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 Moscati and Lucio Moscati. His father, an Italian immigrant, was purchasing agent for Stauffer Chemical Co.

He aspired to become a news photographer and, when he graduated from Niagara Falls High School in 1950, his father borrowed money from friends to buy him a professional camera.

The first in his family to attend college, he earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism photography in 1954 from Kent State University, where he was yearbook editor and listed in Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges. A member of Army ROTC, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant when he graduated.

He worked briefly at what was then the Niagara Falls Gazette and was a staff photographer at the Courier-Express when he was called to active duty in the Army in September 1954. He had been a summer intern at both papers.

In the Army, he was stationed in New York City as a photographer with the Signal Corps and attained the rank of first lieutenant. While assigned to Camp Drum, he was married July 27, 1955, to Joanne Machelor, a Niagara University nursing student he met on a blind date. He rejoined the Courier-Express after he completed a master’s degree in photojournalism at Syracuse University.

His camera witnessed a succession of great moments in sports – O. J. Simpson setting a new single-season rushing record, the Sabres Stanley Cup “fog game,” the Miracle on Ice at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, the Bills in the Super Bowl.

He also freelanced for the Bills and Bisons and was Sabres team photographer. He was inducted into the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame.

He did photo coverage of the Attica Prison Uprising and the Blizzard of 1977, as well as visits to the area by President John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II.

He became chief photographer at the Courier-Express in 1972. After the paper closed in 1982, he was among the first of its staffers to be hired by The News.

He won more than 30 awards before he retired in December 1994, including the Associated Press Bernard J. Kolenberg Award for excellence in news photography in New York State, named for the AP photographer who was the first journalist killed in action covering the Vietnam War.

His work also was featured in an exhibit celebrating the Sabres’ 40th anniversary at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Active in St. Stephen’s Catholic Church on Grand Island, he was an usher, a eucharistic minister and a member of the Knights of Columbus.

He enjoyed boating in the Niagara River, fishing, golf and tennis. In retirement, he wintered in Sarasota, Fla., and wrote occasional travel articles for The News.

His wife Joanne, a school nurse at Hutchinson Technical High School and a psychiatric nurse at Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center, died in 2021.

Survivors include two sons, Dr. Ronald M. Jr. and Robert; a daughter, Deborah McCoy; a brother, A. Richard; 10 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be offered at 10 a.m. Wednesday in St. Stephen’s Church, 2100 Baseline Road, Grand Island.