An Awkward Salute to Black History Month
My late Uncle George was a funny guy. That’s how he thought of himself and how his friends and community saw him, too. He was quick with a quip, usually smutty. He kept these jokes out of my earshot until I reached high school. I was crazy about Uncle George, and Aunt Helen, but those jokes were lame.
And his name wasn’t George. It was Alfred.
Uncle Al called himself George, insisting everyone call him George as a nickname. He took that further, calling all males in earshot George. My dad Ben Sr., his kid brother by 11 years, was George. Al’s best friend Alvin Tilles was George, my brother Ed was George, I was George, Helen’s two grandsons Mark and Eric (by her daughter from a previous marriage) were George, and so on.
Alfred Wolf Pollock was a midcentury small businessman, owning a dry cleaners for over two decades in downtown Fort Smith, the Model Laundry, which my dad managed. So he had that kind of smarts. (He earned a bachelor’s from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.) It’s just that I’ve never seen where he had the imagination to invent an eccentricity like that. “George” had to have come from somewhere.
As a youth, I accepted his two-way sobriquet of George, never questioned its provenance. It’s been ages since anyone who would’ve known how Al came up with it has been around for me to ask. Every so often in recent years I think about it — maybe he did invent the concept or maybe the nickname was a desperate poker bet. I search Google and find nothing relevant about the name George and nothing about taking a name for oneself while also calling other guys the same.
Until a couple of weeks ago when I chanced on a strong clue online. A tech titan of the late 1800s was George Pullman, who manufactured and operated luxury sleeping cars for trains (and dining and other specialty rail cars). His mistreated factory workers formed the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, and their 1894 strike led to nearly three dozen deaths and eventually some national labor reforms.
Another labor union represented another set of Pullman Co. employees. Beginning just after the Civil War, Pullman hired former slaves to work as porters to serve sleeping car passengers. Pullman banked that ex-slaves already were well trained to be subservient.
In 1925, Pullman porters formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters led by A. Philip Randolph. This union won significant rights and was an early sponsor of the Civil Rights Movement. Randolph was a mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Following a trend borne of slavery where slaves were given the names of their masters, rail passengers from the early days of the sleeping car in the 1860s called any porter George, as if George Pullman, who died in 1897, was their collective master. The practice continued decades into the 20th century, according to Wikipedia. George? George.
I don’t recall Uncle George, er, Uncle Al, being overtly racist either in the terms of his era (he died in 1985 at age 79) or ours. The Model Laundry hired any person who could do the work — I recall the variety of employees running the huge washers, dryers and presses.
He must’ve traveled back and forth from the University of Illinois by train and elsewhere the first half of his life. He might well have been tickled that other passengers called any porter George, no matter their own names, and adopted it for himself.
At age 10 I got my first dog. I called him George. Today I still like the name.
©2026 Ben S. Pollock
This column first ran in the February 2026 newsletter of UA-Fayetteville Education Association / Local 965.
