Less than two years from his successful run for mayor of Glenfield, Michael Cherock has used the back of an old campaign yard sign to advertise a “moving sale’’ this weekend.

The Cherock family of four is heading a few miles down the Ohio River to Sewickley, leaving behind a great house, a spectacular view of that river and some very good friends, but also losing the headaches of being agents of change in a community not entirely ready for that.

“It’s run more like a Moose Lodge than a governing body,’’ Mr. Cherock said.

Glenfield is second smallest of Allegheny County’s 130 municipalities with 205 residents, and the names of the entire electorate fit on one three-column page. Mr. Cherock handed me a copy after taking me on a short tour of the borough. (A long tour of this square-mile borough is a contradiction in terms.)

I’d called for Mr. Cherock’s take on a proposal from the past three county executives to allow municipalities to voluntarily dissolve themselves. He said that’s long overdue for these municipalities with shrinking tax bases. Then he began sharing his story of an amateur’s crash course in local government.

In a county with 14 municipalities under 1,000 residents, and 38 under 2,000 residents, there are probably variations on this story up and down the three rivers.

Back in 2014, Mr. Cherock’s wife, Laura, and other young Glenfield mothers came up with a grant proposal for the park at the end of their street. It had worn down since its construction 35 years ago and the state had money for improvements. But when they brought their proposal to the borough council in 2015, they were thanked for all their efforts and told the council wouldn’t ask for the state money. Too risky, the head of council explained.

“I’ll run and clean his clock,’’ Mr. Cherock, 45, decided right then.

He’d grown up in Penn Hills and Norwin, spent seven years in the Navy, mostly on submarines, and then earned two engineering degrees from Penn State. His company, AE Works, does building design, which means it swings blueprints, not hammers.

The man knows his way around a piece of paper, and he did something unheard of in Glenfield: He collected voters’ signatures to get his name on the November 2015 ballot.

Nobody does that there. Mayors traditionally have been elected with a handful of write-in votes. County election records show that the previous mayor had been elected in November 2013 after only 23 of 131 registered voters went to the polls — and just four wrote in a name for mayor.

So when Mr. Cherock had the audacity to run the right way for a job nobody else sought, it felt to some oldtimers like cheating. The old guard started getting worried about this upstart who’d moved to the borough only in 2011. A few “Elect Cherock” signs were knocked down. Then at least one council member instructed the borough secretary to draw up a list of seven prospective write-in candidates for council and two for mayor. Conspicuously absent from that list were Mr. Cherock’s name and that of borough council candidate Amy Markel, who also had gathered the signatures to be on the ballot.

Mr. Cherock took a photo of that official write-in cheat sheet some days before the election, and recalled that some state legislators had done prison time for electioneering on the taxpayers’ dime. He made a call to a friend who is an assistant district attorney, but figured he ought to see how the election turned out before doing more.

He won. With turnout nearly three times as high as two years before, he got 34 of the 65 votes cast for mayor, with all the rest write-ins. Ms. Markel won, too.

Mayors don’t have a vote on the seven-member Glenfield council, but Mr. Cherock led the organizing meeting in January 2016. Mr. Cherock said he made sure the new council selected its president before appointees were placed in its two vacant seats; he wanted only those selected by the voters to choose the leader.

Glenfield applied for and was awarded that state park grant last year. Riverside Park is eligible for up to $39,500 that will cover at least half of the costs of improvements. The borough has roughly $150,000 in reserve funds, so can do the work comfortably.

Curt Reiner, 35, also was elected to Glenfield council in 2015 and says one needs “measured expectations.’’ The borough applied last year for a state grant for a speed monitoring device on Kilbuck Street to slow the ever-zooming cars there, but the only slow thing thus far is the state’s response to the grant request.

Mr. Cherock acknowledges he’s “an all-in kind of guy, an intense guy.’’ Building consensus was not his strong suit. (His critics would call that an understatement.) He hasn’t formally resigned, and he and his wife say they’ll both miss some great people in Glenfield, but they’re looking forward to living in a walkable village with lots of children.

I’m reminded of that old warning against rocking the boat, which is especially true in a dinghy.

Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill

First Published: May 28, 2017, 5:24 a.m.