PROUDLY HONORING Women of the East End Media

Helen S. Rattray

The East Hampton Star

A newspaper woman for the last half century, Helen Rattray is best known as the publisher and former editor-in-chief of The East Hampton Star, the town's newspaper of record since 1885. Beginning around 1981, when she took the helm of the grand old broadsheet, she became a fearless champion of many environmental and political causes that shaped the future face of the East End, in particular land preservation and the preservation of the area’s built heritage. Over the decades, she penned innumerable editorials, in addition to a weekly column titled "Connections," that ran until 2020; over the years, she wrote nearly 3,000 of these columns, which she is now considering culling and turning into a book. Born in Bayonne, N.J., she came to the South Fork when she married her first husband, the late Everett T. Rattray, whose family tree extended back to the colonists who had called Amagansett and East Hampton home since the 1640s. A mother of three and grandmother of seven, she is now married to Christopher T. Cory and currently living in Greenport.