Splendidly Unreasonable Inventors by Jeremy Coller

Author:Jeremy Coller [COLLER, JEREMY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, BIO015000, LCO000000
ISBN: 9781468306156
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

The way to an artificial heart

PAUL WINCHELL

Born: December 21, 1922, New York City

Died: June 24, 2005, Moorpark, California

“Ventriloquism is closely related to magic.

It’s all about misdirection.”

Paul Winchell

“Hallo, Piglet. This is Tigger.”

“Oh, is it?” said Piglet, and he edged round to the other side

of the table. “I thought Tiggers were smaller than that.”

“Not the big ones,” said Tigger. ”

A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

WHEN YOU HEAR THESE WORDS AND OTHER INSPIRATIONAL comments from Tigger to his Winnie the Pooh friends in the Disney cartoon adaptations, you may well be listening to the voice of Paul Winchell, who immortalised this bouncy tiger in his voice-overs. He also gave life to two famous dummies, the dim-witted Knucklehead Smiff and his wooden sidekick, the sassy Jerry Mahoney. Winchell and his friends were a popular item on American television in the 1950s and ’60s.

Paul Winchell, born Pinkus Wilchinski, later shortened to Wilchin, grew up in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side of New York. He contracted polio at the age of six and fought hard to bring new vigor to his atrophied legs. He later wrote that his mother was intolerant of his disease and beat him frequently. While lying in bed, Winchell occupied himself by sending off for coupons and give-aways from magazines, one of which was ‘Be the Life of the Party: Throw your Voice.’ He also relieved his loneliness by listening regularly to the Edgar Bergen show, featuring Bergen’s mannequin Charlie McCarthy, on 1920s radio in America. Overcoming his family’s opposition, his shyness and a childhood stutter to become a ventriloquist, Winchell introduced his alter-ego, the puppet Jerry Mahoney, on radio in 1936, debuting on NBC television in 1947. Over the following years, Winchell was watched by millions of dedicated fans every week on national television.

With an impressive list of voice-overs and guest appearances, Paul Winchell had a career that would have fulfilled anyone’s dreams, but ever the inventor of personalities, Winchell also applied for thirty patents on items as diverse as battery-operated gloves, an invisible garter belt, a flameless cigarette lighter, a retractable fountain pen and a freezer-interrupt indicator that enabled people to determine whether their food had defrosted when the electricity went down. Some claim that Paul Winchell was the first to conceive the idea of the disposable razor. When skeptics impressed him with the idea that, ‘no one would buy a product and then throw it away,’ Winchell dropped the idea, only to see others make billions.

In the mid-1950s, Winchell took pre-med courses at Columbia University, stating that ‘It wasn’t until I was 35 that it dawned on me that I’d missed my education.’ Winchell took courses in acupuncture and hypnosis, attributing his place as one of the top students in the group to his photographic memory. Soon, Paul Winchell was in demand for hypnotherapy work in post-operative cases. When his own son had his tonsils removed, Winchell employed hypnotic suggestion and was allowed into the operating room to observe the surgery.

When Winchell arrived home from his son’s surgery, there was a call waiting from his agent.

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