The sign out in front of Dr. Joy’s office on Dauphin Island reads “The doctor is in.” Sometimes, she forgets to sit it out there, or to put it up at the end of the day.
“How Mayberry is that?” the grandmotherly physician says with a twinkle in her eye.
Her practice is very Mayberry. Everyone knows “Dr. Joy,” the doctor who works part-time but who gives her cell phone and home phone numbers to all her patients and is available to them around-the-clock for phone advice, consults and to make appointments. She won’t say how old she turned when she had a birthday recently. She describes herself as “old enough to know what to do and young enough to do it.”
Her quiet, comfortable office is adjacent to Mack’n’DD’s Emporium, the gift shop she and her husband, Mack, a retired banker, own. The gift shop and doctor’s office, with a covered deck in between, are on LeMoyne Drive almost to the three-way stop on the idyllic island about 1,200 people call home. From there, you can either go east, toward the Audubon Bird Sanctuary, Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Fort Gaines; or west, toward the public beach and the rows of houses perched on stilts on the thin strip of barrier island between the Gulf of Mexico and the mainland.
There’s not a single traffic light on the island, no fast food. Children ride their bikes to the elementary school, where there’s no need to lock them up. Snowbirds flock here from northern climates during the winter. The pace is laid-back, the people friendly.
The quaint town won Dr. Joy’s heart as soon as she set foot on her first visit. Originally from Greenville, she’s fond of small towns.
As a little girl, Joy Harper Hartley wanted to be a doctor when she grew up, but she was told that boys could be doctors, while girls could be nurses. She remembers performing open-heart surgery on her Raggedy Ann doll, “even before Dr. DeBakey,” giving her a candy heart. “My suturing must have been pretty good because no ants got in there at that candy,” she says.
By the time she was college-age, she’d put aside her dreams of becoming a doctor and studied art at Auburn, where she went “mainly to play.” She and one of her friends moved to New York City to go to modeling school, and she modeled for a year or so before badly burning her leg on a Princeton student’s motorbike. Her father insisted she move back to Alabama.
When her high school crush, Mack Russell, returned from serving in the U.S. Air Force, his sister set them up. They’ve been inseparable ever since. They married and had three children, then when Mack enrolled at the University of Alabama to earn his degree, Joy decided to enroll, too, and finish hers – but this time, she changed her major to biology.
“At the time, the medical school catalogue said that ‘only under exceptional circumstances will anyone over the age of 30 be admitted,’” she says. She worked hard to make herself look like a good candidate despite being 33 when she graduated, working as a student teacher in chemistry and biology, joining everything she could and volunteering at the VA hospital – and it paid off. She was thrilled to receive the Outstanding Pre-Medical Student Award.
After graduating from medical school at UAB and completing her residency, she practiced emergency medicine for more than two decades in Birmingham.
In the early 2000s, while attending a cardiology conference in Perdido Beach, she and Mack thought it would be fun to take the ferry from Fort Morgan to Dauphin Island, which she’d never seen before. “There was a soft sea fog that morning,” she remembers, “and we drove up and down the island. Two weeks later, we bought a beach house.”
The island reminded her of Seagrove, Florida, where her family vacationed every summer when she was a child. “There were live oaks everywhere, and at that time there was nothing on the Gulf side,” she says. “I would sketch and draw. This is the closest ambiance to that I’ve ever seen. It’s so different from Gulf Shores or Panama City. Everybody knows everybody, and what you see is what you get, which is nice.”
Dr. Joy still loves to take pictures and paint in her spare time. She shot the cover and contributed many of the pictures in the coffee-table book “Dauphin Island, Alabama,” published in 2014 and sold in Mack’n’DD’s, and she creates vintage Christmas ornaments and paints whimsical designs on wooden furniture and accessories, some of which are for sale in the shop, along with her paintings.
By 2008, she and Mack moved to Dauphin Island. They kept their beach house – they rent it out, reserving it for their own big family gatherings at Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July – but bought a home on the wooded east end where they live permanently. She started practicing part-time with Providence Family Medicine in Tillman’s Corner, and Mack opened Mack’n’DD’s (DD is Joy’s nickname).
‘A beautiful friend’
In 2017, she opened her own family practice next door to the shop. Inside, there’s a waiting room, a lab room, a handicapped-accessible bathroom and an exam room, plus her cozy office where she often sits and chats with patients. They often give her gifts. Draped on a wicker chair is an afghan one of her snowbird patients knitted for her. A purple painted rock adorned with flecks of glitter sits on her desk, a gift from a 3-year-old she treated for an infection. (“She was the cutest little thing!”) In the hallway is a colorful sign made by a patient that says “Dr. Joy.”
She prefers to make appointments on Tuesdays, Thursdays or Saturday mornings, “but if someone has an urgent need to see me on another day, I’m just five minutes away,” she says. She will also do consultations with her patients by phone and online at a much lower rate than an office visit.
And when they come in, they usually stay a while. “I can spend as much time as I want to with my patients,” she says.
As if on cue, on a recent Wednesday – her birthday – Dr. Joy is behind her desk chatting with a reporter when there’s a knock at the door. “Come in!” she shouts. A patient, Caroline, has ridden her bike up to say hello and give Dr. Joy a report on her new blood pressure medication.
“She’s the best,” Caroline says, adding that she sometimes stays at Dr. Joy’s office for “a couple of hours.”
“While you’re here, why don’t I check your blood pressure?” the doctor asks, securing the cuff on her patient’s arm. They chat about Caroline’s husband’s sailboat, which, unfortunately, has a broken rudder.
And then, the result: 123/73. Dr. Joy lets out a little whoop. “We got you in the right place,” she says.
They chat a little longer, but before Caroline leaves, she gives her doctor a hug and kisses her mostly gray hair. “She’s a beautiful friend, a beautiful woman,” she says.
In addition to the patients like Caroline who are island residents, Dr. Joy also treats snowbirds and other visitors and occasionally tends to an emergency, usually a stingray sting or fishing hook stuck in a hand. She and Mack share one vehicle – a van with the license plate “WELUVDI” – so, on the occasion when she’s been at home without a car, she has even had patients pick her up, take her with them to the office for treatment and then drop her back off at home.
She and Mack really do “luv” everything about Dauphin Island. She jokes that “it about takes a backhoe to get me off this island” – but when she does return, she loves coming over the bridge across the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (she calls it “the happy hump”). “Your cares just kind of go away,” she says. “Before we moved here, I felt that way every time. I’m not a crier, but I would cry every time we left. It would break my heart to have to leave.”
Dr. Joy has no plans to retire, ever. “When you do what you love,” she says, “you don’t have to stop doing it. I love this place and its people.” Looking back on her life, she realizes that she’s come full circle. “Now I’m practicing medicine sort of like I remember it being practiced when I was younger and got inspired.”