The Oregon Legislature commemorated late Senate President Peter Courtney on Wednesday with a memorial in the chamber he presided over for 20 years. (Photo by Ron Cooper/Salem Reporter/pool)
Oregon bid farewell to the state’s longest-serving legislator in the Senate chamber that the late Peter Michael Coleman Courtney presided over for 20 years and loved more than anything but his family.
About 200 dignitaries, former colleagues, friends and family who crowded into the Senate chamber on Wednesday cried a little and laughed a lot as a host of speakers described the compassionate, cantankerous man who dedicated his life to serving his adopted state. Many wore vintage campaign buttons from Courtney’s first legislative run in 1980, with the words “here to serve” and “nobody works harder” around a sketch of a floppy-eared rabbit.
The dignitaries included former Gov. Kate Brown, who first served alongside Courtney in the state House in 1991. They both later moved to the Senate, where Brown set her sights on becoming Senate president. But when Oregonians elected an evenly divided Senate in 2002, Republicans agreed to accept a Democrat as Senate president only if that Democrat was Courtney.
Brown said she could share countless stories about her 30 years of working with him — some not fit to be repeated publicly. But one stood above the rest: the reason why one of her last acts as governor was renaming the state hospital’s Salem campus after Courtney.
It started in 2004, when The Oregonian and Salem Statesman Journal began reporting on terrible conditions at the Oregon State Hospital, the state-run mental health facility a mile from the Capitol. Those stories and photos, describing lead paint curling from walls, asbestos frost floating in the air and inadequate staffing, agonized Courtney, and he demanded a tour of the facility.
On that tour, Courtney ordered staff to open a small locked building. Inside, thousands of corroded and dented copper cans sat on filthy shelves, each containing the unclaimed, forgotten remains of patients who died at the hospital.
“Peter would say that nothing in his life prepared him for what he had discovered,” Brown said. “He very clearly saw that what he would forever call the room of the forgotten souls was emblematic of the state’s utter failure to address the needs of some of its most vulnerable citizens. And so Peter Courtney did what he always did: He rolled up his sleeves and went to work.”
Courtney’s efforts led to a 2005 law on mental health parity and hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new 620-bed hospital in Salem and a 360-bed facility in Junction City.
He was expected at a ceremony renaming the hospital’s Salem campus in his honor on July 16, 2024, but he died from complications of cancer hours earlier.
Eastern and southern roots
Courtney was born June 18, 1943, in Philadelphia and raised in West Virginia — as he called it, “West By God Virginia.” Shortly after he graduated from Boston University’s law school, Courtney boarded a Greyhound bus for Salem with a job offer to clerk for an Oregon judge on the newly created court of appeals.
He spent two years living in room 206 at the local YMCA, which remained close to his heart. As a lawmaker, he helped secure millions of dollars in state grants for the Y’s three-story $30.5 million new building, which opened in 2022.
Within a few years of arriving in Salem, Courtney won a 1974 election to the Salem City Council. Salemites elected him to the Oregon House in 1980, and he served in the House until 1999, minus a four-year stretch in the 1980s when he lost elections for the U.S. House and Oregon Senate. Courtney was elected to the Senate in 1998, became Senate president in 2003 and stayed president for an unprecedented 20 years until his retirement in January 2023.
Gov. Tina Kotek ruled over the House for nearly half of Courtney’s 20 years as Senate president.
“I hope that each of you who had the experience to experience Peter, that you will have a memory that you can cherish with Peter for the rest of your lives,” Kotek said. “A personality and a presence like Peter Michael Coleman Courtney never truly leaves this Earth, and that gives us all something to smile about.”
Kotek has a physical reminder: a set of hand-embroidered napkins with her initials, TLK. The L is there because of Courtney, who introduced himself with all four of his names and was appalled to learn before they both took the stage at an event that Kotek’s parents never gave her a middle name. He asked what her confirmation name was — both were raised in the Catholic church and took the name of a saint at confirmation — and went away satisfied when he learned it was St. Louise de Marillac. Next thing Kotek knew, Courtney was on stage introducing her as Tina Louise Kotek, and the new name stuck.
