Barney.

Congressman Barney Frank was an unflinching champion of the fishing industry.

That’s not a phrase you see much, and one he never as a child dreamed would be attached to him.

But Barney rarely flinched from challenges.

New Bedford is home to the nation’s 400-year-old codfish and scallop fleet. It was on the economic ropes in 1992 when Barney landed it in that year’s congressional redistricting. Like so many times before, he jumped in to learn and fight.

Barney loved the fishing families, and they loved him, whether they voted for him or not.

One day in the mid-1990s, Kathy Downey, the owner of Trio Algarvio, a fish processing plant, called his office to ask if monkfish, which she wanted to export, was kosher, which would have earned a premium. It wasn’t a federal issue; we didn’t really know the answer [although the name may have been a giveaway]; and huh, is monkfish kosher?

But in Congressman Frank’s office, his direction was clear: if a constituent had a solvable problem, solve it.

I was able to track it down through the kosher hotline at Yeshiva University, [but that’s another story]. Monkfish is not kosher; it’s a bottom feeder.

I told that to Mrs. Downey, who, accustomed to the congressman’s tremendous leadership, responded, “oh, is there anything Bahnee can do?”

Barney’s constituents, and those of us who worked with and for him, loved that about the shared enterprise he created — bust your ass, fight for those who can’t fight well for themselves, and if something looked undoable, find a way through.

Congressman Frank treated his congressional seat as if he were on retainer to 600,000 constituents. His bedrock conviction was, unless they were nuts [and even then], figure out their issues, or make it very clear to them why it couldn’t be figured out. The ferocity of his belief and practice that his [and your] job was to do what they would do if they had your access and experience provided an ethic, a responsiveness, and an effectiveness which was, well, freakish.

The rules were simple to see and exhausting to execute.

Never guess, figure it out.

Keep everyone informed of where you and they are. “I don’t know” is a better answer than silence or making it up. Get back to people before they had to ask twice.

Do not waste anyone’s time. Get to the point.

Halves of loaves are great. Take them, and fight for the other half.

Work with people you can’t stand if you can make a difference.

Fight someone else’s battle with gusto. It improves the chance they will be there for you.

Do your job, no one else’s, including his.

Be precise [or watch out for epithets at best].

The best way to advocate for whatever minority you are is to do a great job at whatever you’re doing.

And a hundred others.

Working with and for Barney was a daily tornado. Paragraphs were started in the middle. Huge ideas [or tiny corrections] were thrown at you without any interval.

He delighted in the barb. If he came up with a new great line, he’d repeat it thirty times that day. And why not?

After a noticeably incoherent point from a Tennessee Republican during a hearing, he loudly instructed me to research whether non-sentient beings were permitted to vote in that gentleman’s district. His stage whisper had the volume of a kid from Bayonne whose father owned a mob-related truck stop.

At least with me, there appeared to be no boundaries on the humor, in a way I was cool with. The punchline of one of his favorites became a recurring theme for his legislative tenacity: The Jewish grandmother screaming her guts out as her grandson is drowning, bobbing in the water, fighting for his life. The lifeguards drag the grandson in and work on him for what seems like an hour. They are spent, to the point of passing out, but they work furiously on the young boy. The heat. The drama. The fear. The gagging. Finally, the boy coughs, breathes. “Gevalt, he’s alive!” “A miracle!” The lifeguards are sprawled and panting, themselves now near death.

The grandmother, bending over a wheezing lifeguard, says, “…listen, darling, you wouldn’t mind, my grandson, he had a hat.”

His favorite show was “Guys and Dolls”. A favored singer/actress was Pearl Bailey. There are themes here — underdogs, genius, wit.

Barney made a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of people around the world.

Who can say that?

Affordable housing. Consumer finance. Access to banking. Being gay in the military, or pretty much anywhere. Fishermen. Japanese war internees. Victims of hate crimes. Divorcing moms.

