By David Boyce
Word of mouth and a police sting operation seem to have undone thieves who found themselves in possession of a rare banjo that happened to be inside a vehicle owned by Portola Valley developer Jim Pollock.
During a June trip to the Sacramento area, Mr. Pollock’s GMC Denali SUV had been stolen; police later found it undamaged, but without the banjo and some fishing gear that had been inside.
With pawn shop owners on the lookout for anyone trying to unload a 1931 Vega Vox III banjo, Mr. Pollock told the Almanac that the thieves apparently gave up trying to sell his banjo. Instead, he said they gave it to an attorney who, in collaboration with a private investigator, contacted Mr. Pollock to claim the $10,000 reward he had offered for its safe return.
In cooperation with the Folsom Police Department and anxious for the return of an instrument Mr. Pollock said he has used to entertain six U.S. presidents and two U.S. Supreme Court justices, he said he agreed to wire the reward money to the pair on Monday, Aug. 20.
On Monday, with the undamaged banjo in the safe hands of a middleman working for Mr. Pollock, he said that Folsom detectives planned to arrest the attorney and his partner, presumably on charges of trafficking in stolen goods.
By handing over the reward money, at least temporarily, and allowing the sting to follow its course instead of having the police immediately arrest the men, Mr. Pollock said he will get possession of his banjo and it won’t be out of his reach as evidence in a trial.
The missing banjo may have come as a surprise. The banter among banjo players, he said, goes like this: “If you left your banjo in the back seat of your (open) convertible and you left it there all day, you’d have five more banjos when you got back.”
Playing for presidents
Mr. Pollock comes from a musical family, he said, including a grandfather who entertained the wealthy and powerful at the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive men’s club in northern Marin County.
As a student at Menlo School, Jim traded his expertise in arm wrestling for some banjo instruction from a “world-class” player, he said.
He went on to play for his fraternity brothers at Stanford University. On one midnight trip to Las Vegas, he said he encountered the late great Eddie Peabody, who played a Vega Vox, and he never forgot it.
He bought his Vega 30 years ago from a San Diego widow who sold it on condition that he actually play it, in keeping with a promise she had made to her husband, then deceased, that she not sell it to someone who would just hang it on a wall. “I had to play it before she would give it to me,” Mr. Pollock said.
He became a member of Bohemian Grove, where he has played his Vega for audiences that included presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes. He also entertained President Gerald Ford, but in a different venue, he said.
“I played what you’d expect to hear on the banjo and what you didn’t expect to hear,” he said, noting that the large round “resonator box” of the Vega makes it unique in allowing gentle guitar-like notes.
That flexibility accommodates banjo classics such as “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” and “Dueling Banjos,” he said, plus softer tunes such as “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago.
When he played for justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Conner in Washington D.C., Mr. Pollock said that Justice Kennedy broke into song during the performances of “Wild Irish Rose” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
“That’s pretty fun stuff,” he added.
