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 have held the post.

He was born at Southampton Hospital on June 17, 1963, the son of Everett Rattray and Helen Seldon Rattray. He attended the Hampton Day School in Bridgehampton, N.Y. in his early years and graduated from East Hampton High School and then Dartmouth College.

Among his first jobs was as a teenage busboy at the Sea Wolf restaurant in East Hampton and included two summers as an East Hampton Town lifeguard, an assistant caretaker on Gardiner's Island, selling fish, setting up party tents, making table and glassware deliveries for Bermuda Party Rentals, staffing the liquor checkout counter at a Cambridge, Mass., grocery store, 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.