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When people call the headquarters for Michael McCluskey's campaign to become the next representative of DIstrict 5 on Halifax regional council, a familiar voice will soon greet them.

The bouncy cadence and rolling timbre will be unmistakeable. Ditto the speaker's encyclopedic familiarity with the Downtown Dartmouth district, its issues, and its people.

After all, the woman working the phones will be his mother Gloria McCluskey, who is known as the unofficial queen of Dartmouth.

What else to label someone who began her political career as a Dartmouth alderman before becoming mayor in 1992, a post she held until amalgamation four years later.

And who, after a hiatus from politics, was elected councillor of District 5 and spent the next 12 years advocating for the City of Lakes.

"I loved it for every one of the twenty-three-and-a-half years I was in it," McCluskey, who is 93, told me this week.

Which is why she couldn't be happier about her son's decision to run against Coun. Sam Austin, who has been representing District 5 since McCluskey decided not to reoffer in 2016.

"He will," she said of the youngest of her four children, "be a strong voice for Dartmouth."

If, at least on the face of it, a decidedly different one from his well-known mother.

Michael McCluskey, who is 60, rose to the rank of lieutenant-commander in the Navy, once was dean of six IT schools on the west coast, and most recently was training insurance underwriters in Canada, India and the United Kingdom.

But chances are you know him as Fat Apollo - a handle derived from a character on Battlestar Galactica - the comedic stage name he used on the Geeks vs. Nerds podcast and for his regular appearances at Hal-Con conferences and other geeky events in Atlantic Canada and further afield.

Or maybe on X, the former Twitter, where, as Fat Apollo, he opines on all manner of local affairs - including expressing his displeasure about the recent announcement that Postmedia has reached a deal to purchase Saltwire, which owns the Chronicle Herald - and once engaged in a lively back and forth with a pre-presidential Donald J. Trump.

It was on that platform earlier this week that McCluskey, under his own name, announced his candidacy. This was no spur-of-the-moment decision.

"It was the story of people with problems who weren't being listened to," he told me. "And if they were listened to, they weren't understood."

He concedes that his comedic background might make some question his seriousness. "But good comedy is about empathy and not punching down," he said, noting that before Volodymyr Zelenskyy was leader of Ukraine, he was a famous comedian.

Besides, he has done his time around politics. Growing up in the McCluskey household - his father Tom was a noted boxing trainer and cutman - meant hearing his mother take middle-of-the-night calls from constituents and the occasional death threat, as well as hashing out the issues of council at the dinner table.

"We would sit and debate stuff constantly," he said. "It was like an apprenticeship."

One that he would put to use on student council at Dartmouth High School, and later as a member for the school's reach for the top team, which missed going to the provincial semi-finals "because of a judging error" that still rankles 45 years later.

He learned loads by his mother's side, he told me. To park your ego and listen. To treat every person, regardless of their situation, with respect.

"To realize that every issue, no matter how trivial it is to you, matters to the people who have brought it up to you," he said.

McCluskey and his 24-year old daughter Harley, live with Gloria in the family home. Mother and son have not always seen eye-to-eye on everything.

Gloria can be blunter than he is, Michael said, but also has a thicker skin, as befitting someone who spent more than two decades in the trenches of municipal politics.

They agree on this though: the same factors impacting the rest of the municipality - rapid growth, the housing crisis - are at play in Dartmouth. And the current HRM council spends too much time ponderng big questions and not enough on the day-to-day matters that have an impact on people's lives.

"Council has its eyes on the horizon, but the wake of the big ship is swamping all the little boats," said Michael, the retired Navy man.

He vows, if elected, to do his best to change that.

"He makes people feel seen and he listens," his sister Elaine McCluskey, the jounalist-turned-novelist-and-short-storywriter told me.

To get his chance, on Oct. 19 he must beat a councillor seeking his third consecutive term. Gloria, who vanquished a sitting councillor when she made her political return in 2004, doesn't think incumbency is the advantage it once was in municipal politics.

An equally important question in the District 5 contest may be how much a name matters. The McCluskeys, after all, are deeply embedded in the fabric of Dartmouth. Elaine's Dartmouth-centric latest novel The Gift Child read, according to one reviewer "like Dartmouth Royalty writing about their kingdom."

Michael said that he mused for awhile about changing his name to Glorious McCluskey, then thought better of it.

It had to be tempting. His mother who still watches televised sessions of regional council, the Nova Scotia legislature, and the House of Commons, anchors her own cable television show.

Complete strangers stop her on the street and pick up her cheque at restaurants.

The other day a younger man whom she had never met before held open a door so that she could enter a building.

"I feel like the Queen of Dartmouth,' she said.

"Gloria, you are," he replied.

Her son knows that he has to do more than ride along on his mother's coattails. But, as he tries to carry on her legacy, a little bit of that royal glitter would sure be nice too.