Dan Rattiner, A Founding Father of Fake News

In 2004, in need of a job and a career I was barely existing on the East End when I enlisted as a driver to deliver Dan's Papers in order to become a paid writer somehow. In November 2004, my first paid article, "The Truth About Liars" (saloon) appeared in the Montauk Pioneer, being the first of over 1000 plus paid articles I penned for the Dan's Papers company between 2004-2012.

Dan Rattiner was actually running the whole show back then for owner Jimmy Finkelstein. In the next eight years I received a second to none education in the value of great "Fake News" stories because it was "Fake News" that helped put Dan Rattiner, Montauk and Dan's Papers on the map and in main stream media.

Dan Rattiner was a New Jersey born son of a pharmacist who bought White's Pharmacy in Montauk in the 1950s and moved his family to Montauk.The pharmacy, as Dan tells it, was in the building next to where it stands today. White's Pharmacy now exists in a building Dan's father built and that building is still owned by the Rattiners.

In the early 1960s Dan founded The Montauk Pioneer and as he told me many times, wrote, edited, sold the advertising, blocked it, did the cartoons and delivered it himself.

His first sold ad was purchased by Nick Monte, then owner of Gurneys Spa. Dan Rattiner is a very complicated "renaissance" man with an engineering degree from a New York State college, but he also claims some Harvard University courses, too.

With so little real news in Montauk, he just made stuff up, totally tongue and cheek. Stuff like a contest to "drive cars off the bluff of the Montauk Lighthouse to see how far they could land in the ocean."

Perhaps his most famous "Fake News"story was of a never used "Underground Subway"from NYC to the Hamptons that Dan penned around 2006-7. A more recent one told of a billionaire who purchased real wild lions to patrol his ocean front mansion to keep the deer population under control. The more ridiculous the story the more folks called in or wrote in and eventually emailed in to see if the stories were true. Thus Dan Rattiner became the father of "Fake News," on the East End of Long Island, as a good, entertaining thing.

Perhaps nowadays "Fake News" has a more negative connotation as in being intentionally misleading to manipulate the populace. I thought it was time to give credit where credit is due. Make no mistakes about it , Dan Rattiner is one of the fathers or better said a "pioneer" of "Fake News."

The photo for this article was taken the last day Dan's Papers was located in Bridgehampton on Main Street. It is Dan and his dog, his son David and myself, all former writers of the now defunct historic Montauk Pioneer.