David Rattray is the owner and editor of The East Hampton Star. He is the fifth member of the Rattray family — over three generations — to serve as editor of The Star. He is a co-director of the Plain Sight Project study of slavery on Long Island, N.Y. In addition to journalism, he has a background in documentary filmmaking, museum development, and boatbuilding. He attended the Hampton Day School in Bridgehampton, N.Y. and graduated from East Hampton High School and Dartmouth College. His early jobs included summers as a busboy, an East Hampton Town lifeguard, an assistant caretaker on Gardiner’s Island, selling fish, setting up party tents, making party rental deliveries, staffing the liquor checkout counter at a Cambridge, Mass., grocery store, and as a field archaeologist for the American Museum of Natural History. He was associate producer on the public television documentaries “The Hurricane of ’38” and “Chicago 1968” for the American Experience and “Tabloid Truth” for Frontline. He worked for Design Division, a museum design firm in Manhattan, before returning to East Hampton in 1998 to work at The Star. He became its editor in 2003, succeeding his mother, Helen S. Rattray.
