There have been very few well-known announcers and usually, it's because the person became an on-camera personality like Gary Owens, Johnny Olson or Alan Kalter. Don Pardo did it the hard way: In front of the microphone, not the camera.
He was the superstar of a show business profession that doesn't exist much these days: The staff booth announcer. We all know about him announcing game shows like Jeopardy! We all know about him announcing Saturday Night Live. But he was also a guy who worked for NBC forever, doing thousands and thousands of promos and news bulletins and commercial spots and anything else that needed a professional voice.
He announced on SNL for 38 seasons, missing only Season 7. What happened there happened after Lorne Michaels had left the show and no one knew he'd be coming back. SNL was groping for a new relevancy with a series of new casts and creative teams. That season, they brought back Michael O'Donoghue, who'd been one of the main writers on the first five seasons. O'Donoghue was full of ideas about how to shake up the show and make it different and dangerous.
One was to dump Pardo. In fact, O'Donoghue wanted to fire Don on the air, for real, with no advance warning. He didn't get to do that but he did persuade the folks above him that the show needed a new sound…and that year, Saturday Night Live was announced by Mel Brandt or Bill Hanrahan. The next season, O'Donoghue was gone and Pardo was back…to stay.
I started to write, "Saturday Night Live won't be the same without Don Pardo"…but that show hasn't been the same for a long time. So I'll just close by saying Don Pardo had a helluva career. He did what he did as well as anyone has done it.