A single mom from Acushnet wrote us a letter. Her divorced husband, now in Texas, had been able to modify downward by half the child custody payments a Massachusetts court had ordered for their two children. He said that’s stupid, let’s fix the law. Two years later, we did just that, enacting legislation requiring the parent who’d moved to another state to return home to argue for a modification. How many hundreds of thousands of moms are financially viable because of this?

A Cuban homosexual was being persecuted by the Castro government, but couldn’t get asylum. Barney told us to figure it out. With the help of a Republican, Ileana Ros Lehtinen, a Republican who would do anything to oppose Castro, we got Attorney General Reno to change the asylum rules. Which AG Reno then followed to additionally allow victims of domestic violence asylum. Thousands of people around the world came to America to live freely.

This happened constantly. See a problem, fix it. Or work to exhaustion trying.

And he believed in movements, and strategy and tactics. If you understood the underlying dynamic of something — whether it was the rules of debate in committee, or how coalitions churn within movements — you could be efficient and cut to the core question, which he could always do.

Barney fought for reparations [yes, reparations] for Japanese Americans who had been interned in camps during World War 2. In 1988, he and Congressman Norm Mineta moved legislation through the House to provide cash relief. Remarkable. In 1994, at the Japanese American Civic League convention in Denver, they were debating a resolution on the floor for gay marriage. Congressman Minetta cited the gay Congressman Frank’s work in getting their relief. That’s coalition politics 201.

Barney used his power. He hammered George Stephanopoulos, John Podesta, and other leaders in the Clinton White House to eliminate by executive order the ban on gays and lesbians getting security clearances, to require Cabinet agencies to protect us from basic discrimination, and to hire gay people.

For a spell, he chaired the committee that oversees the federal courts, which interacted with, inter alia, the Supreme Court. On a regular visit to the Court, Barney pressed Chief Justice William Rehnquist on why the Court refused to adopt a human resources policy protecting homosexuals [as we were known] from job discrimination. Rehnquist was not a happy camper. We could not have been prouder of Barney.

Barney was at the center of the toughest stuff. President Clinton pledged to lift the ban on gays in the military. He couldn’t get it done; the stark homophobia of Colin Powell and, worse, the Democratic chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sam Nunn, were too great an obstacle. We just didn’t have the votes. Clinton, and Barney, kept coming up with compromises — which were attacked not just by the right but by our own people. It was a horrible lesson that happens over and over, understandably — it’s our friends who are looking for compromises who are the problem, not the recalcitrant opponent who won’t even talk to us. That was wrenching for Barney. That was one of the few times I saw him genuinely anguished; crying was the least of it.

What was the right thing to do? And where are the mentors or elders to seek guidance from? Oh, wait, Barney was the elder. How do we get our base to see that the work has to be moving the center right, not just attacking our leaders for their inability to move our hardened opponents?

Barney was an awesome leader. Vision. Goals. Strategy. Tactics. Communications. Hard work. Stamina. Perspective. He loved people like him — Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi. He held a truism, long before Barack Obama would come to be elected, that the best members of Congress were the women, the people of color, and the handful of gays; they were authentic, none of them had a millisecond of illusion that they could be president someday, so they just did their jobs.

He had little to no patience for most. He could be relentlessly mean, a bully. Staff always had code and signals for each other about what mood we were dealing with that day. I wish I hadn’t been a part of enabling that, but I did.

Congressman Barney Frank was a gay, overweight, left-handed Jew whose father did time. The odds of success for him weren’t great. There was a time some would have called that package “damaged goods.” Some still might.

Damned if this intellectual brawler didn’t fight and struggle and insist on doing good. He made a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions. He was seen and heard in ways most of us don’t even dream.

And in his last minutes, he pushed for more, publishing a book that admonishes us on all the things we’re doing wrong and what we could be doing right.

I hope wherever he is, they allow him to smoke cigars in peace. I hope he is mastering the new rules and engaging people to fight for more.

“Listen, you wouldn’t mind, he had a hat.”