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Ted Leach started his political career as an energetic 10-year-old writing “I like Ike” in lighter fluid on the streets of Springfield, Illinois. “We thought it was cool,” he recalls. “The local gendarmes had a different take.”
After attending the University of Tulsa, Leach served as a campaign assistant for U.S. Senate candidate and former University of Oklahoma football coach, Bud Wilkinson. Leach then became campaign coordinator for the election of Oklahoma’s second Republican Governor, Dewey F. Bartlett.
He was executive editor of Pipeline and Gas Journal in Dallas, corporate communications director for the country’s largest construction management company, and eventually founded Leach Newspapers, Inc., which owned weekly newspapers on the East Coast.
During that period, he attended Harvard University’s evening extension for four years where he focused on environmental management. He worked as a volunteer for Vice President George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988 and for Senator John McCain in the 2000 New Hampshire primary.
Leach was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2000 and served on the Science, Technology and Energy Committee. He was the co-sponsor of the first four-pollutant bill in the nation and was president of the first bipartisan freshman assembly. He founded the Legislature’s Environmental Caucus.
In 2003, he became the co-chair of the Carbon Coalition, a non-partisan, non-profit group of New Hampshire citizens who advocate for a responsible energy policy. As a sideline, he underwrote and built America’s first and only opera company performed entirely by string-operated marionettes. The New England Marionette Opera quickly became one of New England’s most talked about cultural attractions. Unfortunately, it was destroyed by fire in 1999.
A REP member since 2003, Ted was elected to the Board of Directors in 2006. He serves on the Membership and Development Committee.
He has published several times on REP's behalf:
- "We can slow global warming and still grow the economy," published May 4, 2008, in the Union Leader, Manchester, NH
- "Oil Industry's flawed energy 'study'" published in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, Peterborough, NH, December 21, 2007
- "It's funny how things evolve" published in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, Peterborough, NH, October 20, 2007
Ted lives with his wife Beverly in Hancock, New Hampshire. He has two grown children in California and New Mexico.
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