Paul Winchell

American television entertainer

• Born: December 21, 1922
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: June 24, 2005
• Place of death: Moorpark, California

Though better noted as a television personality and entertainer than as an inventor, Winchell developed innovations that ran the gamut from dramatic medical breakthroughs to novelties to unobtrusive everyday articles. His greatest accolades came as a result of his invention of the artificial heart, which purportedly became the model for the Jarvik-7 heart.

Primary fields: Entertainment; household products; medicine and medical technology

Primary invention: Artificial heart

Early Life

Paul Wilchin was born to Jewish Americans Sol and Clara (née Fuchs) Wilchin, who had apparently shortened their surname Wilchinski before their son was born. Paul was the second of three siblings, with an elder sister, Ruth, and a younger sister named Rita. His father worked as a tailor, and the family lived in modest rented accommodations on the lower East Side of Manhattan.

Winchell’s childhood was troubled. He had an especially stormy, even physically and verbally abusive, relationship with his strong-willed mother, and he harbored extremely bitter feelings about this phase of his life for years to come. However, according to his own account, this seemed to serve, in the long run, as a spur that would motivate him to excel in defiance of the odds. In 1928, at the age of six, Winchell was stricken with polio but, undertaking intensive weight exercising, was able to survive without severe or permanent physical impairment. Among the personal obstacles he faced was an abnormal shyness, coupled with a speech impediment (stuttering and stammering), which he overcame by developing and honing his speaking style, finally succeeding to the point that he was able to master the art of ventriloquism.

In this effort, in which Winchell was almost entirely self-taught, he had as a hero and role model the famed celebrity ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, whose performances with his dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd during the 1930’s through the 1950’s pioneered voice throwing as an entertainment form. Young Winchell’s immediate source of inspiration came from attending a live performance of Bergen in New York. Begging money from his sister Ruth’s boyfriend, Winchell was able to purchase a pamphlet on ventriloquism. He not only cured himself of his speech impediment but also (using dummies that he had learned to fashion with the help of his father) began making a name for himself by giving comedy ventriloquist routines for classmates and teachers.

Life’s Work

Winchell’s first true break into show business came in 1936, when his art school principal arranged for him to appear on the Major Bowes Original Amateur Hourradio show. It was then that he was first introduced under the professional name by which he would thereafter be known: Paul Winchell. (This was the idea of his sister Ruth’s boyfriend, who believed that the pseudonym would make the young man’s act more marketable to audiences.) Winchell’s routine with his dummy, originally named Terry, was so well received that he won the cash prize and launched into his career as an entertainer. Taking part for several years in the vaudeville tour, he had the good fortune to be on hand for the advent of television.

One of the trailblazing shows of the early mass-media television era was The Bigelow Show, which ran on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) networks from 1948 to 1949 and featured Winchell and his most famous ventriloquist dummy, Jerry Mahoney. From 1950 to 1968, Winchell performed, and usually starred, in children’s and variety shows such as The Spiedel Show, The Winchell-Mahoney Show, and Circus Time with Jerry Mahoney and his second great dummy characterization, the slow but good-hearted Knucklehead Smiff.

Though Winchell was already one of the best-known names in the entertainment world, it was in 1962 that he diverged into a career as a voice-over artist. From 1968 to 1999, Winchell acted as the voice behind the animated cartoon character Tigger in the Walt Disney cartoon series Winnie the Pooh, the voice-over impression for which he is best known. Achieving great success, he branched into a series of voice-over roles as diverse as those of Dick Dastardly in Wacky Races, Gargamel in The Smurfs, Boomer in The Fox and the Hound (1967), Fleegle in The Banana Splits, and Zummi in Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears. In 1974, Winchell received the Grammy Award for Best Recording for Children. He appeared in roles for various Hollywood productions, among them Stop! Look! and Laugh! (1960), Vernon’s Volunteers (1969), Which Way to the Front? (1970), and The Treasure Chest Murder (1975), but these roles never became a substantial part of his career.

Winchell’s career as an amateur inventor took him in many directions. He became a premed student at Columbia University. Studying there from 1959 to 1974, he ultimately earned his doctorate in acupuncture. He also became a proficient hypnotherapist, working part-time at Mount Vernon Hospital in New York. Dr. Henry Heimlich invited Winchell to observe and assist at Montefiore Hospital. There Winchell conceived the idea of an artificial coronary device that could be implanted during surgery and possibly increase the heart patient’s chances of survival. Winchell completed his artificial heart device in 1956, when he applied for a U.S. patent, and was finally granted a patent on July 16, 1963 (U.S. Patent number 3,097,366). On November 22, 1972, Winchell donated the patent to the University of Utah’s Institute for Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Robert Jarvik, who worked at the university, was said to have refined and adapted the model to develop his Jarvik-7 artificial heart. Thereafter, it appears that relations between Winchell and Heimlich on one hand and Jarvik and Dr. Willem Johan Kolff, Jarvik’s department chair, on the other became strained. Over the ensuing years, a debate surfaced as to the extent of the influence exerted upon Jarvik’s mechanism by Winchell’s prototype.

