Longtime sports historian Lou Prato ’59 Com wrote seven books about Penn State football, including The Penn State Football Encyclopedia. “He loved Penn State,” says his wife, Carole—the other big love of Prato’s life. “He always said to me, ‘I don’t know what I would do without you.’”

Prato played football in high school and, though he wasn’t a star, he shone when writing about the sport. Following in the footsteps of three uncles who were sports writers, Prato covered sports for The Daily Collegian. He enjoyed a 40-year career as a broadcast news director, later directing Northwestern University’s journalism program and instructing and lecturing in communications courses at Penn State. For more than 30 years, he was part of the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), which, in 2001, created the Lou and Carole Prato Sports Reporting Scholarship.

Carole says her husband’s greatest accomplishment was starting the Penn State All-Sports Museum. “He found all the artifacts, everything—all the pictures, everything that went into it.” Some of the artifacts, such as John Cappelletti’s 1973 Heisman Trophy and a basketball used in 1954 when the team went to the Final Four, Prato discovered in a dusty closet at Rec Hall. He became the museum’s founding director in 2001, retiring in late 2005.

Prato (Parmi Nous, NROTC), who was writing another book about Penn State football, died on Feb. 26, 2025, at age 87. Besides Carole, he is survived by a son, Scott; daughters Vicki Rearick and Lori Keating; eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. —Katherine O’Brien