Bio
In his 22 years as a bus operator, Jefrick Dean has driven every bus route out of the East New York Depot in Brooklyn. On his current route, Dean drives from the depot to downtown Brooklyn and back to the depot eight times a day. He works from 6:30 am to 10:30 am, has a two-hour break, and then works again from 12:30 pm to 4:30 pm. Dean welcomes each passenger who gets on by saying, “Take your time. Welcome aboard,” and he has gone so far as to learn to say this in Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Haitian Creole and Swahili. He also strives every day to make sure that everyone exits his bus in a better mood than when they entered, and most do. Bus riders occasionally write or call the NYC Transit Authority to praise a bus operator they view as exemplary. Given the City’s bus fleet of 6,000 vehicles that transport an average of 2.7 million riders each week, these “unsolicited commendations” are surprisingly rare. Very few bus operators have accumulated more than a dozen in their careers. Dean has received 132, consistently praised by riders as being, in their words, “extremely special… most extraordinary… compassionate… exemplifies untiring patience … a most shining personality.” Dean is the very definition of a civil servant. Dean became an ordained minister six years ago and has been one of 76 volunteer chaplains serving under Rabbi Harry Berkowitz, the chaplain for the NYC Transit Authority. Rabbi Berkowitz notes, “All of my volunteers are wonderful, but Dean is truly one of the outstanding ones.” In 2008, after bus driver Edwin Thomas was murdered by an angry passenger, Dean was “the rock that everybody relied on to get through the grieving.”
