'SNL' Legend Don Pardo's Massachusetts and Rhode Island Roots

There's a lot of buzz in the air for Saturday Night Live.

It's an interesting election year and people are anxious to see veteran Maya Rudolph likely reprise her role as Kamala Harris (with a rumored but unlikely appearance by Steve Martin as her running mate Tim Walz). The beloved sketch comedy show is about to celebrate an impressive 50 years on NBC. We will also soon see the release of Saturday Night, a highly anticipated film about the dramatic lead-up to the show's first episode in the 1970s.

The Universal Pictures "comedy thriller" comes out Oct. 11, but a trailer is out now. Along with actors playing the original cast members, including Chevy Chase and Gilda Radner, the trailer features someone playing Don Pardo, the longtime SNL announcer, struggling to read off the names of talent ahead of that first episode.

If the real-life Pardo had any difficulty with the cast list, he got over it quickly. He stuck with the show until he died in 2014 at age 96.

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Not a bad career for a guy from Massachusetts who began his broadcasting adventure in Rhode Island.

Massachusetts Native Don Pardo Started in Rhode Island Radio

Long before he was the golden-voiced guy in the announcer's booth at NBC's Studio 8H in New York City, Pardo was just another New England kid. He was born in Westfield in 1918, and grew up in Norwich, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island.

It was in Rhode Island, after graduating from Emerson College, that Pardo started working for WJAR in 1938. WJAR was then a radio station; it didn't start TV broadcasts until 1949.

Pardo impressed the bigwigs.

At the height of World War II, Pardo joined NBC in New York City and never looked back. He announced on the news, game shows and special broadcasts, but at SNL he became a mainstay. In his later years, he flew to New York from "retirement" in Arizona weekly to announce live in-studio at the request of SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels.

Don Pardo Never Forget Where He Came From

In 2009, Pardo was inducted into the Rhode Island Radio Hall of Fame. Before the event, he stopped by WJAR for an interview with anchor Gene Valicenti.

Pardo, 91 at the time, told Valicenti about his start as an actor with WJAR's 20th Century Players and how he graduated to staff announcer in the early 1940s.

He missed working with Rhode Island broadcasting legend Art Lake by a year but knew the name when Valicenti brought it up. Lake was a trusted and affable meteorologist on WJAR for decades, greeting morning viewers with anchor Frank Coletta.

Pardo said he couldn't believe he got the call to move to the big leagues in New York all those years earlier. He ended his career feeling like he had made the right move.

"I did pretty good," he said.

After his death, Pardo was replaced as SNL announcer by former cast member Darrell Hammond.