Ray Hartmann: A Loss for All of Us
April 24, 2026
Ray Hartmann, dead in a tragic car crash. It will take years for me to believe it.
There are some people so vibrant, so charged with energy and passionate conviction, that you never quite believe they are gone. They never really are gone, because they have poured so many of their ideas and opinions, and so much of their love, into the world. But knowing I will never get one of those warm, slightly awkward phone calls from Ray, asking about a story or a contact or just how I am, devastates me.
He hired me at The Riverfront Times, slid right over the editor’s head because the editor was deliberating calmly and slowly, and a piece I’d written freelance won an award and Ray wanted me on staff. Also I was a woman, and the staff was heavily male. I was glad to be a token—glad to be trusted to dig into injustice when I had never thought I had the courage. But above all, I was glad to work for somebody who, when one of our stories threatened to lose us big advertising clients, said, “Go for it.”
He had integrity, always. He could be sly and mischievous, and he had a sizable ego, and he could drive you crazy, coming round on deadline day to rehearse his topic for Donnybrook at length. But he came round to all of us because he wanted all angles, all opinions. By the time he wrote or spoke on air, he sounded sure and strong, because he had researched and read and listened all week. Nobody ever saw that part, just as nobody ever realized how shy the man was. He could hold a crowd captive, but if he ran into you with your family at a restaurant, he froze, terrified of the necessary chitchat.
Some of that was maybe ADHD; we used to joke about slipping Ritalin into his coffee. The way Ray managed the piles of paperwork on his desk was to slide them all into a cardboard box at the end of the year and label it with the date. But that impatience with chitchat and paperwork was also an impatience with bullshit, and it served him—and St. Louis—well. He saw through pretense and posturing, resented exclusion, cared so little for the accumulation of wealth that he built a newspaper worth millions and pretty quickly spent his share being generous and having fun.
The generous part? Also something people who saw him in his wild bachelor days, with the little red sportscar, could never credit. But when our copy editor’s mom was suffering with a severe mental illness, and he had to go to Chicago to take care of her and had no idea how long he would be there, Ray told him not to worry. No matter how long it took, months or even years, his job would be waiting for him. And so it was, many months later, and as far as I can ascertain, Ray paid him a steady salary all those months.
Orphaned as a teenager, he cared about family. He cared about his employees, too, yelled at us if we did not take every single vacation day. He loved giving you a raise; he would use his old-fashioned adding machine and run out the numbers with a flourish. When he sold the newspaper, he gathered us all to make the announcement, and of course we already knew, and he chuckled wryly: a roomful of reporters, had he really thought he would surprise us? But he was apologetic, despite his private relief, and he shared the proceeds generously, fat checks according to our years of tenure, though he did not need to.
The people who bought the paper were miserable to work for, and he already felt guilty, and I ground that guilt in mercilessly, teasing him whenever I saw him because he had ruined the best job I ever had—intense, long hours, but free of micromanagement or corporate conformity or political coercion, and everybody caring hard about the same things and laughing and playing pranks to break the tension. People wrote long letters in response to our stories; they sent story ideas; they turned to us when something felt unfair or swept under the rug. Even my most conservative friend, a Republican lawyer, read the RFT in those days, because he felt like it was honest. Ray built that.
He fought hard against racism, fought hard for fairness and freedom. Like most impassioned, larger than life people, he was consistent in his values but a bundle of contradictions in his personality: gregarious and shy, razor sharp and sarcastic but deeply compassionate, a playboy who turned out to be a doting, utterly committed dad, besotted with his kids and so proud of them. They have lost him too early. We all have.
