Happy 94th birthday, Don Pardo

Happy 94th birthday, Don Pardo

Talk about an American institution. He has spent 74 years in showbiz (making his radio debut three years before Pearl Harbor), and is now in his 68th year with NBC. (I wrote "now" because he still does the weekly intro for SNL.)

Something I did not know:

"Pardo was the on-duty live booth announcer for WNBC-TV in New York and the NBC network on November 22, 1963, and he was first to announce to NBC viewers that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. (His first bulletin interrupted a local WNBC-TV broadcast of Bachelor Father before the NBC network went live with the story.) Because NBC waited eleven minutes to begin videotaping the coverage, it was believed for decades that Pardo's historic bulletins were lost; but, almost 40 years later, an audio tape of the bulletins was discovered in a private collection."