George Pratte

George T. Pratte, Sr. was born in1921 in St. Mary, Missouri, a rural community of 700 people in Southeast Missouri. He was the youngest of seven children raised by Jules and Genevieve (nee Sietz) Pratte.

Upon graduating from high school in 1939, George moved to St. Louis, where he was employed in a pharmacy stockroom. However, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S. subsequently entering World War II, George joined the U.S. Navy in 1942. Initially serving as a corpsman at the Naval Air Field in St. Louis, he transitioned to becoming a sonarman/radarman on the USS Strickland (DE-333), a destroyer escort that took part in many convoys across the Atlantic Ocean to deliver troops and supplies from the U.S. to the Mediterranean and North Seas before finishing the War on convoys in the Pacific Ocean. He was honorably discharged in 1946.

When he returned to the U.S., he started a career as a sales rep for Rice Stix Dry Goods. After several years, he met and married Helen Schwent in 1949. They moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, where George became an independent salesman for various cloth and button companies. Together, they raised their nine children in Shreveport, Natchitoches, and Tyler, Texas over the next four decades.

While George never did attend college, he and Helen were strong advocates for higher education. The living room and every bedroom in the house had numerous packed bookshelves, and each child was given a desk at which to read and do homework. This encouragement to pursue higher education worked, as eight of the children attended college, with four of them going on to complete terminal degrees in their graduate programs.

After retirement, George continued his passion for fishing and telling stories with his friends at the VFW post. He passed away in 1992 at the age of 71