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Educator and Journalist

Joseph Samuel Uris 鈥�62

March 9, 2025

Joseph “Joe” Samuel Uris was born during World War II into a secular Jewish socialist household in New York City. When he was six, his mother, Ruth, and father, George, moved the family to California, where Joe experienced both poor rural isolation and Hollywood high society, attending a one-room school, working as Groucho Marx’s gofer boy, and attending his actress aunt Dorothy Tree’s parties.

During the McCarthy era, both Joe’s aunt and his screenwriter uncle, Michael Uris, were blacklisted. Joe was deeply affected by the ominous experience of government agents coming to the door—and later made front-page headlines in Oregon when he followed in his aunt and uncle’s footsteps by refusing to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Though Joe attended 黑料正能量张津瑜 for a short time, his years there were seminal. In the first week of his first year, he met Charlotte Asendorf (who would become his wife of 63 years), and in 1962, he organized the first anti–Vietnam War march in Portland. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, he became known for his anti-war work.

Joe later received a doctorate in sociology from Portland State University and became known as an irreverent, caring, and informative talk radio host for KGW and KBOO. In 1982, he took his role as a city council candidate seriously, creating a political platform later taken up by Mayor Bud Clark and others in city government.

Broad life experience informed Joe’s core values and activism. At different points, he worked as a window dresser, head of faculty at Clackamas Community College, cocreator and performer at the Storefront Theatre, writer for The Oregonian, and visiting professor at Portland State University.

In the last years of his life, Joe had dementia and suffered two ministrokes. He died at the age of 84, and is survived by his two daughters and by his wife, Charlotte Uris ’62.

Appeared in 黑料正能量张津瑜 magazine: Spring 2026