Interview of Joseph Pollard
Transcript Number 033

INTERVIEWER: Where were you on December 7th and how old were you?

POLLARD: Oh I was 17, I just turned 17 a little while before. I became 18 that following June and on December 7th, we went out to church. It was a Sunday and we came back, my mother was still in the apartment, and so as I came in, I heard these, you know, bombs, Pearl Harbor, unidentified but believed to be Japanese planes. We're getting very little information, but there seems to be tremendous damage. And she walked in and turned off the radio and said, "I'm so tired of listening to all that war news".

INTERVIEWER: Where were you living then, Joe?

POLLARD: Living in New York City, Manhattan. I was born there and brought up there, one of the dead end kids, you know (laughter), on the east side. We lived through the depression. That was the dead end bottom.

INTERVIEWER: Go ahead. What did you do next after?

POLLARD: Well you know, I had gotten out of high school actually the prior summer because I had skipped some grades in grammar school and so I finished high school when I was 17 and had been working actually, odd types of things. Mostly with a branch of the United Parcel called Red Arrow Bonded Messengers. I had been doing that even after school before that, riding a bike around Manhattan traffic delivering stuff. By the time June rolled around and my birthday came, I was now 18, so I knew I was eligible for the draft and very shortly after that, I got a note to come in and register for the draft and go through physical examinations. That was all over, I guess, about August or so. Then I didn't hear anything until right after Christmas, January.

INTERVIEWER: 1940...

POLLARD: 1943 that would be. It was '42 then and it was '43. In January '43, I got the greetings from the President, President Roosevelt greets you and report for induction and physical exams and all that which we went through. We had already had the physical exam when we registered for the draft, but they re-did it all over again. I'd say within a week or two, I was in the Army. Got notice to go over to Fort Dix and only take a few necessary things and we'll give you clothes and went to Fort Dix, New Jersey. It was now February, it was pretty cold. There was nothing but snow and slush and mud and we're in these tents, it was a whole new experience. But it lasted a few weeks and we went through a lot of tests then, aptitude tests and all of that sort of stuff. Then we were assigned to something which we didn't know what, but we were sent, I guess it was about three weeks or so, we were sent to Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Army had taken over all these big resort hotels down there and the one I was in was the Marlboro ______. There were a lot of us there and we trained down there. We did basic training. We marched on the boardwalk with the sleet and rain blowing in off the ocean and all the way to the end of the boardwalk way out on the sand dunes and they had rifle ranges set up there so we could shoot these old Enfield and Springfield 07's that we never saw again, but you learn how to shoot a rifle. We took some more tests and so on and then after about another 3 or 4 weeks we found out we had been assigned to a SAW battalion which we had no idea what that was and we were sent down to Seymour Johnson field in Goldsboro, North Carolina and when we got down there, we found that we were in the Signal Corps. We were attached to the Air Force because or Army Air Corps it was then. That's the Army Air Corps because it was Army Signal Corps and that we were going to go through more basic training. So, of course, during that time we did a lot of drilling and everybody took turns at being drill master. I seemed to remember the commands better I guess so they kept me at it more and I kept doing it and we practiced drilling in small squads and so on. It was kind of fun, you know, and pretty soon everybody was calling me Whitey because I was the drill master. These were all boys from all over. We won the drill championship or something so they kept me as drill master for a while. A lot of the other guys shipped out. Pretty soon I was also sent for advanced training which was down to Drew Field in Tampa, Florida. When we got down there, I guess, it must have been May or June by the time I got to Drew Field and they were forming these, as it turned out, Signal Aircraft Warning Companies. There was a big battalion of them. I guess a battalion is about 1000 men and a company is about 200. But these were individual platoons. Each platoon was about 54-56 on a table of organization and each platoon had its own radar set and you learned to operate it and they were going to practice it on field training and so on. So, but strangely enough when I got there and I got assigned to this radar platoon, which had two officers: a first lieutenant and a second lieutenant. They discovered, they finally discovered, that I had a skill that the Army was just desperate for.

