An unassuming artist and adventurer
By Maddie Lokensgard
It is a slow afternoon in the Bethel Seminary. Classes are out for the day and only the occasional hushed conversation between individuals or the jingling of janitors’ keys breaks the silence.
John Pollard, a man of quiet demeanor and humble stature, fumbles with his keys while opening the door to the janitor’s closet. As seminary building services supervisor and HC/RC building services supervisor before that, John’s every day is spent checking doors, tinkering with broken vacuums, and working alongside student workers to keep the seminary clean.
“Unfortunately, I think [the facilities workers] are just kind of ignored,” says Evan Gosen, Bethel senior. “They’re definitely under-appreciated.”
To any busy college student, John is just a simple man with a simple job living a simple life, but his life pre-Bethel was far from ordinary.
At 26, John met the love of his life and future wife in a bar in Minneapolis. That next year, during a particularly cold Minnesota January, the two of them had had enough. They decided to pack up their belongings and headed west to Vya, Nevada, where they homesteaded a ranch. Leaky Creek Ranch had been vacant for 11 years before John and Judy’s arrival, but they fixed the place up and lived off the land, growing their own food and living without electricity.
Up until this point, John and Judy said they had both led reckless and wild lives as unbelievers, but when Judy took a fall off a trailer that left her bedridden for over a month, she took to reading. She read every book in the house and every book in the town until all that was left was an old King James Bible. She read the whole thing through and, through God’s word, was saved.
“After seeing how Judy began to change her whole life around, I was influenced by that,” John says. “I fought it off for a few months, but finally I accepted the Lord in February of 1985.”
Born in 1952 to a mother of six and a father who left when he was 16, John spent his adolescent years not far from Bethel in south Minneapolis. He left home not long after his father.
“I didn’t really have a choice,” John says. “My mother was working full time trying to support all of the kids, so I figured it was time to go.”
At 16, John set out to hitchhike across the United States, which was the start of what became two decades worth of wild living, making art, moving across the country, traveling with a carnival, truck driving from coast to coast, and even working at a mortuary for a period of time.
“John is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met,”
— Destin Modina, junior Athletic Training major
At one point, John had acquired a car and drove it to a place in northern California called Wheeler’s Ranch, tucked in the hills of the coastal mountains. Wheeler’s Ranch was made up of 300 acres of land that was open to the public in an attempt to create a “back to the land” way of living. Upon arriving, John traded his car for a makeshift cabin that overlooked a river and became a part of this alternative lifestyle community. Later the ranch became known as a famous hippie commune of the 1970s.
John accepted the only job he could find in the area and became the HC/RC building services supervisor at Bethel University. For the past 18 years, John has worked facilities and spends his free time gardening and making art. Some of his drawings and paintings are being featured in the latest art installation in Bethel’s library.
“John is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met,” says Destin Modina, Bethel junior and former facilities student worker. “He’s really soft-spoken, but I have so much respect for him. He’s done everything in life.”
