Barney Frank, my dad, and the Boston they knew

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, the political boss from the Boston area who preceded Tip O’Neill as Democratic leader and served in Congress for more than four decades.

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.

Another favorite story featured a City Hall softball game, where my father was the catcher. Barney was attempting to score. To avoid being tagged out, he tried, like he was Pete Rose, to run my dad over. My father claimed he’d used his old football training to knock the future House Banking Committee chairman to the ground.

That two Jews, from Bayonne and Brooklyn, would collide there, amid the Irish who dominated city hall, was less surprising after White’s election. White had hired a young, relatively diverse staff, with more minorities, non-Bostonians, and women—among them my mother, a Minnesotan who joined City Hall directly from Radcliffe.

These people were liberals, Kennedy-influenced products of the 1960s. Many lived in Cambridge, worked in Boston, and moved to Brookline, buying big old houses for amazingly low prices. They worked in city and the state government, with the belief that diligent, pragmatic policies could improve things. Today’s Massachusetts—regulated, prosperous, educated, and relatively healthy—makes a case that they were right.

Moving around the city with my brother and me, Dad pushed this gospel with localized anecdotes that were kind of like parables. In Back Bay, relaxed zoning on corner properties gave developers some of what they wanted, but preserved the neighborhood’s historic look. In East Boston, Massport moved entire three-deckers when the airport expanded. At the redeveloped Commonwealth Pier, in South Boston, which Fidelity took over, they couldn’t get rid of the seagulls that crapped everywhere—until a maintenance guy went on the roof with a shotgun.

Barney, elected to Congress in 1980, had moved on to other matters. But Brookline, where we lived, was in his district, one of the Jewish towns that made up his base. He would show up at all kinds of stuff there—rumpled, verbose, accessible. He once talked to my high school government class for 45 minutes, with his fly open. 

But he was also a dick. He yelled at people there, his own constituents, all the time. He was, to be fair, kind of an egalitarian about it. He made many people feel important enough to berate. A girl I knew got an early dose of political disillusionment when her famous congressman, the gay rights icon, told her how little he thought of her opinion. I think it was about the Gulf War. He went to the wedding of the sister of an acquaintance of mine. She said she felt obligated to warn guests to be careful approaching him: “He’s not that nice.”

And it’s easy to imagine how for Barney, growing up as a closeted kid in a tough town, belittling people started as a defense. But when he was the most powerful person in the room, it was bullying. Barney, by all accounts, didn’t yell at Kevin White or Nancy Pelosi. He yelled at his staff. 

I would argue, though, that his meanness jibed with the place he represented. The city I recall from childhood was not indifferent. It was hostile. Crime was rising, the newspapers were negative, and the racism of the busing days had become only a little less overt. Even in Brookline, we watched guys get out of their cars to fight over traffic disputes. Everyone seemed to hate Dukakis after he lost the presidential election. People supported the Red Sox by brawling at Fenway and booing the players. Their top target was Jim Rice, a career-long Red Sox player and eventual Hall of Famer. We were at a game where a guy ran on the field and mooned the crowd. He had “R-I-C-E” written on his ass.

I don’t think Barney’s constituents voted for him because he was a jerk. They just didn’t care that much. They didn’t prioritize kindness. They wanted smart and effective. He gave them that.

As a reporter, I learned that Barney was easy to reach. But watch out. At my first reporting job at a weekly paper in Boston, I got him on the phone. But when I tried a question he apparently wasn’t expecting, he said he “wasn’t interested in answering that.” Then he hung up.

Later, covering the House, I published a piece that listed him among lawmakers who didn’t participate in a key Democratic Caucus vote over a contested chairmanship. But unlike the other members I mentioned, Barney was himself running for a different chairmanship, which meant he couldn’t vote. His press secretary demanded a correction to clarify that he hadn’t ducked the vote. Trained by my editors to fight such requests, I declined and went home. When I got off the Metro, I had a 30-second voicemail. Addressing me as Mr. Friedman, my former congressman explained that I was an idiot. It was cutting because he was kind of right.

For awhile, I kept the message. I used to play it for people who thought you had to be important to be yelled at like that by Barney Frank. But I lost the voicemail a long time ago.

I never came close to telling him he’d known my parents, that in fact, my mother reputedly canvassed for him while pushing my brother and me in a stroller. He didn’t give the impression of someone interested in reminiscing.

I never checked my dad’s stories about him. But back at the BRA, supposedly, they kept McCormack’s guy, and got their federal funding. The new Quincy Market was ready for the bicentennial, in 1976.

Barney’s memorial service was held there on Monday, at Faneuil Hall. That’s right by the Greenway, the park over the highway that the Big Dig put underground. The city is nicer, safer, and much richer now. The success of the planners is that it feels like all that was inevitable. Hardly anyone remembers Quincy Market before they fixed it up.

So I mourn Barney along with my father, who died a few years ago. The stories he told are a way to remember those City Hall staffers, and the progress they made in the Boston that’s gone.