INTERVIEWER: What was that?

POLLARD: I could type. So once the Army found out that I could type, that was the end of my career in the Army. I did nothing but type from that point on practically because everything moved with paper and half of the platoons were writing these out in longhand with carbon paper and I could sit at an Army issue Signal Corps typewriter which was all caps and bat it out in no time because I had been foolish enough in high school to take about a half a year of a touch typing course (laughter). And that's what happens when you volunteer.

INTERVIEWER: When approximately in 1943 are we right now?

POLLARD: We're in about June of '43. So we went through the training, gone out on field training to Myaca, Florida, which is a swamp and still probably is. I think it's a state park now, but we trained in the swamp with radar. We didn't have the radar at that point. The only place the radar was was back in the school where you went to learn. I was classified as a radar operator, but they never had time for me to go to school because I was in the orderly room all the time making up morning reports, sending notes on orders and stuff back and forth, filing Army regulations and everything else because we all had to keep our own records. So anyway I guess it was around August after all this and we got the real heat of Florida. Around August or September, we got our orders. We're going to ship out, we're going overseas and so on and we all got our barracks bags together. We had a final inspection and we got into the trucks and went down to the railroad in Tampa and we got on the railroad. We were on that train for I think about 7 or 8 days. It was really nice. We had sleeping cars, a lot of them with roomettes. I was one of the guys who was in a roomette and we went cross country from Tampa, Florida to Seattle, Washington. And when we got to Seattle, Washington, it was late at night as I remember, around September or October, 12, 1:00 in the morning. We got off the trains about 4, 5, 6 trucks. We got into the trucks. We still had our khakis on, summer khakis, it was cold and we took off in the trucks and we went hours in the trucks, as it turned out south from Seattle into the McKenzie, the Olympic Peninsula, the McKenzie Indian reservation area to a dirt road which must have been for an hour, hour and a half. We got off in the dark and somebody had lanterns and there was a wooden building there that we were picking up our beds, folding beds, getting them into barracks, fresh brand new pine barracks, putting them in there and setting up. We were all in the dark with lanterns and we woke up the next morning and it was unbelievable because we were in this...sequoias and redwood trees that must have been 100-150 feet high and we were right in the middle of them. Some of the fellows walked down this little path and there were about three or four barracks and an orderly room barracks and a supply room and walked down the path and then they called and we went down there and we were on the edge of about a 200 foot cliff and this big original radar set in those days, SCR250 or something like that. It was designed by the British and built in Canada and they had used it during the Battle of Britain, that type of radar. It was a big square antenna thing and you'd climb up on it, must have been 40 feet high, the antenna revolved. And there was this huge radar set sitting on the cliff and we were a part of the signal aircraft warning system for the northwest coast because the Japs were in the ocean?. So we got the thing going and the guys who were the radar mechanics got it moving and the radar operators got in and started their regular scan up to the north because everybody was afraid Japanese planes were going to be coming down and bombing us. One actually did, but not where I was, but there was one that came off a submarine. I read about it later, dropped a few bombs in Oregon. And we were operating, I was operating my typewriter in the orderly room trying to put together our set of government regulations, keeping the morning report and sick call report and the duty roster and all the rest of it and we had a first lieutenant who was an electronics engineer who had been sent to Britain to study radar over there and he was the commander of the platoon and a second lieutenant who was an administrative officer just out of OCS and he was supposed to be doing what I was doing, but I was showing them how to do it. Within a short time, I was like a