This was late spring 1998 and George Pollard was in his Kenosha home on the shore of Lake Michigan talking about the time he did a portrait of Harry Truman.

"It was his last portrait," Pollard said.

The former president was not famous for his patience. "His hip hurt and he didn't like sitting," Pollard said.

Pollard was undaunted. After all, as a sergeant during World War II, he had known the pressure of being asked to paint generals. "This experience," Pollard would later note, "had taught me two things -- paint fast and do not be intimidated by important people."

The Truman portrait, done in 1964, had taken a full year to set up. It was at the presidential library in Missouri. Truman sat, began to chat, and Pollard went to work.

Although he called Truman one of his most memorable subjects, George Pollard, the internationally known portrait artist who died Thursday in his Kenosha home at 88, was used to working with the celebrated and the powerful. His subjects -- and his subjects nearly always became admirers -- were presidents, popes, A-list entertainers and athletes. Yet somehow Pollard remained as friendly and unpretentious as the Wisconsin farm boy he was.

I was at his home in Kenosha that day in 1998 in the company of my Madison friend Bob Royko. It was one of the most enjoyable afternoons I've ever spent.

I'm ashamed to say that at the time of the visit, I had never heard of George Pollard. I didn't mention this, of course, but George wouldn't have cared. His graciousness was exceeded only by that of Nan Pollard, his wife, a talented artist in her own right.

George's great gift was as a portrait artist but he had another, almost as a rare. He could talk about rubbing elbows with the most famous people in the world and not come off as a name-dropper. He knew them because he had worked with them, easy as that.

Often there was a good story involved. This was the case with John F. Kennedy, who was a Massachusetts senator campaigning for president in 1960 when Pollard approached him at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee. Pollard, not yet well-known, showed Kennedy some of his work and asked if the candidate would mind sitting for him.

"Let's do it now," Kennedy said, so they did, on the Pfister's mezzanine.

Bob Royko had asked me to come along to the Pollard home on a visit in which Bob was going to pick up a portrait George had done of Bob's brother, Mike Royko, the best newspaper columnist of his time.

Mike died in 1997, and Bob had commissioned a portrait/illustration that would have Mike standing in his beloved Billy Goat Tavern, with Billy Goat proprietor Sam Sianis behind the bar and Mike chatting with a third person -- Slats Grobnik.

Bob was visibly moved when Pollard handed him the finished work. "I think I got it right," George said. "It drove me crazy, but I think I got it right."

He usually did. The big break for the boy who grew up on a farm outside of Sheboygan came during WWII. As Pollard later wrote in his book, "The Journal of a Portrait Painter and His Family of Artists," he was a skinny 23-year-old just out of art school, stationed in New Zealand, when his commanding officer asked him to do a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting for the Red Cross.

That portrait led to another, of Douglas MacArthur, and Pollard was on his way. Of all his celebrated subjects, Pollard may have been awed only once, when he was commissioned to do a portrait of Pope John Paul II. He settled down and did a fine job, and when a Kenosha priest, subsequently visiting with the pope, mentioned his hometown, the pope said, "Kenosha? Then you must know my friend, the artist George Pollard."

That day in his home, as much as George talked about his long and colorful career, it was clear that he and Nan were equally proud of their children, all of whom are working in the arts. Their son, Jim Pollard, in fact, is himself a renowned portrait artist. Nan likes to joke that they advised their children not to go into the arts -- so naturally they all did.

It 's an independent streak that might recall, say, Harry Truman. That morning in Missouri, George Pollard and the former president got along well enough that they had a second sitting in the afternoon -- a total of three hours.

As they parted, Truman took his first look at the portrait. "Young man," he said, "I think you have flattered me just about right."