Early Life
MacNelly was born in New York City in 1947 and grew up on Long Island. MacNelly's mother was a retired journalist. His father C.L. MacNelly, ran an advertising firm, and was the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post from 1964 to 1968. MacNelly was educated in his teens at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, where he was a class clown and decided to be an illustrator. He graduated in 1965 and went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined the literary society St. Anthony Hall. He was accepted as a sports journalist and illustrator for The Daily Tar Heel and specialized in satire. He considered himself to be a horrible sports writer, but his illustrations for the paper were well beyond the ability of an average art student. His work for the college's newspaper led to work at the Chapel Hill Weekly. In 1969, MacNelly was commissioned to paint a representation of the Carolina Inn, which became an "iconic" image representing the Chapel Hill campus hotel and appeared on promotional brochures and menus issued by the inn in the ensuing decades. The painting mysteriously disappeared in the 1980s and resurfaced in Massachusetts in 2008, when it was returned to the Carolina Inn and presented to the public for the first time at an official unveiling in January 2009, attended by MacNelly's son Danny.
MacNelly quit school just shy of getting his bachelor's degree and married his first wife, Rita MacNelly, in 1970. He married Scottie Perry in 1985, and had a son Matt.
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