corporal because they needed me (laughter), but in December or so, we had a company headquarters out of Seattle came down and gave us an inspection. They checked all of our records and they found that even though I was doing all of this work, keeping all the records and so on, I hadn't had any training in it, so I had to go to clerk school. So they shipped me out down to Sacramento and I went to clerk school for about a month, Camp Kohler Signal Corps. And when I came back to Seattle I found out they had closed down the Cape Elizabeth radar station. The Japs were withdrawing from the Aleutians and my company or my platoon actually had been shipped out and I found out later from corresponding with some of the guys that they went up the east coast of Italy with General Clark's Army during the Italian invasion. But they assigned me then to another radar platoon which was operating which actually was for a different type of radar set. It was a shorter range radar set and was designed to intercept fighters and we were in contact with Payne Field and we'd tell them if we saw any blips on the screen or anything and let me know so they could go up and shoot these Jap planes that never arrived. But they'd go up on practices. And then we did start getting some blips, but as one of the guys said, I've got, you know he said, "I've got this blip" on such and such a spot and there was another tube which was a high range tube and the guy says "yeah, but that's a seagoing vessel" but he says, "I don't know. I've got it at about 2000 feet". So what it was they were sending these balloons over with thermoid bombs and they would drift across the Pacific and they hoped they would set forest fires on fire. Of course, they didn't realize that we had like 40 inches of rain on the Olympic Peninsula so most of them just went out. So we called the fighter squadrons up at Payne Field and they'd go up at night and they'd try and find these things. It was good practice, and I think they shot some down, most of them I imagine they missed. Even with the plane's radar, it was hard to pick them up. But that's what we did. This was in Raymond, Washington. It was fun. We had a town all to ourselves, just 50 some odd guys. Most of the other guys in town had been drafted just like we had. There were tons of girls at the little tiny storefront USO they had down there. It wasn't a bad time at all. And we were the U.S. Army and we were a team (laughter). It was a great six or seven months. Come April they decided I guess, April '44 now, they decided at the top well the Japs were gone from the ocean by then. They closed down all of these radar stations and they shipped us all down to Fresno which was a, Camp Pinedale was the headquarters for the Signal Corps of the west, so we all went into Camp Pinedale and they decided to run us through tests and get us to do other things. So I qualified for cryptographer school and I went to cryptographer school for a while and learned to be a cryptographer with the little machines that you made codes with and so on and then I did pretty good in it so they sent me then to cryptanalysis school which was breaking codes and I did that for a while. And then I came out, but somewhere along the line somebody realized that I could type and pretty soon I was in the company in the base headquarters at Pinedale base headquarters and I was typing again in the Classification and Assignment area and for a while they kept putting me in these little various signal corps type unit because they mostly detached units and they didn't have any clericals in their table of organization so somebody had to learn how to keep the records. So I'd go in for a month or so, three weeks before they'd get shipped out and teach somebody in there that had some skills and could spell maybe how to do these things. I had a lot of fun doing that. The one that I went into I remember was on the Air Corps band that was training in the signal camp because they were going overseas and there was a detached part of the band, supposed to be small and I imagine in retrospect, it was probably because we were heading into the Philippines and we were going to take it at about that point and they wanted a band over there for McArthur to come walking in or something. So the band, I taught one of the guys in the band how to do it and I slept in the back with the band and I was part of the band for a while. It was fun because we had some of the best musicians in the country that were in the band.

