08-21-2014, 10:59 AM
SNL won't ever be the same.
Quote:Don Pardo: A Voice on Television That Stood Out<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/nyregion/don-pardos-voice-on-television-stood-out.html?_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/nyreg ... .html?_r=0</a><!-- m -->
By JAMES BARRONAUG. 19, 2014
Don Pardo in 1982 at NBC. Credit Al Levine/NBC Universal, via Associated Press
Jack Cafferty remembers what the camera on “Live at Five” did not show: the red socks.
Don Pardo wore them every day on “Live at Five,” the early-evening newscast on WNBC-TV that went on the air in 1979.
Mr. Cafferty was an anchor with Sue Simmons; Mr. Pardo was the announcer. And on “Live at Five,” which abandoned some of the formalities of television newscasts, Mr. Pardo appeared on camera, sitting at a microphone in the studio, not in a soundproof booth somewhere else at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the way announcers usually did.
“I asked him about the red socks,” Mr. Cafferty said by telephone on Tuesday. “I don’t know if he wore them every single day because I didn’t go lift up his pant leg and look, but one day I asked, ‘What’s with the red socks,’ because he dressed conservatively — blazer and slacks. He said: ‘They’re very special. I made a promise to myself when I got to a certain milestone, I’d wear red socks for the rest of my career.’ ”
Mr. Pardo, who died on Monday at 96, never let Mr. Cafferty in on the secret. He never explained what the milestone was. And the camera stayed on his face, unfamiliar as it was. It was the face of someone who had been heard on television for decades but had only occasionally been seen.
Mr. Pardo’s was one of those voices that television viewers of a certain age knew, whether they knew it or not. He was a stalwart in NBC’s stable of staff announcers — “all these baritones running the halls,” as Mr. Cafferty put it. Each was distinctive, but even in such sonorous company, Mr. Pardo’s voice stood out.
“You heard the voice, you knew it was Don Pardo,” said Ted Faraone, a publicist for WNBC in the early days of “Live at Five.” “It was like, you heard Ella, you knew. You heard Frank, you knew. You heard Pardo, you knew.
“I remember getting on the elevator with Pardo one day and who’s on the elevator but Robert Merrill. He says: ‘I’d know those pipes anywhere. How you doing, Don?’ ” (Mr. Merrill, the opera star, was a baritone himself.)
New York viewers heard Mr. Pardo more often in the early days of television than viewers in other parts of the country did, because he was often on the network’s local station. During the first broadcast of the “Today” show on Jan. 14, 1952, for example, he handled the station breaks for WNBT, as the station was known (it became WNBC in 1960).
He made mundane sentences sound important, and sometimes, his doing so made the people he introduced feel important. Al Jerome, who was the vice president and general manager of WNBC in the early 1980s, appeared every few weeks, delivering an editorial.
“There was a thought that would go through my mind, wow, Don Pardo is introducing this, introducing me,” he said by telephone on Tuesday. “I think there was a wow factor.”
But before “Saturday Night Live,” baby boomers knew his voice from game shows. He did not necessarily project a lot of personality — in the 1950s, he rarely bantered with hosts like Gene Rayburn; he just read the copy. But he almost always managed to put a certain oomph into a sentence, even on game shows that were destined to fail, like “Choose Up Sides,” which lasted only a couple of months in 1956.
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“Here for your own room is RCA Victor’s new Glenwood 21 deluxe television set,” he told one contestant. And then, a moment later, “You and your friends will see a full 261-square-inches pictures, clear sharp and brilliant.” The way he said the word “brilliant” had a certain knowingness that said he knew just how much like a commercial it sounded.
He also did warm-ups, getting audience members ready to play their part, which usually involved applauding when the “applause” sign lit up.
As a 10-year-old, Eben Price attended a taping of “Jeopardy” in 1965 during the program’s original run as a daytime program. Mr. Pardo’s warm-up was something to remember for Mr. Price and his three younger sisters, down to the mock version of the game that Mr. Pardo played with the audience before the taping began.
“My sisters are triplets, and they caught Don Pardo’s eye,” recalled Mr. Price, who grew up to be a lawyer in Dallas, “and they were identically dressed. My father leaned over to the sister who’s closest to him, my sister Mary, whispered the answer in her ear, and she raised her hand. Don Pardo called on her, she had the right answer — the right question, since it was ‘Jeopardy’ — and Don Pardo, in his greatest booming voice, said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that’s correct. Let’s give her a big hand.’ ”
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Shadow boxing the apocalypse
