"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.