughter is her heart.
“It’s my weekend to have her,” she said. “We have fun.”
Between her family and her second job at TJ’s on Franklin Street, life doesn’t slow down when she hands her keys over to the next CW driver at 2:17 p.m. each weekday.
“It keeps you busy,” she said with a smile, betraying no sign of fatigue beyond a few sips from the caffeine-powered bottle of Coke she keeps stashed by her side.
