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.