Draw for mayor tame compared to wild 1975 race

Ajudicial recount will be held Monday to determine who, if anyone, won the most votes in the Peachland mayoral race. If the provincial court judge confirms the current result, of 804 votes each for incumbent Cindy Fortin and challenger Harry Gough, the winner’s name will simply be drawn from a box.

It sounds like a wacky way to determine the outcome of a democratic process. But wacky is, well, old hat in Peachland.

Consider the improbable series of events that occurred in the 1975 race for mayor in Peachland. Then, as now, it was a bitterly contested contest.

The election night counting produced a narrow victory. And there followed flipflopping newspaper headlines, allegations of electoral hanky-panky, days of uncertainty, citizens demanding another count, judicial intervention, a recount and an overturned election.

But what I really love about this story is that it was two reporters who saved the day for democracy, ensuring the duly elected Peachland mayor took office.

Unfortunately, that candidate was Harold Thwaite.

Thwaite was the combative mayor of Peachland for nine years before the 1975 election. He lorded over the town with an imperial style that both amused and frightened onlookers.

Once, during a Peachland council meeting that wasn’t going to his liking, Thwaite punched Ald. Des Loan. That netted Thwaite an assault charge and a conviction.

Another time, he paid $700 to have a mayoral chain of office made for himself, after town council balked at the cost.

Thwaite tried to have Queen Elizabeth hang it around his neck when Liz was visiting the Okanagan. Thwaite hadn’t actually been invited to the royal reception, but he somehow got within groping distance of the Queen at Kelowna’s airport before being hustled away by bodyguards.

Peter Scott, then a columnist for The Daily Courier, wrote that Peachland town council was like a year-round circus with Thwaite the ringmaster and chief barker.

“He bullies, he sulks, goes into histrionics and belches forth fire and brimstone when crossed,” Scott wrote.

“He is an anachronism. He would have done very well prior to the invention of democracy,” Scott wrote.

Unsurprisingly, Thwaite’s freewheeling style and penchant for verbally and physically assaulting his opponents discouraged many people from running against him for mayor. Simply put, people were afraid of Thwaite, a former soldier.

But in the fall of 1975, Peachland Chamber of Commerce president Bernice Fletcher summoned up the courage to run against King Harold.

Backed by the town’s business community, who believed Thwaite’s embarrassing antics were making Peachland a laughingstock, Fletcher ran an aggressive campaign. She and her supporters knocked on practically every door, urging voters to finally turf Thwaite.

But it’s a curious fact of life in a democracy that the more outrageously a leader behaves, the more some people love him. Generally, these people are shallow, apolitical and unserious — people for whom politics is just a form of entertainment.

People like me. I would have voted for Thwaite, if only to see how bizarre things might become under his leadership.

So Thwaite had his troops and both sides — the sane and the insane — went marching to the polls on election day, Nov. 15, 1975. Turnout was heavy and there was much anticipation surrounding the outcome.

But before the counting of ballots began, the chief electoral officer, Hamish MacNeill, took ill and went home. He left the counting in the hands of two deputies, Harry Lever and Myrtle McLoughlin, both town employees.

After they had tallied the ballots, they pronounced Fletcher the victor, winning by a margin of 473 to 414. This result surprised two radio reporters, Jack Marion of CKOV and Bev Sinclair of CKIQ, who were keeping track of the count after the results of each ballot were called out.

By their tally, Thwaite had won the election by about 10 votes. But the returning officers insisted their count was correct, and the headline in the following day’s Courier read “Fletcher Victory.” She was quoted as saying, “I am mayor-elect.”

But it was discovered the next morning the ballot boxes had not been locked and sealed after the counting was complete, as was required by law. And there remained the puzzling inconsistency between the officials’ count and the numbers produced by the reporters.

Thwaite pounced on the irregularities and uncertainties, immediately suggesting foul deeds had been done.

“I am going to suspend Lever and McLoughlin for rank inefficiency. I am going to have the election declared invalid. I want to keep Peachland absolutely honest,” Thwaite thundered.

Thwaite claimed the “mafia” had infiltrated Peachland, arranging to stuff the unlocked and unsealed ballot boxes. “This really smells,” he said. Both sides brought in lawyers and, for a while, Peachland was locked in the grip of electoral crisis.

In Peachland, this crisis took the form of some very heated debate at the Totem Inn as to which novelty menu item should be removed first — the Fletcher Fish Burger or the Thwaite Pig Knuckle Sandwich.

A few days after the election, a formal recount was done by Kamloops Judge Patrick Dohm. His count produced a six-vote victory for Thwaite over Fletcher, 447 to 441.

So the radio reporters had been right — or at least far more right than the official ballot counters.

How they could have so badly added up the ballots, giving Fletcher a 58-vote victory when she actually lost the election, is anybody’s guess, but MacNeill came to the defence of his assistants.

“They were just tired, which may have caused some of the confusion,” he said. “They had worked almost 12 hours. There was no hanky-panky, as the mayor has suggested.”

Thwaite, no surprise, was jubilant at his re-election.

“I’ve served with the Armed Forces in Korea, Cyprus, Vietnam and the Middle East, defending democracy. I’m happy it could be carried out in the recount of the ballots. The vote indicated I was the people’s choice for mayor.”

And, of course, he couldn’t resist a dig at his opponents.

“They canvassed every home but could not beat honesty and experience,” he said.

As for Fletcher herself, Thwaite said with typical ungraciousness: “I have nothing to say about Mrs. Fletcher. She doesn’t interest me one particle.”

Thwaite went on to serve out his sixth two-year term as Peachland mayor. Before he died in 1999, at age 87, he was a frequent and sharp critic of all those who succeeded him in council chambers, variously calling them bums, liars and fools.

“I was the most brilliant mayor Peachland ever had,” Thwaite told me in 1996.

I didn’t argue with him. After all, he was elected six times. Plus, he was pretty good with his fists.

Ron Seymour is a Daily Courier reporter and Peachland resident. A version of this column appeared in November 2000.