Remembering Bart Prater on the Day He Died 1-5-2017

     Not everyone, but the introspective ones, the ones with keen insight and a sensitive nature will ask themselves many times over the course of their lives, “how much has my life mattered?  What have I done with it?  Have I accomplished anything at all worthwhile?  In any positive way has my being here made any difference?” Most people, the ones who don’t seriously ask those questions of themselves will very quickly come up with a lot of positive answers about the good they’ve done; and they’ll end their list with some sort of an exclamation of false modesty.  That was not Bart Prater.

     He asked himself the questions, struggled with them and demanded of himself sincere and honest answers; not often seeing that how he lived his life was anything more than ordinary or greater than simple.  He came from a simple background.  Had probably less than most of us today would think of as ordinary.  But he had something inside.  Something that was bound and determined to come out.  It was a little devil.  Not much smaller than Paul Ryan, and loads more fun than Chris Christie.  Bart had a brilliant mind, and he used it to turn devilish thoughts into laughter and fun.  He was what the Irish call a spailpin’, a prankster, an imp.  He was the kind of trickster who liked to put the rubber dog poop in the middle of the living room floor and hide behind the curtains, waiting, for hours, for days if necessary for someone to come along and yell “oh crap.” 

                That’s how he was, and he found the perfect career to make the most of that little devil that lived inside.  He went into radio.  Live, local radio where DJs had personalities, some nerdy skills and a one to one relationship with everyone who was out there listening.  At WROV in Roanoke, Virginia we saw some good ones, but few were as creative as Bart Prater, and none more prolific.  If you could count them, there was at least one prank for every day that he worked in broadcasting.  Even when he got out from behind the microphone the pranks continued.  A classic came during his years at WVTF public radio which hosts volunteers who read books on air for blind listeners.  Bart saw no reason there shouldn’t be a similar service for the deaf so he wrote a public service announcement and slipped it into a stack to be read by the on-air news staff.  It said:

WVTF is now accepting applications for volunteers to read to the deaf and hard of hearing.  “Applicants should be dependable, punctual, able to enunciate clearly and have an ability to talk really loud.”  It went over the airwaves unnoticed by the staff and probably by most listeners.  You had to be paying attention to catch it.  That was a Bart Prater hallmark.  He recorded a Christmas commercial giving away the N&W railway as a train set with a disclaimer at the end:  batteries not included.  Another time when station manager Don Foutz came in the studio to ball him out over something Bart said on the air.  While he was being chewed out Bart quietly opened the mic and let the whole Roanoke Valley in on the reprimand - live as it happened. 

                His talents didn’t go unnoticed.  Southwest Virginia loved him, major markets wanted him but couldn’t lure him away.  He liked it here.  And he retired here.  Those years out of radio proved difficult for him.  Everyone knew who Bart Prater was, but few of them had ever seen who Bart Prater was.  He raised ducks.  He watched a lawn tractor he'd named "Sven" catch fire and burn while stuck in a mud bog.  He loved short wave radio.  But to say he socialized sparingly would be an overstatement.  He didn’t mingle, rarely met his handful of friends and seldom made a phone call.  Without the microphone or a few comrades about there was no ball and bat, and no one to play with.  Bart’s style was to put the rubber dog poop out and hide behind the curtains until you stepped in it. And that's when you found out the poop wasn’t really rubber after all.