INTERVIEWER: It wasn't Glenn Miller, was it?

POLLARD: No it wasn't, we had some crazy guy that would play the French horn and he'd come drunk as a skunk at 2:00 in the morning and take this French horn out and start blowing it and it sounded like banshees coming through the woods or something (laughter). Everybody was throwing things at him. But one of the really nice things, there was a fellow by the name of Melvin Baden. I still remember the name. He was concert master of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a young fella, and he was drafted as a musician I guess. Whoever brought him in had the sense to say let's save the musicians and they assigned them to the Army band, but Army band doesn't play violins so he was assigned as a base drummer so he'd walk in the marching band with a big base drum and beating that, but when he came back to the barracks, he used to practice that violin every day. It was just beautiful to listen to. So that was nice. Oh I was in the Japanese radio intercept outfit. Most of the soldiers were nesei, Japanese boys, and I had to teach one of the fellows in that to do it. In fact, that was almost a permanent assignment because there was a question of should I go with them or should this other guy who was an American interpreter who could do it, should he go with them because..., but I was a corporal and he was a PFC and the table of organization called for a PFC so he got to go and I went back to my typewriter at headquarters. So they shipped out. They went to the Philippines too. No, I'm sorry, they didn't go to the Philippines, that was the band. They went to India, they went to northern India when we were fighting down in Burma and all that sort of stuff and they had this thing that went over the hump with flying the stuff over to the Chinese. And they were up in northern India intercepting Japanese radio and they would intercept it and the code guys would break the codes and they knew kind of what the Japanese armies were doing and again the fella that went over there used to keep in touch with me when I was still in Pinedale and I stayed in Pinedale and Fresno, staying at headquarters. Then I got into the classification and assignment section as I think I mentioned. We were at a point where I was put into it, I was a corporal and the thing was run by the NCO, who was a staff sergeant. He was a married guy, nice fella, but he drank a lot and was out sick a lot and so somewhere along the line, he didn't seem to mind, I reorganized the files so I could find things and it was all new then. I remember it was some time in July of this would be July of '45, because I was in Pinedale all of this time, so around June or July of '45...

INTERVIEWER: So the war in Europe had ended.

POLLARD: The war in Europe, yea, it was just after V-E Day.

INTERVIEWER: Because May I think was V-E Day.

POLLARD: We had an inspection from something called Continental Air Force Headquarters. They had just changed from Air Corps to Air Force and they started the, the Air Force headquarters was in Bolling Field in Washington, so we got an inspection by a bunch of brass that came out there to look at all the Air Corps guys that were in Pinedale. We were Signal Corps but we had just been changed over to Air Corps now when this happened. We were changed to Air Corps and when the Air Force started, then we were Air Force. So they wanted to see air troops that were in the Signal Corps camp and so on so they came over and inspected it all. I remember we had a major that came through, inspected our classification and assignment. I was running the Office of Personnel because the staff sergeant was a little sick and there was a chief officer that was over the whole enlisted and officer personnel so I was on the officer's side and he had his office in the enlisted sign. It was much bigger there so...yeah so anyway, he inspected it and gave me a little thing about didn't understand the Army regulations, how things were supposed to be filed because I hadn't filed them they way they were supposed to be (laughter) , but I explained to him, I just filing them so I could find them faster because we were getting calls for certain MOS's so I had re-filed them all by MOS so that when we got...that was military occupation specialty...file them all by MOS so that when we got a call for 50 yards of this MOS to be sent to the infantry training camp or something, I could pull them out faster and work through them without...I kept a list of the MOS's so that I if I needed it by name, I could always find it. But that's not the Army way son. So but I'd say about two or three weeks after they left, we got a telegram to transfer our corporal to Bolling Field, Washington, D.C. immediately.

INTERVIEWER: This is now July of '45. Have you been home on leave yet?

POLLARD: Yeah, I went home about three times, cross-country on the train all the way, cross-country back, sitting up most of the way, got home to see my mother and my girlfriend and all that sort of thing. That was great, going back and you know each time you go back, you think it's the last time I'm going see them, but...

INTERVIEWER: Okay, so now you're in the Air Force in Washington.

