Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1454229
6 8 M A R C H 2 0 2 2 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M HISTORY IN THE MAKING As he puts down his pen, BWI's resident historian reflects on a career spent digging deep into the university's past F rom a subscriber to Blue White Illustrated living near Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s to an eventual staff position as a contributing writer and historian — that was my version of the Yellow Brick Road that Dorothy traveled in "The Wizard of Oz." I had never thought about writing for BWI while running the Washington segment of Northwestern's graduate broadcast jour- nalism program from 1983 through 1994. I was just a fan back then, traveling with my wife, Carole, to State College, Los An- geles, Miami and many other cities and towns just to watch Joe Paterno's Penn State football team. We even tailgated with family and friends in the sun, rain, snow and freezing weather, fully dressed in our blue-and-white garb below a big white flag with the blue letters "Prato." Then in 1995 we moved to the State College area. I began teach- ing in the College of Communications while also writing a book, "The Penn State Football Encyclopedia." The encyclopedia was a hit when it was published in late 1998, and it was like being born again. It led Penn State's athletics director at the time, Tim Curley, to hire me as the first director of the Penn State All-Sports Museum, and that regenerated my love for sports history. I was still helping with the construction of the museum in 1999 when the then-editor of BWI, Mark Brennan, asked me to com- pile an all-time Nittany Lion football team. The result was a series of 13 position-by-position stories that ignited a lot of feedback from BWI readers. Over the next three years, I wrote only two stories and initiated both, obituaries for two of Penn State's most illustrious athletes, 1940 football All-American Leon Gajecki in 2000 and 1948 track Olympian Herm Goffberg in 2001. In the summer of 2004, I hit the BWI jackpot when publisher Phil Grosz asked me to become a contributing writer, and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. A Big Project I am 83 years old, and as older BWI readers know, the aging process continues to add to our medical problems. With the other professional and personal obligations that I have, my writing time has diminished. Because of that, I have decided to step down as BWI's history columnist. Above all, I need to finish the book I have been writing off and on for several years. It's about Penn State's first African American letterman, Wally Triplett, and the monumental stand that his virtually all-white 1946-47 team made for civil rights, including the integration of the Cotton Bowl. I have had six books about Penn State football published, burnishing my reputation as a sports historian. Yet, this Triplett book is the most significant of all. The prime reason for the delay in finishing the book was my blundering attempt to also trace the history of all of Penn State's African American ath- letes. I will leave that for another author to complete. My link to Penn State goes back to the fall of 1955 when this one-time Pitt fan from Indiana, Pa., won a freshman schol- arship in the School of Journalism. My ambition was to be a sportswriter. Throughout the 1960s and '70s, I became nation- ally known in one corner of the sports world, primarily through then-popular Sport magazine. As a freelancer, I was often on the road. It was a difficult jug- gling act; I had a full-time job, and my wife and I were raising three children. But it was rewarding, too. Among the superstars I wrote about were baseball greats Roberto Clemente and Johnny Bench, and NFL quarterbacks Len Dawson and Joe Theismann. A couple of my articles made headlines, including the one about Alex Kar- ras, the Detroit Lions star who became more famous as an actor. Cue memories of "Blazing Saddles." L O U P R ATO | LOUPRATO@COMCAST.NET Lou Prato's journalism career includes a stop at WWJ-TV in Detroit in the 1970s. He also wrote for Sport magazine before beginning a long association with BWI. PHOTO COURTESY LOU PRATO