Joseph W. Sachs, retired businessman

Joseph W. Sachs, a retired businessman and an accomplished bridge player, died Monday of kidney failure at Sinai Hospital. He was 96.

The son of Abraham I. Sachs, a shoe store owner, and Mary Neiman Sachs, who worked in her husband’s store, Joseph William Sachs was born in Chestertown.

He was raised in Chestertown and Newark, N.J., where he graduated from Weequahic High School. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1940 in economics from the University of Illinois.

After graduating from college, he began working as an economist for the U.S. Office of Price Administration in Washington.

After serving in the Navy during World War II, he returned to the OPA, where he worked until 1949. He met his future wife, the former Phyllis Ethel Garrison, who also worked there. They married in 1947.

He left the OPA and traveled throughout the South as an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Mr. Sachs returned to Baltimore in 1947 and established Sachs Stride Right Shoes, which he expanded to a chain of seven stores. He sold the business in 1986.

He then had partnerships with HaagenDazs ice cream shops in Harborplace and seafood restaurant Long John Silver’s in Mondawmin Mall.

In 1980, he was president of the Harborplace Merchants Association and later served several terms on its executive board. During the 1970s, he was president of the Mondawmin Mall Merchants Association.

A resident of Ken Oak Road in Mount Washington for more than 40 years, he retired in 1990.

Active in Democratic politics, he was a charter member, in 1968, of the New Democratic Coalition for the 5th District. From 1975 to 1980, he was a member of the Citizens Public Housing Association.

From 1982 to 1984, he was vice president and a board member of the North Baltimore Center, a private nonprofit chartered to provide outpatient community mental health services in North Baltimore. He was its president from 1984 to 1986.

Mr. Sachs was an avid bridge player and teacher.

“He was playing four days before his death,” said a daughter, Roberta “Bobbi” Sachs Likover of Bolinas, Calif.

His wife, who had been executive director of the Neighborhood Design Center, died in 2015.

For the last seven years, he was a resident of the Edenwald Retirement Community, 800 Southerly Road, Towson, where a memorial service will be held at 3 p.m Sunday.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Sachs is survived by a son, Stephen A. Sachs of Reston, Va.; another daughter, Margaret Sachs of Asheville, N.C.; and six grandchildren.