Legendary LSU coach Dale Brown stood out in an era when picking up the phone mattered

I was working late in the newsroom that Friday night, sometime in the winter of 1998. This was the magnificent old Kansas City Star building on Grand Avenue. Ernest Hemingway worked there once, and it always featured the wonderful newsroom soundtrack of clacking keyboards and humming conversations and ringing telephones.

My telephone rang. The number wasn’t one I was familiar with. But in those days, that didn’t stop you from picking up the phone anyway. Certainly not in Hemingway’s newsroom.

Before I could say hello, the voice on the other end barged in.

“It’s Dale Brown.”