THERE’S LITTLE in the news business that bothers seasoned political reporters. We deal with personalities, egos, partisan attacks, attempts at humiliation, personal barbs, even veiled threats.

Most of it bounces off the hardened veterans of this noble effort to pry information loose about our government, those who wield power in it, and make sense of it all for the public. But one thing reporters never stop hating is when a public figure declines comment or simply doesn’t return a call.

That never applied to Barney Frank, the longtime Massachusetts congressman who died Wednesday from congestive heart failure at age 86 at his home in Ogunquit, Maine.

Frank was consistently accessible, ever quotable, always on the record, and honest to a fault. Love him or hate him – and there was often little middle ground – you’d be hard-pressed to find a story that included the sentence, “Frank did not return a call for comment” or “Frank refused to comment.”

If you were going to talk with him, you had best be armed with solid facts and good questions, or be subject to his famously acerbic style, which could slice through you before you knew it.

My dealings with Frank, a leading liberal Democratic voice in the House over three decades, were only during his congressional career. But folks I know who go back to his days in Boston City Hall working for Kevin White say the only thing about him that changed was his style of dress. Rumpled eventually gave way to ironed shirts. “Neatness isn’t everything” was one of his early campaign slogans on posters that became collectors’ items.

Unlike some of my former colleagues in the media, I liked Frank very much, though, truth be told, I also liked John Silber, the equally sharp-tongued longtime president of Boston University and one-time candidate for governor. Their politics were hardly in synch, so they’d never admit it, but they were cut from the same cloth. Both acted as if they were the smartest people in the room, which they usually were.

I always believed self-assured people like that are who you want in elected office, not some go-along-to-get-along lemming.

There were no airs or pretense with Frank, and no coterie of staffers running interference for him before he’d deign to take your call. As a reporter or editor, whether it was a deep policy piece or something less pressing, the slightly nasal, unmistakably Newton-by-way-of-Bayonne, New Jersey, voice on the other end of the phone was always the one that you heard, not some underling.

Fast with a quip, with a biting sense of humor that had few rivals in Congress, Frank’s most caustic barbs were often unleashed on Republicans. But Democrats and even his own constituents were not spared. It was journalists, though, who often were on the receiving end of his most impatient and impolitic jabs.

I’d often heard that Frank would rarely, if ever, say thank you to a reporter, and that his interviews ended abruptly when he felt like it.

That was not my experience. When I was editorial page editor at the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, he came in for an endorsement interview during his 2008 reelection campaign. He was, at the time, a 14-term incumbent and the chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee. The banking crisis that threatened to take down the global economy peaked that September, and his reelection against Republican Earl Sholley (Who? Yup, that says it all) was a foregone conclusion.

But Frank submitted himself to the process, thoroughly addressing every question we threw at him. Afterward, from his car, he called to thank me for our editorial board’s time, and later, when the endorsement of his reelection came out, he called again to say thanks. Both calls were gracious, and felt and sounded sincere.

In the early 90s, I reported stories and wrote the Political Notebook columns for the Boston Globe’s South and West weekly sections, when I had many occasions to deal with Frank, whose district included communities in both regions.

In September of 1991, I called Frank’s office to ask him some questions about a push he was making in Congress, along with Republican Congressman Jon Kyl, a staunch conservative from Arizona, for a promise by Russia of a reduction in its military spending in exchange for US aid to the newly reconstituted Russian state following the collapse of the Soviet Union. After a longer than I expected interview that was full of substance and policy, I had one more unrelated question that I had saved, figuring I’d get hung up on when I asked it.

Earlier that week, Roll Call, the insider publication focused on Capitol Hill, had named Frank one of the eight “hippest” members of Congress. Without missing a beat, Frank said the only reason the list had eight was “they couldn’t find 10 hip congressmen.” Truth be told, it didn’t quite feel like the most apt description of what made him stand out. But I didn’t try to contest the designation. Instead, I asked him what made him so hip. That drew a rare deflection.

“It would be unhip to comment on that,” he said, adding that to retain one’s hip standing, one had to adopt a posture of “studied nonchalance.”

As was often the case following a fast Frank rejoinder, I had no comeback.

Jack Sullivan is a retired senior investigative reporter for CommonWealth.

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