Sometime around 1970, Barney Frank called the head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, all worked up.
Back then, Frank was the top aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White. Elected in 1968, White was a reformer, at least at first. And he’d empowered the BRA director, a guy named Hale Champion, to professionalize the agency by firing old political patronage hires on the payroll.
But there were limits. The BRA had gotten federal money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to renovate Quincy Market, the old colonial area around Faneuil Hall that had fallen into disrepair. Those funds were made possible by Speaker of the House John McCormack, who along with Tip O’Neal, was one of two speakers from the Boston area in that era.
One of the BRA officials on the chopping block, Frank told Champion, had to stay on: “He’s McCormack’s guy.”
“We’ve never seen him, Barney,” Champion countered. “He doesn’t come to work.”
“I don’t give a shit if he’s dead,” said Frank, who died last month at 86. “You want your HUD money? Keep paying him.”
That, at least, is how my father—at the time the press guy for the BRA—told it.
My dad had covered City Hall as a reporter before joining the White administration. He later managed real estate development for the Massachusetts Port Authority, mostly on the South Boston waterfront. The anecdotes he’d tell were heavy on politics and planning, set in locations around the city he’d encountered when he arrived in the mid-60s: In the press room at Old City Hall, a tabloid guy had cheerfully admitted to making up quotes from city councilors, correctly predicting they wouldn’t notice or care. At a South Boston restaurant, crooked state reps had sold their influence for just a few free meals.
I first knew some local politicians—Mike Dukakis, Ray Flynn, Father Drinan, and Barney, as Dad called him—as characters in those stories.
In 1968, my dad wrote what may have been the first newspaper profile of Frank, in the Boston Globe. It was largely laudatory. But my father, himself often unkempt, made much of the young aide’s messiness. There was an anecdote about Barney wandering City Hall shoeless, and a quip that Frank had “occasional moments of neatness.”
Later, my dad continued to refer to Barney with a kind of bemused appreciation. But also, I think, with leftover competitiveness toward a onetime sort-of peer who had ascended so high.