Peter Courtney, legendary and longtime leader of Oregon’s state Senate, has died

Peter Courtney, the longest-serving state lawmaker in Oregon history whose booming oratories and one-of-a-kind style made him a Salem legend, died Tuesday. He was 81.

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Gov. Tina Kotek’s office announced in a release that Courtney died of complications from cancer in his home, surrounded by family.

Courtney’s death marks the passing of an Oregon political original. He was a wily and sometimes dour Democrat who rose to the peak of legislative power and became so enmeshed with the city he represented for nearly five decades that Salem has a bridge, housing complex, and state hospital campus all bearing his name.

Along the way, Courtney became a paragon of, and holdout for, the kind of even-handed partisanship Oregonian politicos often speak wistfully about — the “Oregon way” mode of governing, where results matter more than scoring points against political rivals.

It was a brand of leadership that helped the moderate Democrat become Senate president in 2003 when the Senate was evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. He would not relinquish the role for nearly 20 years — a run in which Courtney helped to usher in annual legislative sessions, boost K-12 school funding, replace Oregon’s defunct and crumbling state hospital, fight for animal welfare and much more.

In all, Courtney served 38 years in the Legislature between stints in the House and Senate. He spent 20 years in the powerful role of Senate President. Both are records, and Courtney has attained a legendary status among old friends and foes.

“Peter was old school,” said former state Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland, who served with Courtney for more than two decades. “He was a truly brilliant leader. I’ve never really experienced anything else like that.”

Courtney was likely “the best legislator the state has ever had,” according to former state Sen. Lee Beyer, a Springfield Democrat who worked closely with Courtney since the 1990s.

Sen. Tim Knopp, a Bend Republican who often squared off with Courtney, called him a mentor and “one of the most important elected officials and political figures in Oregon history.”

Courtney was famous in Salem for his deep reverence for the Legislature — particularly the Senate.

“If you want a barroom brawl, then go to the House,” Courtney joked in a 2021 podcast interview with then-state Rep. Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles. “If you want to be in a cathedral and try to look for a loophole because of all your sins … you go to the churchy-poo.” By which he meant the Senate chambers.

But as the end of his career neared, and political brinksmanship like walkouts became more prominent, Courtney often mourned the loss of comity he saw in the state’s discourse.

“Oregon has become just another state,” he said in the 2021 interview. “I really regret that. Oregon …. loves to be first or only. But today Oregon is just another state.”

Courtney was sometimes seen as the backstop of the Legislature, hitting the brakes on progressive bills sent his way by House Democrats. But his long reign atop the Senate had as much to do with his inscrutable style as it did his reputation for corralling his party’s ideologues.

A gifted speaker, Courtney could thunder from the Senate rostrum with the fire of a preacher. But in one-on-one conversations, he was just as likely to baffle with obscure sports references or self-deprecating digs than to force his point.

An Oregonian profile of Courtney in 2004 put it well: “In the often-drab world of state lawmaking, Courtney stands out in Technicolor.”

“He knew how to deflect any conversation from where it was going to where he wanted it to go, and he would do it with some outlandish thing sometimes,” said former state Sen. Arnie Roblan, D-Coos Bay. “The outcome was: He got to have the conversation he wanted to have.”

“Peter and I trash talked, but we enjoyed it and it was part of the game,” said state Sen. Fred Girod, R-Lyons, who considers Courtney a good friend. “If you didn’t have your A-game or you could be easily intimidated, Peter probably wasn’t your guy.”

Courtney was born in Philadelphia in June 1943. The middle child of three boys, Courtney has said he spent his youth helping to care for his mother who had Parkinson’s disease. He grew up in Rhode Island and West Virginia — “West By God Virginia” in Courtney’s pronunciation — where his grandmother helped raise him.

Courtney received a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Rhode Island. He completed law school at Boston University, where he was class president.

Shortly before graduating, Courtney learned about an open judicial clerkship in the Oregon Court of Appeals. Courtney often said that he’d never heard of Salem and couldn’t point Oregon out on a map when he accepted the job.

He described the move in the 2021 podcast interview.

“You didn’t know where Oregon was two weeks before you came. You’d never heard of it. You’re coming from three time zones [away] and then you see this biggest ice cream cone you ever saw out one window, which was Mount Hood in the summer… You don’t have any friends. You have nothing. And that probably shaped me more than anything.”

Courtney arrived in Salem in July of 1969, and lived for two years at the Salem YMCA. By 1974 he had won a seat on the Salem City Council. He married his wife, Margie, in 1976, eventually having three sons: Peter, Sean and Adam.

Courtney won his first legislative seat, representing Salem in the Oregon House, in 1980. In 1984, with a decade of public service under his belt, he sought a brighter stage. He ran for Congress, coming in second in the Democratic primary. Two years later he came up short in a bid for state Senate.

