The late Ray Hartmann was many things, but “organized” was not among them. An editorial assistant who worked with him at the Riverfront Times, the alt-weekly he founded and built into a juggernaut, recalls that at the end of each calendar year, she was instructed to sweep everything off his desk into a box, which she then taped up and labeled with the year. That was his filing system.
Many of those boxes ended up in the garage of Hartmann’s final domicile, an apartment complex in St. Charles where the longtime journalist moved during his quixotic 2024 run for Congress. After Hartmann was killed in April in a freak car crash on I-64, his longtime lawyer Andy Leonard enlisted friends and former colleagues to help clear out the garage.
Cliff Froehlich, who worked under Hartmann as an editor of the Riverfront Times, as well as serving as executive editor of St. Louis Magazine after Hartmann relaunched it in 1994, was one of the volunteers. Froehlich had more on his mind than altruism. He knew that the first issue of the Riverfront Times had been missing for decades. The paper’s own archives had been donated to WashU Libraries days after its 2024 sale and swift shuttering, but those bound copies began in December 1977, one month after the first issue. For years Hartmann himself had bemoaned the fact that the issue was missing. Froehlich, however, couldn’t help but wonder if it had been a victim of Hartmann’s offbeat filing system and was in his possession the whole time…