Extra! Eclectic Journalist Tries His Hand at Driving N.Y. Taxi

The Harvard class ring was long gone, pawned years before with a pair of cufflinks, when Robert E. Mack '47 spent his first day inside the Yellow Tin Box on the streets of Manhattan.

It was 1983, and Mack was in business for himself behind the wheel of a leased yellow cab, earning money to jump-start a commercial newsletter business.

Before working in the cab, Mack had been a journalist, reporting on the New York state legislature for United Press International (UPI), and covering conventions and demonstrations in the '60s with an NBC camera.

He had won the Bronze Star for bravery in combat against the Germans in the last days of the Second World War. But in 1990, back on his feet and out of the taxi, Mack wrote an article for Harvard Magazine that began: "I didn't know tough until I drove a cab in New York City."

He came to Harvard in 1943 from Saranac Lake, N.Y., in the upstate Adirondacks, where tuberculosis patients flocked to take the cure in health resorts--"people with tuberculosis were our industry-like a steel mill or a fabric mill," he says. Mack left just before antibiotics developed during the war crushed the town's economy beyond repair.

When he came to Harvard in the fall of 1943, Mack lived in Adams House, the only civilian dormitory in a militarized campus.

"I arrived in Cambridge in '43, a 17-year-old kid from the country, and I was surrounded by a sea of uniforms," he says. "Harvard was virtually a military camp, and I was a skinny kid in civilian clothes. That was the shock."

While many of his classmates entered the Navy's V-12 program--which allowed them to stay on at Harvard with a change into sailor's suits and classes in naval science--Mack committed to the Army after the end of his first year.

"I didn't have 20-20 vision, which the Navy, required, but the infantry, they didn't care," he says. "They gave you glasses, and if you lost them, that's just how it was."

A skier since childhood, Mack enlisted in the 10th Mountain Division, which trained in the Colorado mountains and on the Texas plains for an assault up the backbone of Italy.

Mack was mule skinner--"that's a mule handler; some people envision me taking the hide off of mules"--and then a radio operator in the 10th, earning the Bronze Star for carrying a radio to a unit cut off on the front line. By the German surrender, he was north of the Po river in the Italian Alps.

He came back to Harvard after a brief time off and a military discharge.

While he was in college, Mack says his extracurriculars consisted mainly of taking trips to the Old Howard Athenaeum--a Scully Square theater of some ill repute.

"The Old Howard was a fascinating place in itself. It was the last of the old-time burlesques, with comics, jugglers and strippers," he recalls. "Even before I arrived at Harvard, the people up at Saranac Lake said 'Don't forget the Old Howard.'"

After graduating in the middle the 1949-50 school year, Mack did a stint in the insurance business before joining a daily newspaper in Albany, N.Y. Mack says he had not had any newspaper experience before graduating. Two years after working in Albany, he joined UPI, a wire service, and became its correspondent at the state Capitol.

"UPI didn't treat its employees the best, working for them was not a bundle of joy, but he handled himself well," says Charles Dumas he Associated Press Albany correspondent and Mack's friend and chief competitor through the 1950s.

"He was intelligent, competent and well-liked," Dumas recalls. "I found him a particularly decent man."

During his time at UPI, Mack says one of his most memorable interviews came when he was awakened by a six o'clock phone call in a New York City hotel room. The call came from UPI, demanding that he interview former President Harry S. Truman, who was staying in the city at the Carlisle Hotel. Truman was known to take early-morning walks through the Manhattan streets.

"I went, and sure enough Old Harry came out," he says. "We walked around, and the streets were empty, but the cab drivers and guys in the sanitation trucks would yell, 'Hi, Harry, how ya doin'?" It was an interesting experience."

After Mack left UPI, he worked several public-relations jobs, finally joining NBC News, where he worked as a writer and occasional correspondent. Through his reporting at NBC, Mack says, he was pepper-gassed at a Black Panther trial in New Hampshire, covered Pope Paul VI at Yankee Stadium and worked the floor at both party conventions in the 1964 presidential race.

Mack became a freelance journalist in 1974. He says he was attempting to create Newsletters Unlimited--a commercial newsletter company--when he decided to supplement his income by driving a cab.

"I was broke, trying to get the business underway, and driving a cab is the kind of job you can just go out and get," he says. "It was the first time I wasn't moving paper from an 'in' box to an 'out box--I felt like I was really doing something."

Mack says driving the cab was reminiscent of an urban Outward Bound program,

"I needed the money and I liked the challenge," he says. "Physically it was the most exhausting job--after 12 hours in traffic, you just want to go home and sleep. You have no other life."

Mack says he cruised in his cab for fares coming out of the gay bars on Greenwich Village's dock strip at 3 a.m., ferried young professionals to buy heroin in the West Village's Alphabet City and once spent five hours inching through a flood with five malodorous tourists to Kennedy Airport.

Once, he was punched by another driver during a traffic argument, and thereafter carried a piece of plastic that resembled a meat hook, the mere appearance of which he says helped to settle road disputes more smoothly.

Mack says his pride in driving a cab was not always shared.

"I was very full of my cab-driving experience, but whenever I mentioned the cab at cocktail parties, my friends would immediately change the subject their most recent outrage at the hands of a cab driver," Mack says.

"I realized that what I thought of as this great achievement of my life was seen as sort of a come-down," he adds.

After three years of driving on the weekends and with his newsletter business taking off, Mack decided, after staying a week home sick with the flu, that he did not want to turn to the garage.

Mack was in the newsletter business with his second wife, but he says both the business and the marriage have failed since he wrote the article in Harvard Magazine. Mack is now in semi-retirement in the Hamptons on the east end of Long Island, and still writes occasionally for The New York Times.

Virginia K. Greiner, who worked for an Albany daily in the '50 and is a friend of Mack's says "he is not your usual... Harvard snob."

"Someone I know said that Bob Mack was the only person he had ever met that didn't tell you in the first five minutes that he was a graduate of Harvard," she says. "He was always pretty modest, and he had a lot to be proud about."

Looking back at his Harvard years, Mack says that he "didn't get much of an education." He finished with a degree in government, but says he has promised not to return for a reunion until he was the last surviving member of the class of 1947.

"You've seen in movies where one guy from Indiana State meets another guy from Sigma Delta Nu, and they go through the handshakes and are delighted to know each other," he says. "I've found that when I've met other Harvard people, they don't give a shit."

Mack sold the class ring years back. "[Harvard] lost track of me a while ago, he says.

When he met with his class' secretary at the Albany Capitol building a few decades ago, Mack says, he was summarily brushed off when he introduced himself as a member of the class of 1947.

"That's kind of typical," Mack says. "I may have been in the class of '47 but I wasn't in his class of '47."