You may recognize the name Pollack from the marquee of various shopping centers and business parks around the Valley. Or maybe you’re a patron of Pollack Cinemas, Tempe’s eccentric discount movie theater filled with life-size figures of movie stars and characters.
That theater, the collection inside of it, and pretty much anything else in town with the name Pollack on it is owned by Pollack Investments, which is run by Michael Pollack.
Pollack is a man of many business ventures, but he’s also a man of many collections. And there’s one Pollack building in Mesa that you’ve likely never heard of. But more on that in a minute.
When he was growing up in San Jose, California, in the '70s, Pollack bought old beer signs at flea markets, repaired them and resold them to antique stores.
"I was making some real bank back then when I was only, you know, a teenager," Pollack said.
As the years went by, Pollack kept buying and selling, but he branched out to other types of advertisement displays. He has figures of all sizes advertising anything from Alka-Seltzer to rodent control.
Eventually, he stopped selling pieces from his collection. Now most of it is tucked inside two large rooms in the office building of Pollack Investments in Mesa. The collection is not open to the public.
"I've traveled all over the world to find pieces for this museum. Everything that's in here is specifically geared for advertising. There's nothing in her that you could just go buy," Pollack said.
]The building is huge. It used to house a furniture store, and Pollack says it looked like a big warehouse when he acquired it. Outside, there are massive brown arches and a terracotta tile roof. Inside, there are tall white columns and lots of gold accents.
The shelves in the Pollack Advertising Museum are crowded with items that would’ve been found in various types of stores and window displays.
A 5-foot-tall Jolly Green Giant stands across an aisle from a large plastic Donkey Kong; a small army of tiny mannequins wear scaled down women’s lingerie; a larger-than-life foot with yellowing toenails advertises "Corn-off."
The walls are covered with beer signs similar to the ones Pollack used to fix and resell as a teenager.
It’s a lot to take in, particularly the bigger beer displays — most of them spinning around or moving in some way or another.
"The one that's over here is a clown. And this particular display was made for several different brands. The one that you're seeing here was made for Bergie beer. Those are original beer cans from the 1950s. They were drilled out so that the liquid was removed," Pollack said.
"They twirl, and then the little balls that are at the end turn at the same time to create even more motion. This has three motors that control it, one in the base itself. And see, he looks like he's drunk from the Bergie because you can see how he moves around on that base. The rest of them run on one motor."
"One of the very, very unique pieces here in the museum is this piece right here. This is a hams piece. The piece is designed on a motor scooter and it says on the saying, "Look ma, no Hamms," instead of hands," Pollack added.
There was only four of these ever made of this particular piece because it was just too expensive to manufacture. One of those was destroyed in a fire and then there was three more and I was fortunate enough to end up getting all three of them."
"Here's one of the newest additions to the museum. This is an incredible piece. I tracked it for more than 25 years, and I was finally able to get it," Pollack said. "He is for Edgewood Whiskey. He's wearing an old-fashioned suit with the tails, kind of like a tuck suit. And he just, he's a jolly old boy that just has a good old time drinking his Edgewood Whiskey."
And basically, he is made of paper-mache. He's from the 1920s. So imagine paper-mache lasting almost 100 years. It's amazing."
"His eyes, there's a clockwork motor. He didn't run on electricity because they weren't using it back then. You would have to wind him up. And there's a special key that winds him up. And you see how bloodshot his eyes are? When you'd walk in the door of a liquor store, his eyes would be going back and forth and back and forth," Pollack said.
Rows and rows of shelves in the advertising museum house “Bananger Motions,” mechanical window displays that used to be rented out to jewelers. They were all produced between 1937 and 1959.
The squeaky symphony you hear in the background is the sound of nearly every one of Pollack’s 147 small Baranger displays moving at the same time.
"This one is a flying saucer with a bride and a bridegroom both looking around as the flying saucer is flying around. And what it says is, 'Out of this world with one of our beautiful diamonds.' Another one that's really incredible is one called Moonshot," Pollack said. "And that's this one right here built in 1957. And it was their creation of what it would look like to land on the moon."
"Some of them were just so intricate that it's unbelievable. Back in the day when these were done in 1945, 1950s, to have this much going on with one motor was unheard of. People would line up just for the unveiling of a new Behringer display. Sometimes 15, 20 people deep to see this marvel of, you know, when you look at it and really study it."
"You've got like here on this piece, the gold furnace piece. You've got a woman typing. You've got a man working the furnace. You've got another man checking it. You've got another one going back and forth. You've got another guy that's bringing the air into the furnace," Pollack said.
"And then you've got the diamond pieces going around. That's a lot of stuff going on in one piece, especially with one motor. My goal has always been to be able to preserve history. And when you think about it, with over eight or nine thousand pieces, the amount of history that's in this room, because many of these pieces actually go back to the early 1800s. And so I look at it that I am the curator of this incredible history while I'm here on this earth."
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