Edward M. “Ted” Perkins III was born on Oct. 1, 1962, in Winchester, Massachusetts — “Much to his dismay,” says his wife, Lisa Chiba Perkins. Two years later, Ted and his parents moved to Portland, Oregon, the city he would call home for the rest of his life. He never lived more than a half-mile from the two houses he grew up in, a true Portlander despite his East Coast origins.
Ted attended what would become Beaumont Middle School while the school was still a K–8. He found two of his life’s greatest loves, community and journalism, in the sprawling, linoleum labyrinth of Grant High School. Ted joined the Grantonian — the school’s student-run newspaper and the predecessor of Grant Magazine — where he would become the Feature Editor.
“(Ted was) one of a kind,” says Michelle Bressler, one of his Grantonian colleagues, describing his lack of the self-consciousness high schoolers often have. In the newsroom, Ted was “laconic,” she says, “He wasn’t, like, in the middle of every single thing … but more just sort of had this bemused look on his face.”
He preferred watching from the sidelines over being the center of attention, but “when he did decide to say something,” says Bressler, “You always heard what he said.”
The Grantonian staff was a small fringe group who “wanted to write (and) kind of didn’t necessarily fit into what you can think of as the sort of normative traditions of high school,” says John Cheng, a close friend of Ted’s during their time together on the Grantonian. They were a tight-knit group who felt most at home in each others’ company, filling the newsroom with crazy ideas and the clamor of typewriters feverishly laying out the next week’s features.
The most memorable of these ideas for both Bressler and Cheng was Ted’s attempt to become a Rose Festival Princess. “You can imagine some people would break that barrier and kind of be a jerk about it,” says Bressler, but Ted took it seriously. He challenged the stereotype of the traditionally all-female competition, trying to take it as far as he could. One of the required skills in the competition was curtsying, so Ted took lessons from a friend.
“It was a comedy of errors,” says Bressler.
According to Cheng, Ted’s smooth talking and quick wit got him past the first round of auditions, but he ultimately couldn’t clinch the title. “In the moment, we all just sort of probably were puzzled,” says Bressler, “But now, I’m just thinking that it was brave.”
Ted, Cheng and some of their other friends also created a short-lived Portland Interscholastic Croquet League consisting of teams from a variety of high schools in the city.
Ted was a prolific journalist while on the Grantonian — his name appears under multiple headlines in every issue of the paper between 1979 and 1981. “Writing came easily for him,” says Cheng, “I did not write nearly as quickly as he did.”
After graduating from Grant, Ted earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon before returning to Portland, where he would begin 40 years as a professional journalist. Throughout his career, he worked for the Daily Journal of Commerce, the Portland Tribune, The Oregonian and The Hollywood Star News.
While serving on the board of the Roseway Neighborhood Association around 1996, Ted met his future wife, Lisa. “(Ted) claims that there was a Friends of Trees event and that I yelled at him,” she says, “He has this whole story, which I don’t remember that way.” By 1998, they were dating, and before the turn of the century, they were considering marriage.
Ted loved to play poker — he held a monthly poker game for some 25 years. He didn’t want serious poker players and rule sticklers; “He wanted guys who he can have fun with,” says Lisa. During one such game, she could tell Ted was more nervous than usual. “He had to wait ‘til he knew he had a bad hand and he knew that I had a good hand,” says his wife, “And then he put the ring down on the little ante pile.” In 2000, they got married, and in 2005, their son Joe was born.
A deep love for community was one of the strongest tenets by which Ted lived. Apart from his two and a half decades of cementing friendships over poker and his work on the board of the Roseway Neighborhood Association, Ted received awards from both the Beaumont Business Association and the Hollywood Boosters for his community work. During the Y2K scare, Ted’s compassion for the people around him shown through once more. He refused to buy a gun or stock up on survival supplies.
“‘I’m gonna buy cases of soup,’” Lisa quotes Ted as having said, “‘And if somebody needed them, I will share my soup with them.’”
Ted’s grandfather owned a small independent newspaper in upstate New York, something he always hoped to achieve one day. It was this dream that inspired Ted’s 50-year-long journalism career, to express his love for his community through another of his life’s greatest loves. In the mid-2000s, Ted joined the staff of a Northeast Portland community paper, the Hollywood Star News. Through the Star, he was finally able to emulate the life he had watched his grandfather live as a newspaperman.
Despite heavily considering it, the Perkinses never bought the Star. Around the beginning of the 2010s, though, Ted began to take a more active role in the paper, eventually climbing the ladder to the positions of designer and editor; because of the intimate staff, he also continued writing articles for the paper. Joe, a photographer and current senior at Grant, fondly remembers taking trips around the city with his father to take photos for the Star’s stories.
In the spring of 2022, the Star was looking to supplement its aging staff with new writers. Instead of looking in the pool of existing Portland journalists, Ted did something unorthodox: he asked student journalists on Grant Magazine to write part-time for the publication. Soon, one or two student-written articles were appearing in each of the paper’s monthly issues. Ted encouraged the young writers to imbue their own voice into their writing, allowing the Star’s readers to catch a glimpse of their lives while the students got their first taste of professional journalism.
“It was just something that gave him a lot of pleasure,” says Lisa, “To share whatever he could share.”
Ted was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2018. For the next four years, he continued to serve his community however he could, making efforts to integrate high schoolers into the world of professional journalism through Zoom calls and long emails of tips and tricks he’d picked up throughout his five decades in the trade. Ted helped students find their place in the Portland journalism scene, even while bedridden and with only one functioning arm.
On Sept. 12, 2022, Ted passed away peacefully in his sleep at home. I only met him through the crackling distance of laptop cameras and days-long email exchanges about the best interview questions and extended deadlines, but Ted’s immense kindness was always present. He was incredibly patient, offering advice, encouragement and probably more compliments about my writing than I deserved. He will be dearly missed in Northeast Portland, among Grantonian alumni, at The Hollywood Star and among the few of us on Grant Magazine who had the pleasure of working with him.
“It was important for (Ted) to have a sense of community,” says Lisa, “He left a big impression on people and on us.”
