Charles P. Prato

Charles Prato was born in Hoboken, NJ, March 17, 1932, and died on April 7, 2025, predeceased by Muriel, his wife of 68 years. He leaves behind three daughters, Laura, Ellen, and Joan, and his son, Bill; three sons-in-law, Howard Holtz, Lyle Hough, and Mitch Wishart; eight grandchildren, Angela, Alex, Yolanda, Anna, Rachel, Melissa, Vincent, and Paisley; and three great
grandchildren, James, Charlotte, and Hazel.
Charlie had two long and successful careers, as an educator and as an advisor at Lincoln Investments. Rising from an uncertified
teacher to a Doctorate in Education and highly regarded Superintendent, he began a new career in finance at age 55. This does not include the many extra jobs he worked as a new teacher and young father to support his family- house painter, shoe salesman, and door-to door sewing machine salesman- to name a few. He loved his tenure at Eastern Regional High School and his work in finance and described the people in those jobs as second family. If you knew Charlie, you knew this was his supreme compliment.
Family- no matter how you joined it- it did not matter- was the structure and meaning of his life. For Charlie and Muriel, holidays,
vacations, birthdays, or just visits, were an occasion to be with family. Because of Charlie, there were nearly four decades of yearly vacations with the ever-growing clan, from New England to Florida, where his grandchildren marveled at what he would dunk next in his morning coffee.
A lifelong dieter, Charlie always started his dessert before the family dinner was finished, and then insisted on another sliver. In posed pictures, he is unsmiling- but candid shots with his children and their families reveal his joy. Till the end of his life, he retained the capacity to surprise, with his quick wit, his odd sense of humor, his bouts of crankiness and kindness, and just his basic obliviousness to the ordinary conventions governing the rest of the world. Somehow, the laws of physics did not seem to apply to Charlie.
His enduring gift to family and friends was his example of generosity in love and giving.
Relatives and friends are invited to the visitation on Saturday April 12th from 10:00-11:00 AM at the Bradley Funeral Home, Rt. 73 & Evesham Road, Marlton, NJ. Funeral Service will begin at 11:00 AM. Entombment will follow at Calvary Cemetery, Cherry Hill, NJ.
In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made in Charles' name to either St. Jude Children's Research Hospital https://www.stjude.org/donate/donate-to-st-jude.html or to Book Smiles https://search.app/8JQ4kMiaAMd6D4J66
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