Winchell filed for many other patents, including a retractable-tipped fountain pen (3,071,113, filed January 30, 1961); a jewelry pendant (D216371, November 27, 1968); an electric heater for a container (3,079,486, May 22, 1961); a lens cover (3,133,149, September 23, 1960); a warning indicator for interrupted power supply for freezers (3,063,225, February 3, 1961); a tandem sifter for flour and other products (3,063,563, January 30, 1961); an inverted novelty mask (3,129,001, May 22, 1961); a nonbulging garter fastener (3,128,477, February 3, 1961); a pouring expediter for sugar, salt, and the like (3,110,424, January 30, 1961); a nonvisible garter for hosiery (3,097,407, December 1, 1961); and a hand pump for transferring liquids (3,120,192, December 22, 1961). One prototype he developed, but for which he did not bother to file, to his later regret, was for the disposable razor.

During the 1970’s, Winchell worked with alternative energy advocate Dr. Keith E. Kenyon of Northrop University on developing an electric motor for automobiles. The 1980’s saw Winchell, Heimlich, Senator Ted Kennedy, and certain entertainment industry notables team up to form the Africa Tomorrow organization and to conceive a scheme whereby hunger in Africa might be alleviated by teaching Africans how to raise and harvest the prolific and hardy tilapia fish. However, they were unable to secure U.S. congressional support for its funding, and the project petered out.

Winchell married three times: His first marriage was to Dottie Morse (by whom he had two children, Stephanie and Stacy Paul); his second, to Nina Russel (the couple had a daughter named April Terri); and the third, to Jean Freeman (the mother by a previous marriage of two sons, Larry and Keith, whom Winchell adopted). His personal life was turbulent, though the full extent of this was not generally known until he published his controversial autobiography, Winch, in 2004. In the book, Winchell blamed his mother and his ex-spouses for most of his emotional and psychological problems. Some see the autobiography as an attempt to ease the painful memories that were still plaguing him. Others, and most openly his daughter April, took exception to this view and lay more of the responsibility on Winchell himself, alleging problems such as marital infidelity, verbal abuse, and fits of anger—and stating that Winchell as a family man was a far different persona than the television kid’s show idol with whom most of the baby-boom generation was familiar. Apart from his autobiography, Winchell was the author of the books Ventriloquism for Fun and Profit (1954) and Pressure Points: Do it Yourself Acupuncture Without Needles (1979; with Kenyon). Toward the end of his life, he was active in the Universal Church ministry, establishing a Web site called ProtectGod.com (now defunct). On the night of June 24, 2005, Winchell died in his sleep of apparent heart failure.

Impact

Winchell’s most revolutionary and enduring innovation is the artificial heart. However, debate continues over who should receive what amount of credit for the development of the device. It has been alleged that Robert Jarvik did not incorporate portions of Winchell’s designs—nor did they even influence him—in the making of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart. Henry Heimlich consistently maintained that the design set forward by Winchell in the patent that he donated to the University of Utah was totally incorporated into the Jarvik-7 and that Jarvik himself must have been familiar with it. The question over the extent (if at all) to which Jarvik made use of Winchell’s research has been bandied about long after Winchell’s death and shows no sign of being resolved. Regardless, Winchell must rank as one of the most versatile, and unusual, inventive geniuses of the mid-to-late twentieth century, and a model to nonspecialists with avant-garde ideas.

Bibliography

Asbury, Kelly. Dummy Days: America’s Favorite Ventriloquists from Radio and Early TV. Santa Monica, Calif.: Angel City Press, 2003. Biography of Winchell and four other prominent ventriloquists of the 1940’s-1960’s era (Shari Lewis, Edgar Bergen, Jimmy Nelson, and Señor Wences).

Presnall, Judith Janda. Artificial Organs. San Diego, Calif.: Lucent Press, 1996. Presents Kolff and Jarvik’s perspective in the Winchell-Jarvik debate. The chapter on the development of the artificial heart gives an excellent, readable technical version of the process that led to the Jarvik-7 and beyond. Winchell and Heimlich, however, are for the most part ignored.

Winchell, Paul. Winch: The Autobiography of Paul Winchell. Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2004. Very straightforward, even brutal, in its style, this book offers excellent psychological insight into what drove Winchell to overcome his negative childhood experiences and persevere to become a successful entertainer. Discusses his invention of the artificial heart.