Peter was born to Arthur and Ruth (Underhill) Bearse on May 27, 1941. His father, now deceased, was an electrical engineer, a graduate of MIT, Class of 1929. His mother, also deceased, was a secretary/bookkeeper descended from John Underhill, a privateer sea captain who helped to save the Massachusetts Bay Colony, featured in a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. His grandfather was another sea captain who moved from Canso, Nova Scotia, to Gloucester, Massachusetts about 1890 to sail a fishing schooner out of Gloucester. Until about 1960, the family ran a grocery store in West Gloucester. Peter had three sisters but lost two of them and his mother, prematurely, to breast cancer.

Highlights of the influence of Gloucester and his family on Peter’s growing up to take a serious interest in matters public and political are related in Chapter 3 of his book, WE THE PEOPLE: A Conservative Populism.

Peter had a troubled health history during his younger years, suffering from a bad strain of asthma from the age of five. Because of this, he was not called to serve in the military. He was classified 4F even though he had participated in his high school’s ROTC program and would have served in Vietnam if he had been called. His uncle, now deceased, was Lt. General Edward Underhill.

He was among the top ten members of his class graduating from Gloucester High School’s Class of 1959. The class motto? – “Never try, never win.” Peter went on to Harvard on a scholarship, where he majored in math with a minor in history. After working for IBM following college, he went to New York City to begin graduate studies in economics at the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, from which he received his Ph.D. with high honors in 1976. Except for one year on a prestigious fellowship named after William McChesney Martin, a former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Peter was constantly working full time while studying part-time.

His professional career has included positions as:

· The first Economic Development Planner for the City of Newark, starting three days after the Newark riots of 1967.

· Project Director for the New Communities Project, Center for Urban Development Research, Cornell University.

· First, founding Director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Policy, State of New Jersey, and economic advisor to two governors.

· Lecturer, Research Associate and founding Associate Director of the Center for New Jersey Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.

· Director of Economic Development, Public/Private Ventures, Philadelphia, PA.

· Associate Prof. of Economics, City University of New York.

· Founder, President and Chief Economist, Development Strategies Corporation.

· International Consulting Economist who has worked on projects in 14 countries worldwide.

Peter has been elected to serve locally, at-large, as a member of the governing bodies of two very different municipalities in two very different states – Princeton, NJ & Gloucester, MA. He has been active in local and state government and politics wherever he has lived, accumulating over 35 years of political experience along the way. Thus, when he saw the people-based, person-to-person politics that he loved drying up, replaced by a money-and-media politics dominated by a so-called “political class” and “pro’s”, he wrote a book that was cited earlier so that the great American majority could take back their politics and honor the legacies of both Ronald Reagan [“Move power and money out of Washington”] and Tip O’Neill [“All politics is local.”]. The book is accompanied by a website: www.politicalcommunity.us.

Peter was previously nominated to run for Congress in 1984 in New Jersey’s 12th C.D. Now, armed with a lifetime of lessons, he aims to put his wealth of experience to work with and for the people of New Hampshire’s 1st C.D.