In 1965, Milton was a speck on the map with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants.

That year, Hwy. 401 had just been extended west to Milton, the single-screen Roxy Theatre was the biggest action in town and Gordon Krantz was first elected to Milton Town Council, where he has served ever since.

The original town is still evident: turn off the highway, away from the big box stores and subdivisions and towards the leafy streets, detached brick homes and mom-and-pop stores of Main St. and the stone courthouse that became town hall.

Krantz moved into the mayor’s office in 1980, and is running unopposed this fall. Once Hazel McCallion, who was elected Mississauga mayor in 1978, steps down in October at 93, Krantz will likely be crowned the longest-serving mayor in Ontario.

Krantz, 77, counts McCallion among his friends; a McCallion bobblehead stands on a shelf behind his office chair.

“She’s always looking over my shoulder,” he says. “What Hazel’s gone through with developing communities such as Mississauga, we’re going through now. And we will go through it for some time.”

Krantz, the oldest of seven children, was born in Milton Heights, Esquesing Township, which is now part of Halton Hills.

“When I refer to myself as a country boy, I’m serious about that,” he says. As a kid in the ‘40s, he used to walk or hitchhike the few miles into town to catch a matinee at the Roxy.

With his well-worn jokes, carefully combed hair and gold rings — one of which bears his initials in tiny diamonds — Krantz is more like a stately grandfather than a country boy. He still walks to work, a two-minute stroll across Victoria Park. His wife of 56 years, Olive, can see his office window from their front porch and their home phone number is printed on his business card.

He doesn’t have a personal Twitter account or a cellphone he actually uses; he also doesn’t have an entourage. Last week he hopped on a GO train to attend the opening of the CNE, shook a few hands and headed back on his own.

Milton, with a population of more than 100,000, forms the western edge of the GTA. Milton has been the fastest growing municipality since the 2006 census. It also has a young population with a median age of 34; the median age in Toronto is 39.

In the mid-‘90s the town’s population stagnated. In 2000, Krantz championed a deal to build the multi-million-dollar “big pipe” to bring water in from Lake Ontario. That led to the housing boom and a population explosion — from 33,000 at the time to 56,000 by 2005. That year Halton region was designated a growth area by the provincial Places to Grow Act.

Critics of Krantz’s personality are few, but he has faced opposition over Milton’s rate of growth.

“We should have the infrastructure in place before the houses,” says Gerry Marsh, who owns the local Sears and ran against Krantz in 2006 and 2010. He says he failed to file certain paperwork after the last election, otherwise he’d be campaigning again this year, but he plans to run in 2018.

“I thought the town needed shaking up. I still do,” Marsh said. Krantz was elected with 59.8 per cent of the vote in 2010 while Marsh received 24 per cent. Fewer than a third — 32.6 per cent — of eligible voters cast a ballot.

Marsh wants to see a different character in the new part of Milton to avoid more suburban homogeneity. He wants more scrutiny of developers’ plans. Many local retailers also opposed the rapid growth, saying it has hurt their business.

Councillor Colin Best, whose own father Brian Best was mayor from 1967 to 1973, “made the mistake of running against the mayor once.”

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“My wife said, ‘don’t do that again.’ ”

“The mayor’s become an icon, similar to Hazel (McCallion). The joke in town is ‘There were mayors before the mayor?’ ”

In 1997, Best wanted to keep the town on its original well water system, which would have slowed the pace of growth. He was re-elected as a councillor in 2006 and now says he and Krantz agree on main priorities, all of which stem from Milton’s growing pains: improving transit and alleviating gridlock, a long-overdue hospital expansion and more schools to accommodate the town’s baby boom. Most of those are under provincial jurisdiction.

In July, town council approved 11 applications to build 6,000 new homes, which could bring another 25,000 residents in four years. A velodrome is being built for the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games, and council endorsed a submission to the province by Wilfrid Laurier University to build a 150-acre campus university campus on adjacent land.

There have been controversies: a contempt-of-court citation in the ‘90s over the placement of the Halton Waste Management Site and opposition from many residents to the $40-million velodrome, partly funded by the town.

A high school dropout who made a living in the oil business before running for town council at 28, Krantz was elected mayor at 43. So far he’s poised for an acclamation, which has only happened once before, sometime in the ‘80s, he says.

For most elections, “I had to get out there and kiss babies, shake hands and kiss whatever else needed to be kissed,” he laughs.

“This is my opinion, (but) there’s never been a serious contender,” says Chamber of Commerce executive director Sandy Martin. “The mayor, if he’s invited to an activity, to an opening, to a birthday party, he goes … he runs his campaign from the day he gets elected to the day he gets elected.”

Krantz says it was never his plan to stick around all these years, but he wants to stay in his seat for the foreseeable future. Besides a bit of gardening, organizing an annual charity golf tournament and spending time with his three great-grandchildren, his life is politics. He gave up volunteer firefighting to become mayor and retired from league baseball a few years ago (“they started putting the bases too far apart for me.”)

He got into politics through a barbershop bet, when he was complaining about leadership and someone challenged him to change things. When asked of his and McCallion’s staying power, Krantz winks.

“Either we’re doing something right or nobody else wants the damn job,” he says.

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