In the days since my mother’s death, a theme has emerged from the notes and messages and condolences we have received. People who knew Helen Rattray a lot or a little have shared memories and perspectives. Some square with mine, others I could not have put into words myself. What follows is the text of remarks I made during her memorial on Sunday at Ashawagh Hall. I had said I would send it to several people who attended but forgot who I had promised. This will have to do.
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A favorite note about my mother came from a former Star intern, a guy who stood 6-foot-3 in socks, who wrote that in their interactions, Helen towered above him. One, from an old family friend, spoke of a “testimony and witness to more than a half-century of community life.”
Another: “An older woman called asking for the movie times. I asked Helen what I should do. She said to read the caller the movie listings . . . because people look to the local newspaper to help when they need it.”
And more:
“I’ll be forever grateful that she took a chance on me . . . and through it all I think I’m much better off for it.”
“The East End will never be the same without her taking it in and having something to say about all of it.”
“She was an interesting, original, and creative woman, a loss to her family and the rest of the community as well.”
“I loved Helen and her passion for true journalism. She cared. Wish we had more like her today. She will be sorely missed.”
“A one-of-a-kind force of nature who lived an incredible life.”
“It’s been my privilege over these 40 years of life on the East End to have been on Helen’s ‘like’ list.” (Her other list was quite long.)
“May she rest in peace — and pride in all she accomplished.”
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It was 1960 and a defining moment in Helen’s life when she moved here with my father. She had been raised in a Jewish family in Bayonne, N.J., and plunging into 1960s East Hampton after a stint in New York City must have been a shock.
She was never a person inclined to write a memoir — why, I never fully understood. I tried to get around that by suggesting that she just write about the first year she moved east: Fewer than 9,000 people lived here. The woods were woods. Houses were mostly concentrated around the hamlet centers. Helen and Everett Rattray were people who enjoyed the edges; they lived for a time in a shack at Northwest Harbor, they had an opportunity to move to the Cedar Point Lighthouse, but with my mother pregnant with me, decided the mile-long jeep ride to a paved road was too much should something happen in the middle of the winter in the middle of the night.
They had a small house behind Bob Story’s boatyard. That house got moved and became the core of the one they built at Cedar Bush on the southernmost arc of Gardiner’s Bay. Beyond the house there was a kind of no-man’s-land of dunes and swamps, then the Smith Meal Company steaming and belching, and when the wind blew from the east, it saturated the air with the unforgettable smell of fish oil, diesel, and smoke. Luckily, it did not blow out of the east much.
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I have often wondered where my mother’s toughness came from. Her father, Abe, was an affable insurance salesman who told jokes and flirted with waitresses. Her mother, Yetta, was the steelier of the two, an immigrant who came to this country as a girl of about 12. Her father was a tailor, if I recall, and they lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I have always believed that Yetta and, in turn, Helen, carried a deep sense that the deck was stacked against them and if they had a goal, they had to struggle for it.
At this point, memories and photographs merge, but I picture Helen and Ev sailing in one of a series of wooden boats, hosting friends, cooking meals, laughing. There were fewer ticks in those days so picnics in the more-untrammeled places were a thing, too. There was no TV in the house, and we children ran wild in the dunes across Cranberry Hole Road. A mile of walking would take us to the ocean.
The newspaper was central to their lives. Wednesday, for those who were there, was legendary; if we wanted to reach Helen or Ev on a Wednesday by phone it had better be damned important.
Wednesday was the center of the week, when the paper was put to bed. In those days, the printing press was in the back of the building. Type was still set in lead. I can remember Dick Rodriguez sitting at the linotype machine, through which I could get glimpses of fire. Dick wore shorts because the machine gave off so much heat. I thought he must be the toughest man alive.
My father’s cancer in the 1970s changed things. Eventually, he had to go on dialysis, and after much training, they had a blood machine installed in the house. My mother served as the nurse, about which I was strangely proud and to my friends who I would bring over to see the tubes and needles themselves, a terror. We, kids, were still young. In addition to nursing my father as his illness worsened, she took on increasing work at The Star.
It was during this time she developed a taste for very big cars — used ones, a Cadillac then a Buick, which seemed even larger when you saw her head just peeping out above the steering wheels. She eventually bought a red Honda, probably for the gas mileage, and found its sprightliness a thrill as she tore around town. Hell on Wheels, Helen Wheels, then just Wheels was a nickname she loved. Christmas tags might be signed, “Love, H. Wheels.”
Helen was affronted easily and seemed to have running battles with this one or that one over politics or matters of publication. She could write a withering letter when she got her dander up. Helen S. Rattray would suffer fools not at all.
She was also a master of memos; I have a thick folder of her dictates on writing and Star style. She was exacting, and if a page of the paper were laid out wrong in her opinion, she’d tear it up and order the production staff to start again. Wednesday nights would roll over into early Thursday mornings before the paper went to print. Today, technology has made it so we reliably get the pages off to the printer by 6:30 p.m. How they did it until midnight, 1 a.m., I can’t really imagine.
When she remarried it was to Chris Cory, with whom she sailed the coast up to Maine and back. Music always filled the house — and laughter.
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East Hampton changed rapidly during her time in the editor’s chair and that put her and the paper at the center of the battle between development and preservation. All things considered, when you think of how bad it could have turned out, I think the forces of preservation were victorious. The paper stood up for the idea that those who stayed, moved here, or came back after college to make a life were entitled to the sense of place they loved and that developers should take a back seat in town affairs; it didn’t always work out that way, but on balance, Helen was proud of the part she had played.
The pressures were intense. The paper chronicled the fight over a Montauk Highway bypass (she was in favor of it and thought the idea that “if you build it, they will come” was missing the obvious — that “they” were here already).
Other battles: A ferry terminal at Promised Land. The development of Barcelona Neck that would have brought hundreds of houses. The airport ad infinitum. Star policy, such as including letters expressing hateful ideas. Explaining to irate callers why our police reports contained names. Place names. Was it Springs or “the” Springs? The Sheep Pound. Ditch Plain without the “s.”
She wrote of the parochial quality of firsthand knowledge. Where did Wainscott begin and end? When did East Hampton become Amagansett on Further Lane? She knew.
Of place names, she wrote, “Who am I to try to uphold the time-honored demarcations? I’m not an old-timer nor do I set myself up as an oracle. . . . It just seems somebody’s got to do it.”
Helen called me in the late 1990s to tell me she was tired and to ask if I would take over the paper. It was a sweet deal that I could not refuse. Tired was a matter of opinion because she stayed on the job for another 20 years. We survived it because I insisted that if we were going to work together we would have our offices on different floors. Even so, when I could hear her reading someone the riot act downstairs, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. We had fun though and thought we were geniuses as we rode the early 2000s real estate boom to profitability. The internet was not yet a big thing; we thought Craigslist was the competition. Little did we know.
She continued working at The Star until she could not.
As uncompromising as my mother was, she could be deeply caring. A friend writing after hearing of her death shared something that Helen herself had written at a sad time. And, closing on something she wrote seems fitting.
Helen wrote: “Human life is as fragile and random as a turtle’s. This is the bitter truth we carry. We know and do not forget. We love. We carry with us the presence of those who have left us. Their words and deeds and works, their effect on others and on the world remain intact. But neither their intelligence nor grace protects them.”
“We know that the pain we feel is the counterpart of the joy we have known, and that because we are able to feel one, we must inevitably encounter the other.”
“Only sometimes, when it becomes too hard to bear, we wish we could be less than we are and more like the turtle.”