Les AuCoin

Greetings, I’m Les AuCoin, the author of "CATCH AND RELEASE: An Oregon Life in Politics" (a memoir published by the Oregon State University Press, 2019).

I’m a former 9-term US congressman, a husband of 58 years, a father, and a grandpa. My wife, Sue, and I live in Portland, OR. I love nature and its creatures, my son and daughter, my late beloved dog Charley, jazz and symphonic music and opera, literary history, boogying with my wife Sue, fly-fishing, sailing, live theater, traveling to forbidden countries, the New Yorker magazine, crossword puzzles, intimate dinners with good friends, abstract art, vibrant democracy, NBA Trail Blazers, the New York Times, NPR, the Atlantic magazine, and great fiction.

My memoir is a series of 32 chapters--each recounting a memory from a life that took me from picking potatoes as a fatherless boy in Redmond, Oregon, to one of the top tiers of national politics. In the pages of my memoir, join me in my ride to cryptic meetings inside the Kremlin, a tour of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the doubling of Oregon wilderness, my rescue of a Jewish Refusenik family from the USSR, my part in opening official relations with China, and my visit to the nuclear war bunker deep inside Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain. Come along with me too when, as an army private in the South, I had to defend myself in the ring against an enraged professional "lady 'rassler."

You can read about all that and more in CATCH AND RELEASE with a click on the button above.