Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1533674
6 0 A P R I L 2 0 2 5 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M T he first story that Lou Prato wrote for me after I returned as editor of Blue White Illustrated in the sum- mer of 2010 was a piece about Joe Pa- terno's coaching tree. It was also nearly the last story he wrote for me. At the time, I was trying to juggle the magazine work with a freelance editing commitment that predated my new job. The overlap created a crushing workload, so I was relieved when my wife offered to help edit a few BWI stories. My wife is a very talented editor with a gift for concision. She could find the flab in a haiku. I sent her a few stories, in- cluding Lou's piece on Paterno's former assistant coaches. She did her usual me- ticulous job, returning the stories a few days later shorn of any excess verbiage. The draft of Lou's story that she sent back was probably about 300 words shorter than the original, so it was not without some trepidation that I returned it to him for his inspection. As it turned out, I was right to be worried. Lou quit on the spot. "I don't need this s--t," he grumbled. I can't remember what I said to coax him into staying on as BWI's history writer, but whatever it was, it worked. Even then, we had the kind of relation- ship where our disagreements didn't re- ally faze either of us, so Lou kept going. He had been writing for the magazine since 1998, and he continued to be an indispensable contributor, sharing his unrivaled knowledge of Penn State and its athletics programs, his sharp wit and his passion for the art of storytelling. Lou passed away on Feb. 26 at age 87. A native of Indiana, Pa., and a proud Penn State graduate, he had spent more than six decades working in media, beginning with The Daily Collegian, for which he served as sports editor in 1958. He was a news executive for TV and radio stations in Detroit and Dayton, Ohio, and he also spent time in academia as the director of Northwestern's graduate broadcast journalism program in Washington, D.C. Though Lou's professional travels took him all over the country, his heart was always with his alma mater. He and his wife, Carole, returned to State College in 1995 and were fixtures at Penn State sporting events, from football to basket- ball to wrestling to ice hockey. Of course, Lou was most famously as- sociated with the PSU football program, the team for which he literally wrote the book. His Penn State Football Encyclo- pedia runs 654 pages and is an indis- pensable resource for anyone looking to understand the program's deep history. After the encyclopedia was published, then-athletics director Tim Curley asked Lou to serve as director of the fledgling Penn State All-Sports Museum. He got that project off the ground while con- tinuing to write books and feature stories for this magazine and others. HISTORY MAKER Penn State's pre-eminent sports historian, Lou Prato brought his alma mater's past to vivid life M AT T H E R B | M AT T. H E R B @ O N 3 . C O M Prato worked in broadcast news in Detroit and Dayton, Ohio, before returning to his roots in Central Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s. PHOTO COURTESY LOU PRATO