This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your stories,

send them to our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. And now a story from

Hank Brown, the extraordinary statesman who led three different universities, served as Colorado's

senator and was fortunate to work with beef pioneer Kenny Montfort.

Here's Hank paying tribute to his friend Kenny.

I think the thing that I'll remember most about Kenny, his tolerance.

Kenny was a liberal Democrat.

He eventually switched to the Republican Party,

but he was opposed to the Vietnam War, and yet he still hired me who'd been

there and supported it. At one point a close friend of his in the community had a

shoe store and had criticized Kenny publicly and really nasty remarks about him in

the local newspaper over one of the projects the company was doing.

And I think it hurt Kenny's feelings because he was, thought of him as a good friend.

Some friends of Kenny immediately organized a boycott at the shoe store. If he would say

such horrible things about Kenny, they didn't want

to do business with him. When Kenny heard about it, he called everybody involved in the

movement and urged them to patronize the store and not penalize this fellow who'd been

so nasty to him. And Kenny's explanation was that if you can lose your livelihood by expressing your viewpoint,

then your freedom of speech doesn't mean anything.

You have to have the kind of society where people don't destroy your livelihood,

...