Driving No. 12 With Pride : A Love of People Makes for a Smooth Road for Honored Bus Driver

Slightly behind schedule because a wheelchair rider had to be loaded, the crowded bus hissed to a stop in front of a blue bench in Belmont Shore. Several passengers forgave the driver for being three minutes late and got on.

“Hey ya, lady, good morning. How are things?” said Joe Catalano, the Long Beach Public Transportation Co.’s driver of the year, to a woman whose two quarters and dime were being noisily digested by the coin box.

Catalano maneuvered back into traffic. He held the steering wheel with both hands, one tattooed with the Marine Corps insignia.

“I enjoy my job,” he said. “I enjoy people, and now that I’m driver of the year, people look up to me. It makes my day go by good.”

He beamed at the thought of that honor, bestowed last December.

“We love him,” said Debbie Lewis, who sat at the front of the No. 12 East Ocean bus that Catalano captains on five round trips from downtown to Cal State Long Beach. “He has a million jokes. Believe me, I’ve heard them all.”

Catalano, snappy in his tie and blue shirt with the company patches on one sleeve, admitted: “They’re usually the same ones over and over. Sometimes I get some new material.”

He has been driving the bus since the fare was 7 cents 26 years ago. Now a man of 60 with gray sideburns, a curled-up mustache and eyebrows that rise like church spires, he approaches each day as if still an excited rookie.

Another regular rider, Madeline Pratt, appreciates that spirit. “In the evening we don’t have Joe, so I car-pool home,” she said.

The driver-of-the-year award, instituted two years ago, is based on safety and attendance records and, most importantly, how well a driver serves the customers, said Guy Heston, assistant manager of the 335-driver transit company.

“You have to have a lot of patience,” Catalano said.

“Let’s say a little old lady gets on. Well, she’s going to take forever, but you can’t say, ‘C’mon lady, hurry up.’ And you have to accept that people will be grouchy sometimes. If you can’t control your temper, you’re in the wrong job.”

Born in Boston, Catalano left that city after only 16 years but has retained its accent in his voice. He spent a dozen years in the Marines, serving in the Korean War as a staff sergeant, then became a bus driver in 1964.

“It was very hard at first,” he said, “but I stuck it out. You have to learn the tricks of the trade.”

His job is easier now. “We have more safety equipment, bigger windows, a comfortable seat, directional signals on the floor,” he said. “We used to have to use a changer, and we had to punch transfers. Now we have an automatic transfer machine.”

Viewing yachts out the huge windshield as he crossed a bridge, Catalano assessed drivers of cars: “Fair, they don’t signal.”

He pointed to a Volkswagen and shook his head.

“The people who drive little cars dart in and out of traffic,” he said. “They think they have all the room in the world.”

He said he has had one accident, a fender-bender when he first started. And one ticket for speeding, also long ago but still vivid in reminiscence.

“I was going 35 miles an hour in a 30-mile zone and had a load of sailors who wanted to go on liberty. I told the policeman, ‘Can you hurry up and give me the ticket? They want to go into town.’ ”

The No. 12 first rolls at 5:18 a.m. Because he walks 3 1/2 miles to work, Catalano rises at 3:30 a.m. If he goes to a track after work, he is home early. “I like to have a beer once in a while, but not during the week,” he said. “No way. My job is too important for that.”

Playing the horses is a passion of this man who has never married but claims to be still looking for a wife.

“Summer Squall” was the tip of one man who got on the bus downtown that recent morning.

“I’ll check it out,” Catalano said.

His bus is almost like a tour bus. He points out new ships in the harbor and the house on Ocean Boulevard in which Clark Gable used to live.

“If I only had one or two passengers the whole eight hours, I would still see something interesting,” he said.

At the terminus of each half-hour trip, either at the university or Catalina Landing, there seemed a sadness.

The bus would be empty, and Catalano would search it for newspapers and lost belongings. In all the years he has never found anything of value to turn in.

He would get a cup of coffee, return and sit alone in the big bus or stand outside it.

“The driver of the year gets chrome wheels,” He said, pointing to a hubcap.

He got back on and sat in one of the blue passenger seats. He could not get that company dinner last December at the Lakewood Country Club off his mind.

He said he was filming the festivities with his video camera when the announcement was made that he was driver of the year.

“I go, ‘Oh my God,’ and I hit my head against a wall,” he said. “I’m shaking, the camera’s shaking. They’re all yelling, and I’m kissing the women. That was really a surprise.”