Robert Clifford stands in the yard of his Walpole home on Thursday, Dec. 12. Clifford, the former president of the Damariscotta-based Colby and Gale Inc., is a current member of the South Bristol Select Board. (Johnathan Riley photo)
When people grow up, they sometimes become the hero they needed when they were a child.
For Robert Clifford, the South Bristol Select Board member, United States Army veteran, and former owner of Colby and Gale Inc. in Damariscotta, said he wanted to grow up to be someone who could give back to the community that helped him and his family during his upbringing in Newcastle.
“There are people in this community that took care of us then; the heat, the food, and the clothing, and all that stuff,” he said. “There was people who helped us get along, so I always had the desire to want to do better and take care of people eventually.”
Clifford, of Walpole, grew up on Mills Road in Newcastle and went to Franklin School before attending Lincoln Academy.
After graduating from high school in 1975, Clifford attended the University of Southern Maine in Gorham for two years before going to Florida State University in Tallahassee to earn a degree in hotel and restaurant administration.
“My degree was going to be in accounting, but I’m not going to sit behind a desk just crunching numbers,” Clifford said. “I felt that I was a people person and I needed to be with people.”
Clifford said he and a friend, Bill Benner, chose Florida State University because it was somewhere warm and they were looking for a school with good programs for the degrees they were seeking.
“We said, well we got to go out of state,” he said. “It worked out really, really good for the both of us.”
After Benner and Clifford’s first year at Florida State University, Clifford said he was looking for something to do one summer and found the school’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program.
“The next thing we know we’re in boot camp to make up for your first two years of ROTC and went to the advance camp after that,” he said. “It kind of caught us and we just did it and it turned out to be pretty successful … it was very interesting … I had absolutely no desire to go active duty, at the time … my intent was to go into the reserves.”
However, being the top of his ROTC class required him to go into active duty, Clifford said. In 1980, after graduating from FSU, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
Shortly after graduating from university, Clifford married his girlfriend, Cindy Knott, someone he had known his “whole life,” before going into the military.
While Benner went into the military police, Clifford ended up utilizing his degree in hospitality and hotel administration operating various military clubs, which according to Clifford, is “basically a restaurant,” for members of the military where functions were held.
Clifford said the military took its liquor oversight in the clubs very seriously.
“On the liquor side of it, we had to weigh every bottle, had to account for every ounce,” he said.
Clifford ran military clubs in Maryland and Germany and was provided the opportunity to see parts of the world he said he wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
“It’s a big world we have out there, but I was very, very fortunate to be able to go to a lot of places other people haven’t been,” he said.
Outside of Germany, Clifford said he and Cindy were able to travel to places like Austria and Switzerland.
While he was stationed in Germany, Clifford earned his master’s in business administration from Boston University in Frankfurt, Germany through the school’s overseas program.
“I thought that was a pretty good accomplishment,” he said.
Clifford’s last active duty was in 1988 when he was the administration officer of 287 recruiters in Boston, Mass. That year, he retired from the army with the rank of major.
After leaving military service, Clifford leaned into his experience in hotel and restaurant administration and became the manager of the Sheraton Towers in South Portland and then Northcenter Foods in Augusta.
Around that time the Cliffords bought their home in Walpole.
In 1991, Clifford’s father-in-law, Barry “Gus” Knott, one of the owners of Colby and Gale, made a compelling sales pitch to Clifford about joining the family business.
“He sold it pretty easy,” Clifford said. “He said when you’re in the restaurant business the busiest times are in the summer when you want to play and we’re the opposite. He said you can have all the time you want to play in the summer and raise your kids. So that was a pretty easy decision.”
After two years as credit manager for the company, Clifford became an owner in 1993 and held that position until 2007.
Clifford said his military experience helped prepare him for all of his leadership roles.
“I felt that I took the leadership role from the military into the civilian world,” he said. “I was very passionate about the employees and the people around us, and that evolved to the community, because the community is the one that keeps you going.”
Beyond his work with the family business, Clifford took an active role in the community, serving on the South Bristol School Committee member from 1991 until 2000, and on the Lincoln Academy board of trustees from 2004 until 2010. He is an active member of the Damariscotta-Newcastle Lions Club.
“There are a lot of (organizations) that do good in the community,” he said.
In 2011, Lincoln Academy Alumni Council chose Clifford as its alumnus of the year.
Clifford also co-chaired the building committee that raised the funds and created the plans for the SBS gymnasium that was built in 2001.
While Clifford has a list of achievements both military and civilian, he said one of his proudest was the creation of The Community Energy Fund of Lincoln County, which Clifford co-founded in 2005 to help residents for heating their homes.
Clifford said fuel prices were climbing and he, with Todd Maurer and Charlie Ault, decided to put together a nonprofit where 100% of donations went toward those in need in Lincoln County.
“When we saw fuel prices starting to creep, we said how are (people) going to survive and make ends meet? There were limited resources that were out there at the time,” he said.
Since the nonprofit’s inception, it has dispersed $2.5 million to those in need.
Clifford said he cultivated his desire to help the community from his time growing up in Newcastle with a large family and making ends meet.
“I’ve had the desire to do the best I’ve always wanted to do … When you’re talking the late ‘60s to the late ‘70s, a lot of people didn’t have a lot of money and I remember growing up and I don’t know how we survived,” he said.
Clifford said his father was a seasonal painter and making ends meet was a bit of a mystery for him.
“The joke was that … we were snapping the shingles off the side of the house to start the wood stove,” he said. “Then come spring, we had to reshingle, but that’s what things were like then. To this day I can’t figure out how we survived.”
In retirement, Clifford has embraced community roles including successfully running for a seat on the South Bristol Select Board in 2023, but when he isn’t attending to the town’s municipal obligations, he’s plowing the driveways of his and his kids’ homes in Walpole, working on his short game at Wawenock Golf Club in Walpole, or playing poker with longtime friends.
“You can’t lose your friendships, and we don’t,” he said.
Clifford also enjoys living close to two of his three children, both of whom live in Walpole. To make it easier to visit one another, he maintains trails through the woods between his property and theirs.
“I have a daughter there 200 yards away, and six of my nine (grandchildren) just walk over whenever they want and visit whenever they want,” he said, laughing. “My 9-year-old will come over here on Sunday morning and ask if we have any maple syrup. It’s great. I love it.”
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