If someone had a Penn State question, especially about Penn State football, they could always turn to Lou Prato.

Prato, an alumnus and longtime journalist, was a Penn Stater through and through and was renowned for being Penn State’s unofficial historian. The longtime Penn State sports fan and historian passed away at the age of 87 on Tuesday, February 25.

“Lou radiated this sort of understated knowledgeability,” said Lewis Lazarow, director of the All-Sports Museum. “He knew so much and had devoted so much of his life to the history of Penn State Athletics, and in particular, Penn State football.”

Prato graduated from Penn State in 1959 after serving as the Daily Collegian’s sports editor. After graduating, he went on to have a lengthy journalism career, including time as an Associated Press reporter in Pennsylvania and a broadcast news director in Detroit and Dayton, Ohio, among other areas.

Before returning to State College, he served as director of Northwestern’s journalism program in Washington, D.C., Prato finally returned to Happy Valley in the late 1990s as an instructor and guest lecturer for several communications courses at Penn State.

“[What drew him back] was love. I mean, there’s just no other way about it. A love of sports in general and a desire to talk about the history of sports, which mattered a great deal to him,” Lazarow shared. “When you sort of drill down, from just that sort of overall picture, it was a love of Penn State and of Penn State Athletics, but in particular, a love of Penn State football.”

Prato had multiple projects, including many books, but one of his most significant and impactful was the founding of the Penn State All-Sports Museum in 2002.

“There was an unrelenting sense of pride associated with this place and what it is that he had been able to accomplish in bringing this place to life,” Lazarow said. “There was an article that he wrote back in 2002 just a few months after we had opened for the Penn State football annual… He wrote it as a way to give people an introduction to the museum. He goes through in that article in his typical self-effacing fashion, he gives credit to everybody else who was a part of bringing it into a reality. But he also talks about opening up closets and digging through old storerooms to find stuff. Nobody writes about everything they went through to open a museum if they didn’t really care.”

Although he retired soon after opening the museum in 2005, Prato continued to be involved with it.

“I was excited to pick up a phone call from [Lou]. I was always wondering, is he going to ask questions? Does he have something to tell me? A lot of times, he was working on a project or something he was writing, and he needed this piece of information… We’d go on talk for a while about whatever it is he was working on or writing or laugh about the whole ‘We Are Penn State’ story because we know the truth, and nobody else does.”

Almost anyone who knew Prato explains him in the same way.

“He was just the most fun to talk to,” said Lazarow. “There was this self-effacing humility he had. He was just like, ‘I’m just a guy, I’m just doing what I can.’ He would talk your ear off about places he had been, or people that he had met, or things that he had seen, and events that had transpired that he’d had the privilege of writing about or commenting on as a journalist, and you’d spend hours talking to him.”