POLLARD: Well actually by the time I was sent to Washington, it was about August, the 15th or 16th of August, I got to Washington and V-J Day had happened the first week of August, so I spent V-J Day in Fresno which was just as wild as the pictures I've seen of New York. I mean we just all left the base that day. I mean whatever way you could get in, buses, trucks, we went into town. The whole thing just evaporated and we went into Fresno and we got into Fresno, you couldn't move because the cars were bumper to bumper right down the main street. They were a lot of convertibles in those days. There were girls sitting on the convertibles and waving. We were going crazy. There was paper flying all over the place. At one place there were tons of paper, it was the telephone company so a couple of us went upstairs to see what was going on and here's all these telephone operators tearing up everything and throwing it out the windows. Let me tell you, I didn't get back to base that night. It was a great V-J Day (laughter). Anyway we went to Washington and a couple of weeks later and who's in charge but the classification section but my major and he said I loved the way you changed that thing around. He says we're going to do things differently in the Air Force and he says I like to have a guy that wants to do things differently. He says do you think you can run our office, the classification section here. Wonderful. I mean it was a great job. They bumped me from corporal to staff sergeant on the same orders and I started putting the things together as they came in, all the material because they were just organizing it, so I was getting desks and stuff. People were being assigned to me to work, guys that could type. I didn't have to type anymore. People that could type, but mostly civilian women who could type and a few of the new WAFs, the Women's Air Force girls. So it was like going to heaven. I mean 21 years old, got about 10 women working for me, Washington, D.C., the war was over. After a short while we got a half day Saturday and it was paradise. You walked downtown in a uniform, you were God. You could bust into any party as long as you were decently dressed and your hair combed and all that stuff. You walked into the Willard Hotel. There'd be a big party, a wedding, you just walk in, "Hey soldier, come over to the table," right and from I guess it was around September that I started, September of '45. I used to go home on weekends, every other weekend or so, I'd jump the train Saturday afternoon, I'd be home to see everybody Saturday evening, go out Saturday night, all day Sunday and I'd grab the midnight train coming back and get in at about 5:00 in the morning and by the time I got back to Bolling Field, it was 6:00 and I'd get about one or two hours sleep and then I was up and running my little department and snoozing a little on the side, but we did a lot of work because for a while there, they were transferring officers from the European theater, bringing them back and either discharging them or letting them decommission or whatever they were or they were transferring them to the South Pacific. We still had an occupation to go. So the problem was in taking these officers and finding what kind of skills they had that might be adapted to an occupation as opposed to a fighting army. So of course all the pilots were getting out and all the administrative people and so on were being held and shipped out to new training deals and then eventually out to the South Pacific or eventually to Japan. So there was a lot of work that was going on and they kept me there, I didn't have enough points because I hadn't been overseas, so I didn't have enough points to get out with the rest of the guys who came in with me. So I was there until March of '46. At that point, they offered me a JWG, a junior warrant officer if I'd stay.

INTERVIEWER: Did you?

POLLARD: No. I never liked the Army (laughter), but what I did is I signed up for the Reserves at least. You know 21 years old, if things didn't work out, at least I'd be a staff sergeant.

INTERVIEWER: So now you're out of the Army.

POLLARD: I'm out of the Army.

INTERVIEWER: What did you do in civilian life when you went back?

POLLARD: Well when I went back the first thing I had sort of some skill as an artist and I wanted to be an artist so the first thing I did was go to the Art Students League over on 57th Street in New York City and I signed up for an art course, painting, it was GI bill so it didn't cost me anything except for the paintbrushes and I painted for about two or three months and I realized I really liked it. I was putting out some stuff that even the instructors were saying, hey you're doing good, you know. So I decided then I wanted to go to illustration, I wanted to be a commercial illustrator. So I got a job at the National City Bank in New York down in Wall Street because I could type, you see. And I was typing at night, all night. I'd go down there oh 4:00 after I got out of school because I went to school. I went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. No I was going to, I was going to Art Students League still in the daytime and I was working there at night because I needed the money. And then by the time the fall came around, I got myself into Pratt Institute, but I got myself in at night. By that time the bank liked me so they wanted me to stay and take a full time job in the daytime because apparently I could get into fees and stuff like that too, so I went into the accounting section of the foreign exchange, foreign trade thing, letters of credit and things like that for shipping. I went into the accounting department with that and I was going to school at night learning to be an illustrator at Pratt. I went for four years to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to learn to be an illustrator and in the daytime, I was working first in the accounting department. Then they figured I could do some other stuff. I could write letters, I could type, I could do things like that. They put me in the correspondence section where you corresponded with all these foreign banks about errors and corrections and adjustments in transactions and so on. So I ended up with not even a typewriter, but a Dictaphone machine, investigating errors in transactions and reporting to the foreign bank as well as to our own department on that sort of thing. I got pretty good at it. I got some raises.

