WDIV: News Director
Died February 26, 2025
References:
- The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), Marchy 5, 2025 – Remembering Lou Prato: Tributes to an RTDNA and RTDNA Foundation legend
- Penn State, Historian Lou Prato Passes Away – Prato was a 1959 Penn State graduate who had a lifelong passion for Penn State Athletics
Lou Prato Obituary
Lou Prato of State College passed away on February 26, 2025. Lou loved his wife, Carole, and their family. He spent his professional life in the television and radio news business as a well as being a writer, author and teacher. He fell in love with Carole from the moment he saw her in her junior year of high school after she and her family moved from the Lewistown-Burnham, Pa. area to Indiana, Pa.. They began dating in 1955 when she was a senior and Lou was a freshman at Penn State. They were married on March 7, 1959.
Since he was a teenager, Lou’s ambition was to be sportswriter as three of his mother’s brothers had been. Penn State’s Journalism School saw Lou’s potential from the articles he wrote for the high school newspaper. He submitted those articles for the Biddle scholarship annually given to one incoming freshman for full tuition in his freshman year and was awarded the scholarship.
In Lou’s four years at Penn State, he spent most of his time outside the classroom covering various sports for the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian. As the paper’s Sport Editor in his senior year, Lou covered the Penn State football team, travelling with the team to the away games. Lou was a proud member of the Theta Delta Chi Fraternity.
During his years at Penn State, Lou was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). Following his graduation from Penn State in 1959 and with his commission as an Ensign,
Lou was ordered to Long Beach, Calf, and assigned to the communications division of the cruiser Helena (CA-75). Until the Navy transferred him to the aircraft carrier Yorktown in November of 1960, Lou was in charge of the top secret codes that changed monthly.
Teaching college students became a major part of Lou’s life. He became a journalism professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. This led to an associate professor position at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in charge of the graduate broadcast segment in Washington, D.C, from 1982 thru 1995, followed by two years of teaching at Penn State.
Two years after Carole and Lou moved to State College in 1996, Lou’s book The Penn State Football Encyclopedia was published. Six books on Penn State football followed and when he died he was still writing his eighth book about the 1946 and 1947 teams that made a historic stand for civil rights. He also was recognized by the athletics department as the unofficial Penn State sports historian.
In 1999, Penn State’s Athletics Director Tim Curley hired Lou to help him start the Penn State All-Sports Museum. He was chosen as the first director of the museum in 2001, retiring on December 31, 2005.
In what Lou considered was his “spare time,” he served as the unpaid volunteer treasurer of the Radio-Television News Director’s Association (RTNDA) from 1980 through 2011. As treasurer and from his free-lance writing, Lou could not believe the historic things he saw, that included the first laptop computer.
Lou is survived by his wife Carole, daughters Vicki (Jeffrey) Rearick of Cabo San Lucas Mexico, Lori (Michael) Keating of Indianapolis, Indiana, son Scott (Lynnette) of Monroe, Ohio, eight grandchildren and eleven great grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his mother, Florence Agnello Davis, his stepfather Mark Davis and his father Michael Prato.
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