TV Cabby Fits the Part to a Fare-Thee-Well

Navigating exhaust-belching traffic from behind the steering wheel of a yellow cab, Jack Dym stopped to pick up a fare.

The man rattled off a midtown Manhattan address. It was business as usual until he took a second look at the driver.

“Hey, aren’t you the cabby on TV?” he asked, surprised and then delighted to have hailed the quintessential New York City cabby--at least according to commercials for Time Warner’s cable operation.

“Jack the Hack,” they call him: a fast-talking, yarn-spinning driver with a Brooklyn accent who’s been driving a cab for half a century.

At 71, Dym is believed to be the oldest working cabby among the city’s 45,000 licensed cabdrivers, said Allan Fromberg of the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

And after 50 years of ferrying passengers, Dym has hundreds of stories to dazzle his most frazzled customers.

There was the time Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis flagged him down on fashionable Park Avenue, trying to get downtown in the pouring rain.

“She said, ‘This is a really nice cab,’ ” he said. “I couldn’t believe that she complimented my cab--the First Lady.”

She also tipped well. “I think it was a dollar or dollar and a half. That’s when that was a very good tip.”

Or the time designer Diane Von Furstenberg decorated the back of his cab with wallpaper, throw pillows and curtains for a photo shoot. A few days later, while the cab was still decorated, he picked up another famous fare.

“Jack Lemmon got in and asked if it was really a cab. He said he’d never seen anything like it,” Dym said.

Then there was the time an up-and-coming model got into his cab.

“She was beautiful. I told her she was going to be a big star. She said, ‘From your mouth to God’s ears.’ It was Sharon Stone,” Dym said.

Some regular fares became friends.

Bruno Zehnder, famous for photographing penguins, was a repeat customer for more than a decade. When he died of a heart attack last year during an Antarctic storm, Dym attached a small, memorial toy penguin to his meter. “Bruno the Greatest, 1945-1997,” it reads.

If his stories don’t get his passengers talking, Dym hands out drawings of smiling sunflowers and balloons. Both bear the message: “Have a happy day. Jack the Hack.”

It’s a simple gesture Dym says he started after seeing one too many frowning passengers.

“People are in such a rush, they don’t have time to smile. In my cab, you smile and get a nice ride,” he said.

Born and raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Dym started driving in the mid-1940s. He married in the ‘50s and moved his family to the borough of Queens.

He followed in his immigrant father’s footsteps by becoming a taxi driver. But he doesn’t really fit the mold, Fromberg said.

The industry in New York City has long depended on immigrants, but few have passed the trade down to their children, he said. Although the taxi commission does not have statistics on the number of immigrants driving, Fromberg said they make up at least 90% of cabbies.

“I would say the idealized image of the taxicab was created in the motion pictures--movies like ‘On The Town’--and the popular media created the image of the New York cabby,” Fromberg said. “I imagine that’s the picture that Jack Dym fills obviously so admirably.”

He even looks the part, with his button-down shirts, sweaters and golfer’s hat.

During dinner at the circular dining table in the kitchen of his home, Dym entertained family members with stories about his day.

“He wouldn’t be happy doing anything else,” said Ilene Rand, his 36-year-old daughter.

When she was 14, her father had asked her to make a sign for his passengers, who he thought were becoming grumpier. “He just wanted to say hi to his passengers and do something nice for them,” she said.

It’s been more than 20 years since she drew that first smiling flower. She still draws them.

“The stories, the pictures, the balloons, that’s what I do,” he says, “to help people to have a happy day.”