They were the only two elective losses in Courtney’s nearly five-decade political career — a period in which he also served 30 years as an administrator at Western Oregon University. But the defeats never seemed far from his mind.

“I’m a loser, I’m not kidding you,” he said in the 2021 podcast interview. “I’ll give you a litany of losses that are unbelievable.”

Courtney reclaimed his old state House seat in 1988, rising to House Minority Leader at a time when Republicans held power. He won election to the state Senate a decade later, in 1998, and immediately made an impression on his party’s leaders.

“For years, he called me every night at 9:40 during session,” said former Gov. Kate Brown, who served a stint as Senate Minority Leader beginning in 1999. “Sometimes it would be a one-minute call and sometimes it would be a half hour. About whatever.”

Brown would go on to work intensively with Courtney as a two-term governor, not always peaceably. “He was sort of like the older brother you always thought you wanted but didn’t always need,” she joked recently. “We did fight like cats and dogs.”

In 2002, voters elected a split Senate — 15 Democrats and 15 Republicans — forcing the question of which party would get to take on the powerful role of Senate president. Burdick recalls Courtney masterfully negotiating with GOP senators over what the arrangement should look like.

“Every time we would get a win in the negotiation, Peter would be very quiet,” she said. “And then when Republicans got a little bit on their side, he would jump up out of his chair and say, ‘You guys are just killing us!’”

By the end of negotiations, Courtney had been named Senate president, giving him broad influence over bills and the state budget. Democrats had also landed themselves control of several key committees.

Not long into his role atop the Senate, Courtney toured the decrepit Oregon State Hospital, which sat in his district. He asked staff to unlock what looked like a shack on the hospital grounds, and inside found thousands of copper urns bearing the unclaimed and forgotten cremated remains of patients.

The shocking discovery set Courtney on a mission to improve things for Oregonians with mental illness. That included kickstarting the process of replacing the crowded and outdated hospital with a more modern facility. On Tuesday, 11 years after its completion, that hospital will be formally rededicated as the Peter Courtney Salem Campus of the Oregon State Hospital — a decree made by Brown as one of her last acts in office.

Courtney was also a chief proponent of a 2010 ballot measure that ushered in annual legislative sessions. Oregon lawmakers had always met in odd years to pass a new two-year budget and a bevy of policies. With the passage of Measure 71, they now also meet for a maximum of 35 days in even years.

“He was a transformational figure in Oregon politics generally, and the Legislature in particular,” said Burdick. “He strengthened the Legislature’s position in the balance of power, and that was probably his most important accomplishment.”

Courtney’s public persona could tend toward the morose, an aspect he often played up for effect. “Life is hell and then you die,” the self-described loner and loser once said in an interview on OPB’s Think Out Loud.

But Courtney also took a deep interest in those around him, memorizing the names of their children, grandchildren, pets and alma maters. His care for animals became a defining feature of Courtney’s legislative career, which included bills to ban cockfighting and puppy mills, protect free-range chickens, prevent dogs from dying in hot cars, increase penalties for animal abuse, ban greyhound racing and regulate rescue shelters.

In 2016, when Burdick’s daughter found two stray kittens in a Salem park, it was Courtney she turned to to convince her mother to keep them.

“Next thing I knew, I was in Peter’s office: ‘How could you do this to your daughter? Your daughter is in tears over this!’” Burdick recalled. “Anyway, I ended up with both kittens.”

Courtney’s tenure wasn’t without its hiccups. In 2019, he appeared on the precipice of losing his leadership role after a sexual harassment scandal in the Senate led the state’s Bureau of Labor & Industries to accuse the Legislature of downplaying or burying reports of misconduct.

The allegations and an increasingly restive and more progressive Democratic caucus seemed to create the possibility Democrats could look for a new leader. The matter wasn’t helped when Courtney cut a deal to scuttle some Democratic priorities with Republican Senators who’d walked away from the Capitol — only to watch the GOP walk out again after they’d gotten their way.

“I think that was one of his lowest moments,” said Brown. “It was clear to him that integrity no longer mattered.”

But Courtney, who’d been publicly mulling retirement for years, remained on top. He’d already retired from Western Oregon University, where he spent three decades as an assistant to the university president and teaching communications courses. He found it much harder to abandon legislative life, a step he wouldn’t take until his grudging departure in 2022.

“The hardest thing for me to do is to leave politics,” he told WOU’s graduating class as a commencement speaker in 2017. “I’m afraid of retirement. [But] there’s got to be that time in life you say, ‘I’ve done all I can do. I can’t do anymore.’”

OPB Reporter Lauren Dake contributed reporting.