I. Introduction
Initially this essay was intended to be very large and about the four most intelligent people I have ever known in my 81-years of life. Three of them were young men that I knew from high school and beyond. The fourth was a woman, Eleanor Uris, who was absolutely the most brilliant of all. Those three former ‘friends’ will be the basis of a future essay about the way NYC American Public Education in the 1950s and early 1960s functioned before the Politicization of everything in society and its Marxist pathology subverted it all.
This lady, Eleanor Uris, is the subject of five media articles which will be itemized in Section II by directing the reader to a New York Times obituary archive of 1975 as a good introduction followed by four more short entries from 1954/55, two of which also appeared in the New York Times. There is a relatively small New Yorker story and a tiny AP story in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise that mirrors the early 1950s pieces. The entire catalogue is barely larger than Lincoln’s tiny Gettysburg Address.
After the ‘research project,’ following Section II, you will read my personal encounters and memories that complement the biographical information – mostly from the New Yorker portrayal.
Although she died in 1975, Eleanor Uris had a 2-3 decade career as a highly prominent Assistant Attorney General of New York State. Since she was a woman in a post-1960s age of ‘Feminist’ glorification of trivial and personally privileged women ‘breaking through the glass ceiling,’ it is especially odd that you cannot even find her name in Wikipedia, the Left-Wing ‘research’ location since, unlike Margaret Thatcher who saved the UK from the Socialist Death Spiral, Miss Uris was a very liberal Republican back when the word ‘Liberal’ had its classical definition and meaning.
[You also will not find an entry for Eleanor Uris in the unbiased and reliable Grokipedia. I am not even certain that her nephew (or grand-niece and grand-nephew who never met her) remembers her. But I certainly do.]
Before the late-1960s, the only Black or Female national or state-wide political figures (elected or otherwise) that I can recall were not Democrats but Republicans. In big cities like NYC, local Democrat Party politicians were usually Black in Black constituencies like Harlem. I well remember, during the 1960 Presidential election, many pictures in the news of Jackie Robinson standing next to Richard M. Nixon on the campaign trail. There may even be one in the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year – but I am not sure.
(Edward Brooke was a long-serving Black Republican Senator from Massachusetts and there was a cantankerous elder cigar-smoking woman Senator from Maine whose name I have forgotten.) Eleanor Uris’ ‘political career’ began after a first-class NYC public school and NYU Teachers’ College education and nearly a decade of teaching school in Harlem to save money, supporting her two parents who were prematurely dying from cancer and virtually raising her 13-year younger brother Michael. Putting herself through NYU law school (first in her class, of course), she extended her legal education at Cornell Law School (not mentioned in the New Yorker article).
Her first better-paying professional political job, after her teaching career, was in the Fiorello H. La Guardia mayoralty that gave NYC a break from the eternally corrupt Tammany Hall Democrat Party domination. Everyone but the crooks (and burlesque owners) loved La Guardia. (Tom Bosley, the father of “Happy Days” magnificently portrayed him on the Broadway stage in the musical “Fiorello.”) The election of a good, honest, reformist man named Robert Wagner gave NYC twelve years of responsible government before the 1965 New York Times led media installation of the thoroughly incompetent (but theatrically clever) Liberal Party/Republican Party stooge John V. Lindsay whose 8-year rule destroyed almost everything including the finances creating the inevitable NYC bankruptcy shortly after his financial incompetence ended in 1973.
(By 1965, with the assistance of the brand-new Sullivan Rule Catastrophe, the death of truly competitive newspapers like the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Journal American and the World Telegram and Sun left the Holy New York Times in total dominance of all New York news in the broadcast area.)
Eleanor Uris was a New York State Assistant Attorney General all of her post-La Guardia working life. (After his second term, La Guardia worked for the first United Nations Secretary General, Trygve Lie, until a year or two later when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer.)
The 1950s articles about Eleanor Uris are all from her first position as Assistant Attorney General for Election Integrity. In later years, as I recall, she was the first Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and later on, when the terminology expanded, Assistant Attorney General for Human Rights.
You should read those five archival little articles to get a proper introduction to a brilliant, kindly and noble woman without the slightest amount of Narcissism that almost every political woman displays to any open-minded observer – should there be any left.
II. References
- The New York Times Obituary
- The New Yorker Article
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1954/10/30/discrepancies
- Adirondack Daily Enterprise
https://www.nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=ade19541102-01.1.1&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN———-
- New York Times Article #1
- New York Times Article #2
III. Eleanor Uris and Me
You could almost say that I knew Eleanor Uris before I was born.
Ellie was born in 1910 to a poor Jewish family of two parents whose early deaths from cancer left her caring for everyone. She had one sibling, a brother 13-years younger, who she practically raised and eternally cared for and worked for.
Her brother, Michael, married my mother’s baby sister – two years younger than him in 1948 just before my third birthday. I carried the ring at their fancy wedding.
Ellie’s entire private life was dedicated to her ‘family.’ She even put her brother through NYU – as she had put herself through all of her higher education so as to begin a near decade as a teacher in Harlem. After her self-funded law school education, her career as a government lawyer lasted until she retired two years before she died.
Until the age of twelve, every Saturday of my life, Ellie, my mother and her brother and their parents and I visited the married couple in Peter Cooper Village. Her niece was born in 1950 and her nephew five years later.
When they moved to Roslyn Heights in 1957, the get-togethers were on holiday occasions rather than weekly.
Her only indulgence was an annual private vacation touring Europe starting around 1960. On most of those occasions, she also took first her niece and later on her nephew. When they got too old to tag along with their aunt, at least once or twice, she took my mother.
In 1975, when she died on a vacation in Alberta, Canada, my mother was with her – a fact I only learned years later.
She made sure that her baby brother had a great career as a dentist. She even did his taxes for him. Of course, she left everything to him and his two children.
Because of her personal humility, I never realized, until well after she died, what a remarkably important person she was.
