Graphic by Maya Uribe
By Miggy Aguilar
David Pollock, former child actor, elected official and current fractional executive visited CI’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties class this month and gave students something unexpected: a whirlwind tour through acting, aerospace, city budgets, campaign trail strategy and yes, frozen peas.
Pollock, who starred in “The Bad News Bears” nearly 50 years ago, poked fun at how that is still what people remember. The 1976 comedy followed a little league baseball team and their reluctant coach. Pollock famously played Rudi Stein, the team’s benchwarmer. “To be in my short acting career and have a movie that kind of became a cultural icon, that is amazing,” he told students. “I will take that.” Still a member of the Screen Actors Guild, he reflected on how lessons from the set shaped his later roles in public service. “As an actor, you develop a good empathy muscle. You literally put yourself in someone else’s shoes.”
That skill followed him into decades of public life, including 28 years as a school board member and city council member in Moorpark. He served as president of the California School Boards Association and sat on the board of the League of California Cities. He currently works with Ventura County’s council of governments on regional planning and serves as a fractional executive for multiple law firms and agencies. He jokingly called himself a “recovering elected official.”
Pollock’s path to politics was not exactly traditional. After his acting career, he earned his pilot’s license, worked as a flight instructor, then joined the aviation side of the shipping industry. He later developed aerospace programs for Rocketdyne in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster and eventually went on to earn a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA.)
His pivot to public service came from a familiar place: frustration with what he was reading about schools in the newspaper. He ran for school board assuming he would uncover “fraud, waste and abuse.” But the deeper he got into budgets and operations, the more he realized things were running far better than expected. “That was much to my chagrin, and delight,” he said. “Be a little skeptical of cynicism.”
One of the messages Pollock emphasized again and again was the outsized importance of local government. “There are over 96,000 government agencies in the U.S.,” he explained. “And it is the school districts, the city councils, the water districts that keep everything flowing, literally.” Unlike federal politics, local government decisions are often nonpartisan and community-driven. “There is no partisan way to fix a pothole,” he added.
When it comes to campaigns, Pollock was honest about their competitive nature. From the door-knocking to the Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) disclosures which require candidates, elected officials and public employees to publicly report their financial interests, he shared how running for office requires strategy and resilience. “Most elections are won before a campaign even starts,” he said. His advice? Spend your time on the voters who show up. “Voting is powerful. Your local representatives know if you have voted in the last five elections. And they will knock on your door.”
Pollock’s career has not been without setbacks. He shared that he once ran for Congress in 2012 but lost out on the Democratic endorsement by just two votes. While that could have stung, he says he is grateful now. “At least in my old age, I do not have to wonder what would have happened if I had tried. I did. And it was okay.”
He also offered some light-hearted wisdom that stuck with students. “When you are a local elected official, people feel like they have access to you everywhere. So if you are buying frozen food, buy it last. Otherwise people will stop you to talk about city business and your popsicles will melt.”
Throughout the visit, Pollock returned to one core theme: disappointment is not the end, it is a skill. Whether in acting, politics or business, he stressed that rejection and failure are part of the process. “Truly successful people are not the ones who get everything right. They are the ones who get knocked down, shake it off and try again.”
To help address growing public mistrust and misinformation about government, Pollock recently launched a civic education site, CivicBrain.org. He hopes it will serve as a resource for people wanting to better understand how public systems actually function and why they matter.
As the class wrapped up, Pollock offered students a final nudge toward public service. “I am always happy to help someone who wants to run for office,” he said. “I have enormous respect for anyone willing to put themselves out there like that.”
His visit was a reminder that leadership does not always come from the top and that democracy, as he put it, “is not a spectator sport.”
