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."