Age has no effect on ability to pollinate, except that a younger tree may not flower for a few more years....

Your best advice comes from this site. Windfallrob has it right. When you call someone on the phone it is a crap-shoot when it comes to advise. You might have been talking to someone who had no knowledge of the subject. The only logic I could get from their reply was that the person was thinking about a tree sometimes taking three years to bloom. No bloom no cross pollination. Good Luck, Bill

Semantics.
Pollenators are the insects, like bees, that carry the pollen from flower to flower.
The trees/plants themselves are pollenizers.
I know, it's nit-picky, and lots of printed materials, catalogs, and even folks we regard as 'experts' will say, "Variety X will pollenate variety Y", but it actuality, it should be, "Variety X will pollenize variety Y' - unless we're dealing with species, like oaks/pecans/walnuts, that are wind-pollenated.

Bill I belong to a couple other forums that have tree sub forums and it seems like the info I've gotten here is always much better (stands to reason since this entire site is for plants as opposed to subforums). But I was away from GW for about a year, bought a farm with 18 acres and have ordered conservation seedlings to plant. So I checked back in and found gw taken over by houzz (I already belonged to Houzz). Anyway, the new format is horrrible (to me anyway). I cant find any of my old posts, and now all my posts show my real name instead of my old username. Thanks for the advice though the members here still seem like the best advisors.

Thanks for the wording correction lucky p . I appreciate correction (usually anyway).