Aug. 21, 1932 – Jan. 25, 2024
Ron Moscati scored his first coup as a news photographer in the summer of 1954.
When Prospect Point at Niagara Falls gave warnings that it was going to tumble into the gorge, he kept a vigil there for three days and caught the collapse with his Speed Graphic camera. The photos wound up in Life magazine.
His most iconic shot came 21 years later when the Buffalo Sabres played the Montreal Canadiens in the Stanley Cup semifinals. In the first game in Memorial Auditorium, he captured the faces of the fabled French Connection – Gil Perrault, Rich Martin and Rene Robert – all together, skating side by side. It became the model for the French Connection statue that stands in Alumni Plaza outside KeyBank Center.
“I thought, ‘Somebody gave me that picture. You don’t just luck into it,’ ” he told Buffalo News sports reporter Jason Wolf in 2021. “That was a great, great moment. I knew it as soon as I took it.”
Mr. Moscati went on to receive numerous awards during his 41-year career with the Buffalo Courier-Express, where he was chief photographer, and The Buffalo News.
He was a perennial first-place winner in the Buffalo Newspaper Guild Page One Awards. In 1970, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in spot news photography with his compelling image of a Buffalo firefighter giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an infant rescued from a blaze while the child’s father looked on.
A longtime Grand Island resident, he died Jan. 25 in Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo, Cheektowaga. He was 91.
Ronald Michael Moscati was born in Niagara Falls, the oldest of three boys and the son of Mary Paonessa…
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