Ray Hartmann’s tribute to Rich Koster
April 24, 2026 – As the Missouri political community mourns the loss of Ray Hartmann, I’m reminded of my favorite column written by Ray. In July 1994, he penned a tribute to his dear friend and fellow Donnybrook panelist Rich Koster. If you’re too young to remember Rich, you probably know his son, Chris.
The column was so powerful to me – a high school kid at the time – that I clipped it out of The Riverfront Times and saved it.
The RFT had no website in 1994, and no electronic version of this column existed until today (4/24/26.)
Here’s the text of Ray’s touching tribute to the late Rich Koster.
Rest in peace, Ray. You were a hell of a writer and a one-of-a-kind man.
John
RICH KOSTER: THE LOYAL OPPOSITION – by Ray Hartmann
It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve been asked more than a thousand times, usually by strangers, one of the following questions:
“Don’t you just want to punch thar Rich Koster?”
“Do you and Rich Koster really hate each other?”
For the past seven years, Koster and I have verbally assaulted one another almost every Thursday night on Donnybrook, the free-for-all show on Channel 9 featuring a panel of journalists discussing (or screaming about) local and national issues. It is fair to say that our particular disagreements have been the loudest and most cantankerous of a loud and cantankerous show.
Still, like all of the Donnybrook panelists, Koster and I remained friends through the years, and it has been easy to answer those questions, the ones suggesting (not always in jest, sadly) that we might get violent or hateful. Rather than dignify the notion with a serious response, but recognizing that it comes with the territory of television, I came up with a standard wise- guy reply:
“Of course I don’t want to punch him,” I would say, “Why would you want to hit someone who makes you look smarter than you are every week?”
I suspect Koster was asked the same questions about me, at least as often, and I imagine that he, too, had a stock response that seemed in keeping with our reputation for public animosity. Knowing Koster, his rejoinder was probably even more caustic.
But, like mine, offered with a smile.
It is painful to put all of this in the past tense. Rich Koster died of a heart attack Saturday at the age of 58. He left behind a loving family and a whole lot of deeply saddened friends, including the one widely known as his loudest adversary.
This is not a time for revisionist history. nor for donning rose-colored glasses, especially not in the case of a wizened and hardened journalist like Koster. Our disagreements were real and unstaged. We simply look at life through different prisms.
I wasn’t expressed this way, but I was a kid of the ’60s, he was a kid of the ’40s and early ’50s. I grew up questioning authority; he was convinced that a breakdown of authority was at the heart of most social ills. I am generally liberal (as he liked to point out every few seconds) and he was generally conservative, although not in a devoutly idcological sense.
Unpredictability was, in fact, one of Koster’s best assets. He’d stand up for a Pat Buchanan, Bill Webster or
Ollie North, but he’d criticize Ronald Reagan at every opportunity. He assailed Bill Clinton as passionately as anyone, but had high praise for other Democrats, especially centrists like Buzz Wesfall or George Peach.
One minute Koster would seem ready to nullify the U.S. Constitution in the name of fighting crime, the next he would be arguing for the First Amendment with the passion of an ACLU activist. He’d crusade for the importance of family values, but had little or no use for the religious right.
Koster was a non-partisan attacker and a non-partisan defender. But he generally took up causes with more vigor than the partisans involved.
He was also an intensely loyal man – both on and off camera – and perhaps more than anyone I have known, he would fight the good fight (or even the bad one) for someone who was under fire. Especially if that person was perceived to be under pack-attack by the liberal press.
Thus it was that we had some of our juiciest arguments over such diverse personalities as Peach, Webster, Buchanan, Clarence Thomas, Bob Packwood, Bob Knight, Chuck Knight, Civic Progress guys in general and, most recently, O.J. Simpson.
Koster should have been a ship captain: He was definitely the last guy to jump overboard.
This is no incidental point. Although Koster and I were not close personal friends on a social basis, I know a number of people who were (Martin Duggan and Mark Vittert of our show being just two of them), and it is without any personal prejudice that I can tell you that Rich Koster was as loyal as they come.
He was an intensely private person who studiously avoided public acclaim and attention, and in seven years I never once heard him boast about anything he did outside of the show, Yet over the years, I’d hear of small acts of kindness and caring on his part, always done without fanfare, on behalf of friends and family.
Rich Koster was a good guy.
He was also, however, a guy who was born to argue. Fearlessly. The more passionately you believed something, the more stridently he got in your face if he disagreed.
It wasn’e just in our liberal-conservative case. He relished taking on his dear friend Duggan, a truly devout Catholic, on almost any issue involving his church. With passion. He’d go after panelist Anne Keefe on women’s issues, Bill McClellan on daily-newspaper journalism and Vittert on anything that might make him seem elitist (even though Koster knew he wasn’t).
Koster just loved to battle. He’d start at our production meetings downstairs at Channel 9, a half-hour before we taped the show. Often, while we were trying to determine if the panel had a difference of opinion on a topic, he’d have on his game face, refusing to divulge his point of view.
“Just wait until we get upstairs. I’ll explain it to you on the show,” he would tell us, menacingly.
God, we’re going to miss him.
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John Combest – Missouri political news headlines