Losing an Icon: Helen Rattray, Longtime Editor and Publisher of The East Hampton Star, Dies at 90

Generations of East Hampton residents will never forget the name Helen Rattray.

It conjures the image of a sharp, petite woman with short curly hair, who ran The East Hampton Star with a legendary demand for accuracy, integrity and craftsmanship. She was bold, fierce and serious, as much a teacher and mentor as she was a writer, editor, columnist and publisher.

But underneath her tough exterior, she was a widowed mother, a grandmother, a sister and a friend. She sang opera, loved animals and literature, fought for preservation — and did some of her best work in the kitchen.

Above all, she was and remains an icon — in name, in reputation and in legacy.

In the early morning hours on Wednesday, April 16, Rattray died at Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport with her son, David, by her side. She was 90.

“Helen had more integrity than anyone I have met,” a former longtime staff member, Virginia Garrison, said. “She was demanding yet moral, smart, and pure.”

Born on September 29, 1934, in New York City, Helen Seldon grew up in a lower middle-class neighborhood in Bayonne, New Jersey with her parents — her father an insurance salesman, her mother a homemaker — and her older brother. In high school, she was a drum majorette and practiced baton twirling, in addition to fostering a love of singing, which started when she was just 4 years old, her daughter, Bess Rattray, said.

“She sang from a very young age,” she said. “Her mother dressed her up like Shirley Temple because she had curly hair, and that was a lifelong thing. She was a singer her whole life.”

Seldon graduated third in her class, according to her daughter, and was the first in her family to attend college. She studied literature at New Jersey College for Women, which is now a part of Rutgers University, and later attended Teachers College at Columbia University.

It was there that she met her future husband, Everett T. Rattray, a journalism school student whose family had East End roots dating back to the 17th-century colonists, and ran The East Hampton Star.

“She was very bookish and into poetry and literature, and she always told me that she had been a beatnik in the ’50s,” Bess Rattray said. “As far as I know, until she married into the newspaper family, she was not a newspaper person. She was a Jewish kid from Bayonne, New Jersey, who joined a very, very Yankee, WASP-y family.

“My mom was typically just one of the smartest people in the room,” she continued, “and was a highly capable person. She was able to transform herself. She didn’t sound like she was from New Jersey. You didn’t know that she wasn’t from generations of education.”

In 1960, the couple moved out to East Hampton, in part so that Everett Rattray could help with the family business. By 1976, Helen Rattray had become an associate editor — but she had other ambitions and interests that predated her involvement at the paper.

In 1966, she co-founded the Hampton Day School, which lived on for decades. She was pivotal in an effort to provide stringed instruments for students in the East Hampton School District. While Rattray was careful to keep her political leanings close to the vest, she was a feminist, an early champion for LGBTQ+ rights, and an advocate for land and historic preservation.

But when her husband died in 1980, she knew what she had to do, Bess Rattray said. She rolled up her sleeves and took over the paper as its editor and publisher.

“She was very courageous,” her daughter said. “To stand up as a widowed mother of three young teenagers and run the paper and keep it going, she didn’t have to do that. She could have sold it and that could have been it. And she ran that damn thing all those decades.”

According to former staff members, Rattray helmed a tight ship. She was rigorous and sometimes severe, and held every employee to the highest of standards. She was brilliant, hardworking and hated mistakes. She strove for perfection.

Over the course of 43 years, she never missed a week of her column, “Connections.”

“I know she was a pain in the ass,” Bess Rattray said. “She’s also seen, on a certain level, as being difficult. Some of that is correct — she could be a total pain in the neck and be too exacting and too hard-nosed. But part of it, also, I think, is just the time.

“A lot of that behavior, if a male executive behaved like that, nobody would blink,” she continued. “I think that is part of it, a 1980s-style misogyny. Bossy women are not well-liked in our culture still, but it was certainly much worse.”

Despite that, Rattray was a fixture at East End gatherings. There wasn’t a party, art opening or event that didn’t have her name on the guest list, her daughter said.

“On a very small micro scale, she was kind of a local personality, a public figure to a certain extent, certainly in the ’80s and ’90s,” she said, “and that comes with an awful lot of vitriol.”

Rattray made her fair share of enemies in the community and never once bent to them, her daughter said. It wasn’t unusual for her mother to receive a call in the middle of the night from a reader angry about being included in the police blotter.

Even still, Rattray stayed the course.

“Every week for all those decades, morning, noon and night, she worked incredibly hard,” Bess Rattray said, “but she never complained about that. I never knew her to complain about that at all.”

It was in 1976 that Doug Kuntz entered the world of journalism, he said, marveling at his first-ever published photograph in the newspaper — on the front page of The East Hampton Star, which he has saved. That photo would launch his career there, ranging from photographer to photo editor, off and on for about 30 years.

“I had a lot of laughs with Helen, and I was in the trenches with her for a long time, and I don’t regret hardly any of it at all,” he said. “It helped me become, probably, a good journalist — and I watched a lot of other people become good journalists because they worked there when they were younger.”

As a former columnist, architect Erica Broberg recalled Rattray editing her words with aplomb. Within hours, the final version she received back always read beautifully, she said, with ease and flow.

“It really felt miraculous to me, like a gift from the literary gods. I never understand how she was able to weave sentences together the way she did,” she said. “In the end, I attributed it to pure talent. Helen was an excellent writer and editor who had a passion for her craft. A strong and talented woman with talent and wit. I am so grateful for her guiding pen, and patience with such a young dreamer like me.”

It wasn’t unusual for Rattray to work late into the night, but despite her tireless schedule, she always found the time to make a home-cooked dinner for her family — locavore style.

“She threw very lavish parties, where our Thanksgivings would have 30 people and every possible dish and drink laid out for whoever, cases and cases of wine and crates and crates of oysters,” Bess Rattray said. “She was very open-handed in that way.”

Rattray is survived by her husband, Christopher Thayer Cory, and her three children, David, Daniel and Bess, as well as six grandchildren: Adelia, Sky, Everett, Nettie, Ellis and David T. Rattray. She is predeceased by one grandson, Raymond.

“I’m sorry mainly for the grandkids that they didn’t have more time with their grandma,” Rattray said. “That’s really the main thing. She was a very warm presence and always very generous with the grandkids.”

A memorial gathering and celebration of Rattray’s life will be held on Sunday, April 27, at 11 a.m. at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, with a potluck lunch and discussion about none other than the role of the free press — which she would have appreciated, her daughter said.

“The fact that my dad, and then my mom, created a real proper newspaper culture in this town is definitely a legacy,” she said. “But I also think her legacy is in the landscape of East Hampton, that so much of what she found when she came here in 1960 was preserved — the visual landscape, the historic landscape.

“I think she absolutely has a legacy there, even if people don’t know it.”