Mack’s

East 96th Street, New York

This modern luxury high-rise apartment block stands next door to an apartment building where I lived as a boy, on the site of a former one-storey auto-body repair shop known as Mack’s because the Black man who owned and operated it was called Mack. Unknown to us at the time, he was Carl C McNair, father of “Ronald Erwin McNair (October 21, 1950 – January 28, 1986)… an American NASA astronaut and physicist [who] died at the age of 35 during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger.”