INTERVIEWER: You're still not married?

POLLARD: Oh no I did. That's why I was working (laughter). I got married, I decided to get married right away and we were married in January of 1947. So that's why I was working so hard and going to school too. You know, you had to have motivation in those days and you know you got married in those days. You didn't go live with each other. It was different. And so those were, you know, exciting days. Unfortunately the month that I got out and graduated from Pratt after four years and got my certificate, it wasn't a degree because I was only going at night and only learning the main stuff and not the academics. One month after that, I got notice from the Army to report down at Biloxi, Mississippi. Harry Truman, five days after my orders were signed, declared the police action in Korea, but the Army knew about it ahead of time and they got their classification and assignment guys in quick. So I was in classification and assignment in Biloxi, Mississippi. I was a staff sergeant. Again I was the experienced guy with processing and testing and all that sort of stuff.

INTERVIEWER: This is like 1950?

POLLARD: 1950 exactly, June 1950. And I stayed in Biloxi for three or four months and they decided to move that whole processing center up to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. We moved everything up there and I was NCO in charge of classification, assignment and processing center. They made me a tech sergeant by then. I'm still about 24, 25 years old. The officer in charge, all of the officers in charge one after another were flying officers. That's what they gave them, the job of classification and assignment officer because there was nothing to do. The NCOs did all the work and they just signed the stuff we gave them. So I was at Montgomery, Alabama at Maxwell Field. My wife came down. She was a good typist and stenographer. She got a job right on the base, no problem. We lived like kings, much better than we would have lived outside of the Army. Then I guess it was somewhere in that spring she got pregnant and come August, I originally was brought in for one year. That's the way they had it. Then Congress went about passing and extending it to 18 months and so on. But I got in so early I was still under the one year when my one year was up. So despite my wife's misgivings, I got out. I just put in my papers and got out and I was discharged and went back and we drove. By that time I had a car, we drove back up to New York, no job, no anything and a baby about five or six months on the way. But I just didn't want to be in the Army.

INTERVIEWER: What did you do when you got back in civilian life?

POLLARD: Well I called all my friends on the way up, everybody I knew, about jobs, in advertising. I wanted to be in the advertising business and one fellow that I knew sent me over to another fellow who sent me to another one that was running retail, advertising for a retail department store chain in New York that had department stores around the country. I went over to see him and he told them that their number one department store, they were small stores, the biggest one of them did about $2 million, which is about what a good drugstore does today. But their biggest store was a $2 million store, their advertising manager had just quit and they were looking for a new advertising manager and asked me what I had done and I gave them a lot of nonsense about, you know, what I could do and all the rest of it. But he bought it and I went out and bought a book on advertising production, newspaper advertising production and I read it on the train all the way up to Utica, New York, which is where the department store was, so that when I was interviewed by the manager, I sounded like I knew more about advertising production and newspaper advertising than he ever heard of. So I got the job and I made a lot of mistakes, but he was a good guy.

INTERVIEWER: Is that what you've been doing every since, advertising?

POLLARD: Advertising. Because I did very little art. I did some art while I was up there, but I found it was more, the layout part of it was better, working with people and figuring out the right merchandise and all of that was more fun so let somebody else do the art eventually. In those days, we really couldn't afford a lot so we bought mats, mat services and stuff like that. It was somebody else drawing the art.

INTERVIEWER: Did you move to Utica?

POLLARD: Moved to Utica with my wife and but I wasn't there more than about 2-3 years, ran some really good promotions, brought a lot of models up from New York, top models, put on a little fashion show in the local theater one day. It was a big success in the middle of a snowstorm. A few things like that. My boss, the manager of that store, was transferred to New York and he became the Vice President of Operations. He was the big guy in the best store and I'd say a little while after he was down there, he called me up and said we need a good advertising guy in New York. So I became Advertising Manager, I about 27, 28. I was advertising manager of the whole chain. So it was a nice start and I was at that for quite a few years and then learned other things. Finally decided to pull out and get a better job with another chain because I was just a kid then, you know. I was 35, 36, 37 years old and I was still a kid. So I got out and got into another company where I got better pay and so on. Worked my way up the advertising chain.

