LANSING, MI -- He called himself "The Peacemaker."
A regular attendee of Lansing City Council meetings until illness kept him home, he always ended each three-minute speech to the city council with one word: peace.
John Pollard, a longtime Lansing activist and city government watchdog, died Friday at the age of 65.
The cause, according to longtime friend Darnell Oldham Sr., was lung cancer.
Anyone with business in city hall knew Pollard.
He attended meetings of the Lansing City Council regularly, taking advantage of every available opportunity – usually twice per meeting for three minutes a turn – to excoriate the council, the mayor, or whomever else he felt was withholding information from taxpayers or making poor decisions with tax dollars.
But there was more to Pollard than the man at the podium, several friends said after his death.
Many spoke – in Facebook posts, phone calls and emails – of Pollard's compassion, commitment to helping the city's youth, and dogged pursuit of transparency from the government running his beloved Lansing.
"John Pollard was not an angry man," Oldham said. "John was a very passionate person, and very concerned about the citizens of Lansing, his community, and the city."
Oldham met Pollard about 30 years ago, when Pollard was running the Black Child and Family Institute in Lansing.
Oldham and others wanted to organize community sock-hops at the center; Pollard not only obliged, but he and his wife attended every event without fail, Oldham said.
Like his friend, Oldham is active in local government watch-dogging.
He said that even though the pair sometimes employed caustic language -- Pollard often referred to Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero as "Ber-Nero," an allusion to the decadent Roman emperor -- it was part of political satire, one way Pollard exercised and advocated for freedom of speech, Oldham said.
Pollard fell ill sometime in the late summer with what he thought was bronchitis. After a seizure landed him in the hospital, doctors discovered Pollard had "pretty advanced" lung cancer, Oldham said.
He never fully recovered, and was not seen at city hall after attending late summer meetings.
"It was his diligence to discover and uncover the facts and figures behind so many city of Lansing issues" that made him unique, South wrote. "He didn't just come to those meetings with rhetorical attacks on policies, he came armed with facts.
"It wasn't uncommon for Mr. Pollard to spend several minutes running through budget numbers and pointing out discrepancies with city contracts," he added. "And it wasn't at all uncommon for him to be right."
Budget season was his bread and butter, as Pollard tracked every expenditure and appropriation thoughout the years; his appetite for data fed the story budgets of media outlets and, on more than one occasion, revealed programs and expenditures that had gone unnoticed.
He was respected by local media for his institutional knowledge and his sometimes parallel mission to follow the money.
That dogged pursuit led him to advocate against a proposed millage in early 2011, because city officials would not include language in the millage to make it clear how the funds would be used.
In a profile by Michigan Capitol Confidential, a publication of the conservative think tank Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Pollard said: "I believe in open, honest, transparent government loyal to the people. And if [the city] is asking for more money, but not being loyal to that, I get out and urge people to vote 'no.'"
That millage passed.
Pollard stayed on city officials; when a budget proposal called for using some millage money to conduct a feasibility study on building a new, consolidated police precinct and headquarters, he came back to the podium at city hall, armed with data showing how much money the city budgeted for the same study – which had yet to be completed – over the years.
He was instrumental in pressuring officials to release the study and giving Lansing residents a true accounting of the costs of a new police headquarters.
"For all his bombast from the podium at Lansing City Council meetings, John Pollard had a deep, sensitive love for Lansing," former city hall reporter Thomas Morgan wrote in an email. "I disagreed with him about 75 percent of the time, but I admired his passion and his activism."
Others said that the larger-than-life public face of Pollard – "The Peacemaker" – was dwarfed by his daily acts of kindness for neighbors and people in need.
Local small business owner Loretta Stanaway said she will miss most "the John that made peace. The quiet, anonymous John that picked up people and gave them rides to the doctor, took them to get groceries, shoveled their sidewalks, checked on them when no one else did," she said.
On his website, Pollard said he was a member of Michigan State University's Big Ten championship-winning football teams in 1965 and 1966; the team also won the national championship in 1966.
He made a career in resource development and motivational speaking, according to his website; he also made an unsuccessful run to join the Lansing City Council in 2005, losing in the general election.
Oldham said Pollard was married for 38 years at the time of his death, and had a son who graduated with honors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Asked what he thought his friend of 30 years would want his legacy to be, Oldham responded without hesitation: "Get active. Be involved. Stand up. Speak up."
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