KTW presents its annual Where Are They Now? series, in which we catch up with newsmakers of the past.
Fifteen years after he handed back the mayor’s chain and retired from city hall, Cliff Branchflower is living a quieter life.
In place of council meetings, the former mayor of Kamloops has an acre of fruit trees to tend on his Brocklehurst lot, and the demands of a black and white cat named Lucky to cater to.
“He followed our daughter home down the road about four years ago,” Branchflower explains on a quiet weekday morning, as Lucky prowls around the living room.
“She couldn’t find a home for him, he was just a kitten, so he came here.”
The Branchflowers have their own luck. All of their children still live in the neighbourhood, as do nearly all of their nine grandkids.
Visits with the grandkids have played a big role in Branchflower’s post-city hall days.
While he still follows city politics, don’t expect him to say much about the current mayor and council, whose inauguration he attended in early December.
“I try not to form an opinion,” he says.
“I never liked being second-guessed when I was in office and I try not to second-guess our current crop.”
Branchflower never set out to be mayor.
When he and his wife, Ruth, moved to Kamloops in 1956 so he could take a job as a typesetter with the Kamloops Sentinel, it wasn’t meant to be more than a temporary stop, as had been the case with previous newspaper jobs in Alberta, Ontario and northern B.C.
But, there was something about the town Branchflower says he couldn’t help but like.
“Every city has its personality and I liked Kamloops’,” he says.
“My dad retired from the farm to Kelowna and we used to visit him — in fact, our intention when we first moved here was to go to Kelowna.
“The people there, I think having premiers of the province there gave them delusions of grandeur.
“Kamloops was more my kind of town, a working stiff’s kind of town.”
He came to the city’s top job in a similar way. A school trustee for 15 years, Branchflower made the jump to alderman in 1980.
Though he had served as board chairman for the school district multiple times, he said moving up to mayor wasn’t in his plans until Mayor Kenna Cartwright passed away early in her first term as mayor.
Branchflower would go on to win in a byelection, and serve for two more terms after that.
“I just kind of fell into it,” he says.
Though he has fond memories of the time in office, Branchflower says retirement also has its perks.
“I had about 35 years of elected office of one kind or another,” he says.
“It was fun while it lasted, but there’s more to life than sitting around boardrooms.”
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