Other lasting reminders of Courtney are scattered throughout Salem. Across the street from the Capitol, dozens of low-income veterans find affordable housing and community at the Courtney Place apartments. A few blocks away, walkers, runners and bikers cross the Peter Courtney Minto Island Bridge — though many Salemites still call it the “taco bridge” for its distinctive shape — that connects downtown Salem’s riverfront to the Minto-Brown Island Park.
Coutney’s middle son, Sean, appeared by video, joking that if his dad saw one of his children had the floor of the Senate he would repeat a phrase that became famous around the Capitol: “I got a bad feeling in all my crevices.”
Courtney loved to have fun, Sean said. He’d bring his kids to the Capitol after hours — why not, if he had the keys to the building? — and let them eat all the junk food in caucus break rooms and slide down the marble staircase railings in the rotunda. And he once dressed up as a pilgrim with a turkey on a leash just to protest downtown Salem putting up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving.
“The most enduring quality of my father is that he cared about others more than himself,” Sean Courtney said. “He loved to learn a person’s story. He would also move heaven and Earth to help someone in need. And I want to believe that everyone is gathered here today because Peter Courtney has touched their lives in some way and has likely helped them at a time when they needed it the most.”
‘Being so grateful’
One of those people is House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby, who said Courtney was an “unlikely touchstone” in her own life. She was 22 when she started working for the Republican-led House Majority Office, and Courtney was the Democratic minority leader. He was the loudest, most colorful politician she ever met — and despite their political differences, Courtney and Drazan’s boss at the time were friends, who would go running together at lunch.
A few years later, after Courtney moved to the Senate and Drazan became the chief of staff to the House speaker, Drazan’s best friend died. When he heard, Courtney walked over to the House and sat with Drazan on the side aisle of the empty House chamber.
“I don’t remember what we talked about,” Drazan said. “I don’t remember if I listened, if I cried. I just remember being so grateful that I could sit there with someone who knew my friend and cared that she was gone.”
Former Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend, said no important moments went by in senators’ lives without Courtney’s congratulations, condolences or conversations.
“Peter was a caretaker,” Knopp said. “He cared for people so much, and you saw that in how he reached out.”
Senate President Rob Wagner, a Lake Oswego Democrat who succeeded Courtney in 2023, recalled him as “a force of nature, bold and hard-charging with a deep passion for helping children and animals.” Oregon has had 57 Senate presidents, but none have had Courtney’s impact, Wagner said.
Lori Brocker, who served as secretary of the Senate during the last nine years of Courtney’s tenure, gave the invocation. Brocker, a former Norwegian Lutheran pastor, recounted the religious banter — or “Reformation trash talk,” depending on who was describing those conversations — she and Courtney, a devout Irish Catholic, had during their years of working together. She remembered jokingly threatening to nail an updated version of Martin Luther’s 95 theses to the Senate door, and sharing updates on Olympic medal counts for Norway and Ireland.
“There are so many memories that all of us have in this room and that people will hear today,” Brocker said. “I don’t know if any of the rest of you feel this, but I feel his presence up here, and I hear his voice in my head.”
Courtney often saw something in people, and especially his staff that they didn’t see in themselves, said Pat Egan, CEO of See’s Candies who was Courtney’s student and later employee. When Egan left the Capitol to attend law school, he felt jealous of the people who still worked for Courtney, and Egan learned about how to lead a good life outside of work from watching Courtney with his wife, Margie, sons and dachshunds.
“I know I’m not alone in saying Peter made me better in every facet of my life,” Egan said. “He made everyone better, because with Peter, it was always about the team.”
Former Sen. Betsy Johnson, who was a conservative Democrat from the north coast before her nonaffiliated run for governor in 2022, said she always imagined that the memorial for “grumpy uncle Peter” would happen in the Capitol’s rotunda. And she promised Courtney that his grievers would use crowbars to pop the state seal out of the floor and slip his casket beneath it, the Capitol serving as Oregon’s grandest mausoleum to its longest-serving legislator.
“Long after we’re all gone, Peter stories will abound in this building,” Johnson said. “Many complimentary, some not so much, but all of them paying homage to Oregon’s most significant naturalized citizen.”
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.