The ole horse’s ass is retiring next month. If I were still living in St. Louis, it wouldn’t be soon enough for me. For the irony of the “conservative” Donnybrook moderator leading is that the show’s most notorious liberal, Ray Hartmann, will very likely get much less mouth time. Martin Duggan and Hartmann are good friends, and therefore Donnybrook has been unwatchable ever since Rich Koster died. After that, Duggan let Hartmann turn DB into his own personal soapbox. And, at least up through last December, Hartmann was the DB host most often on the post-DB call in react show. When Rich Koster was on, he was a reliable counterweight to Hartmann.
I still don’t know the exact relationship between Rich Koster and Missouri AG Chris Koster, if any. The reason I think the former is the latter’s father is because Martin Duggan himself said it on DB. Also, what did Rich Koster do at Channel 5 when he was still living? IIRC, I heard him say that he was the GM, but some smart ass know-it-all kook lib from St. Louis e-mailed me to say that he was the “Program Manager,” and that Rich and Chris are not at all related. In any case, I know I heard Rich Koster say that he was directly responsible for the Rush Limbaugh TV show being in Channel 5 and in a respectable timeslot (after Carson/Leno) for its entire run. He couldn’t have done that w/o being in some serious position of authority at KSDK.
Ray Hartmann has a brother named Dale, that I met while working at a south St. Louis County polling place in the August 1996 Primary Election. As liberal as Ray is, that’s how conservative Dale is. As a matter of fact, Dale told me that he was the chairman of the group against the mid-1990s attempt to incorporate of all of South County into a municipality called Southpointe, and he lived across the street from the chairman of the pro-Southpointe effort. As it is, Southpointe failed, and Dale told me in a real simple succinct way why he was opposed, words that I won’t forget even if I live to a be a thousand years old: “Why create another government to suck off us?”
UPDATE 10/7: Someone claiming to be the real Ray Hartmann e-mailed me today saying he is an only child. If it’s true, then there’s someone in Oakville falsely claiming that he is RH’s brother.
