You have to take the opportunity to talk to people when you have the chance.
I went to the service of Foothills School Division trustee Michael Pollard on Aug. 5 who had passed away the week before.
I found out he was so much more than a person who was concerned about the education of children in his ward of Blackie, Davisburg and Cayley as well as throughout the Foothills.
I had known he was involved in the civil rights movements in the United States in the mid 1960s, and I believe I had mentioned it briefly in an introduction to him when Pollard stepped to the plate to become a trustee in 2013.
I recall asking him about it and he kind of lightly brushed it off as ‘I just got on a bus and helped’. When I asked one of his daughters about that conversation, her comment was “Dad was more about the cause than talking about himself.”
In fact, Pollard walked in the famous Selma March in 1965. That was the famous march when thousands of people joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as they took on Governor George Wallace when they entered Montgomery, Alabama.
Unfortunately, now Pollard is gone. I won’t have the opportunity to hear the stories first-hand of the civil rights movements, or the British-born Pollard taking on the United States and the Vietnam draft.
It was a delight listening to Pollard’s friends discuss criss-crossing the United States with their thumbs as their main source of transportation, kind of like Jack Kerouac and the great Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
During the celebration of Pollard’s life, a man who Pollard had taken under his wing talked of getting advice from the trustee. Pollard had given him a copy of the Beatles’ album The Magical Mystery Tour.
I winced a little. I’m a Stones guy.
But it was fitting. Although Pollard’s actions with the civil rights and taking on Uncle Sam proved he was in his way a Street Fighting Man, he was an artist, a filmmaker, a father and a trustee who believed All You Need Is Love.
I never took the chance to talk to him about those things that weren’t related to school stuff.
I blew it.
He will be missed.