INTERVIEWER: Always living in New York?

POLLARD: Oh no. We moved to Chicago when I was in Chicago with this chain, I was there about five years. Came back to New York, I was Advertising Sales Promotion Manager which was over the advertising display of some other things and from there I went to Interstate Department Stores in New York which had, they were just getting into the discount business. We were learning the discount business. And so I got into that. But this was my original company, where I had started, left and so on. I went back to them when I got into the discount business and there's still little department stores getting these big discount stores so that was a whole new experience. I ended up for a good while, they had a lot of trouble in California. They had bought a big chain in California and were opening new stores and it wasn't working too well so I spent more than half my time in California.

INTERVIEWER: Was your wife and family traveling around with you everyplace?

POLLARD: Not on to California they didn't because I was still in New York and California. I was over both ends of it. So I'd be out in California for a couple of weeks or so. Generally more time in California than in New York. Then I'd be flying back every other or every third weekend and I'd stay in New York for a week or so and then I'd go back to California. In the meantime, I was having a lot more kids. 

INTERVIEWER: How many do you have?

POLLARD: I had six kids all together. You know, good Catholic family, what can you say. Not that good on my part, you know. Anyway we had a fairly good existence. My wife passed away unfortunately.

INTERVIEWER: Have all your kids gone to college?

POLLARD: Yeah, all but one. We had one that had a serious birth defect, but all the other five went.

INTERVIEWER: Wonderful. Joe, you know having been through all of this and raised your own family, spend a few minutes and tell us what you think about the future of America, these younger people today, ought to have learned from your experience.

POLLARD: Well, you know, after you go through it, I mean when I got out of high school, I never thought I was going to go to college or anything further than that. We had no money in the depression. Lost my father when I was really young, 7-8 years old. So it opened a whole new world, the Army did. And you really begin to realize how much there could be to life if you work at it. And in the Army you learn that working at it counted. If you did things, no matter how stupid they were, like typing, if you did them well, there was a certain amount of pride in that too. So you learned to do things, no matter what they are, you try to do them well. And I really think that's part of why I have a very happy life today. As much as I did, I tried to do it better than anybody and as a result, the last 20 years I spent with one company, not only in charge of their advertising, but their whole public communications and everything else. It's a big chain. We were taken over by a multinational out of Canada. I got on the operating board of the multinational as vice president and involved in the preparations of annual reports and all sorts of graphic type stuff. Of what I did in Washington, which was where the headquarters of my chain was, was lobbying. I did a tremendous amount of television commercial work and so on. It was a big chain, People's Drugstore which has now been absorbed by CVS. It was sold by Amasco to CVS. But I spent 20 years there and it was a very satisfying life. When my wife passed away, I actually married one of the women that worked for me who was our advertising manager. She had been working for me for 7-8 years. She was single and we got along fine and when my wife died, I guess we just went from there and it's been a very very...we're heading for our 20th anniversary next year 2001. We were married 1981 on January 1.

INTERVIEWER: Congratulations.

POLLARD: Start the new year, next year January 1 will be our anniversary. Hopefully we're going to spend some of it on our own.

INTERVIEWER: Well Joe, congratulations for a successful life.

POLLARD: Hey, I'm not buried yet (laughter).

INTERVIEWER: I know, and we're all happy for that and tomorrow is Flag Day.

POLLARD: Yeah, we'll have our flag up tomorrow. Had it up for Memorial Day.

INTERVIEWER: And I'm sure everybody is going to be very interested in what you've just said. Unless you've got something else to add, we can...

POLLARD: One of the things you learn in commercials, when you have nothing else to say, shut up.