Biography

One of two people to have a lifetime contract with NBC. The other was Bob Hope.

Jimmy Fallon said "Nothing compares to the moment Don Pardo says your name." Maya Rudolph expressed a similar sentiment, "The moment you said my name was the height of my career".

He semi-retired in 2004 (he could never fully retire, since he had the last remaining NBC lifetime contract), and moved to Tucson, Arizona. But, Saturday Night Live (1975) (SNL) producers convinced him to continue announcing for the show. Thereafter, for every new SNL episode, Pardo was flown from his Tucson home to New York City. In the time since 2004, for a few episodes, SNL producers allowed him to tape announcements from his home. But the producers had a strongly expressed preference to have him in the SNL studio to warm-up the audience and insisted he come to the SNL studio for each new live SNL to announce.

As a staff announcer at NBC on November 22, 1963, he read the first account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in a voiceover on the NBC Television Network.

As of his death on August 18, 2014, he had been a continuous employee (with the last remaining lifetime contract) of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for 70 years, 64 days. To express this in another way, he was a continuous employee of NBC for a total of 25,631 consecutive days, since being hired as a NBC Radio staff announcer on June 15, 1944.