Paul Winchell

Paul Winchell (December 21, 1922 – June 24, 2005), born Pinkus Wilchinski (the family later shortened it to Wilchin), was an American ventriloquist and voice actor from New York City whose career flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also an amateur inventor and he patented an artificial human heart which he donated to the University of Utah.

Ventriloquist work
The ventriloquist figures for which he was best known include Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff. Both figures were carved by Chicago-based figure maker Frank Marshall. His first series as a ventriloquist was actually on radio with Mahoney in 1943; the program was short-lived, as he was overshadowed by Edgar Bergen, though radio historian John Dunning, in his 1998 tome On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio, thought Winchell was the better ventriloquist.

Voice-over work
His later career included a great deal of voice-over acting for animated cartoons, notably for Disney and Hanna-Barbera. For the latter, he played the character Dick Dastardly in several series (notably Wacky Races and Dastardly and Muttley), Fleegle on The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, and Gargamel on The Smurfs. He also provided voices on The CB Bears.

For Disney, he was best known for voicing the character of Tigger from Disney's Winnie the Pooh films, and won a Grammy for his performance in Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. Beginning with the television series The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, he alternated in the role with Jim Cummings, the current voice of Pooh. Following Winchell's retirement, Cummings permantly took over the role starting with The Tigger Movie in 2000 (though Winchell played Tigger one last time in a Walt Disney World Pooh attraction). Other Disney roles included parts in The Aristocats as a Chinese cat and The Fox and the Hound as Boomer the woodpecker. On TV, he played Zummi Gummi on Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, and in commercials, voiced the Scrubbing Bubbles for Dow Chemicals. He also did the voice of Fearless Freddy the Shark Hunter on the Pink Panther cartoon spin-off Misterjaw in 1976.

Other work included on-camera guest appearances on such series as The Beverly Hillbillies, The Lucy Show, and The Brady Bunch, as well as a 1960 movie that included a compilation of Three Stooges shorts (Stop!, Look and Laugh), and a part in the Jerry Lewis movie Which Way to the Front?. On Love, American Style, he appeared with fellow ventriloquist Shari Lewis in a sketch about two shy people in a waiting room who choose to introduce themselves to each other through their dummies. He also provided the voices of Sam-I-Am and his unnamed friend on the animated Green Eggs and Ham from the animated television special Dr. Seuss on the Loose.

Winchell's most successful TV show was "Winchell-Mahoney Time" (1965-1968), a highly-imaginative kids' show. Winchell played several onscreen characters, including Knucklehead Smiff's father, as well as himself, as friend and adult advisor to Mahoney and Smiff.

The show was produced at KTTV-TV, in Los Angeles, which was owned by Metromedia. In 1986, Winchell sued Metromedia over syndication rights to 288 surviving video tapes of the show. Metromedia responded by destroying the tapes. Subsequently, a jury awarded Winchell $17.8 million. 

Winchell's last regular on-camera TV appearances working with his puppets were "The Storybook Squares" (A children's version of the adult celebrity game show "The Hollywood Squares" which was seen Saturday mornings on The NBC TV Network during the 1969 TV season) and "Runaround", another children's TV game show seen Saturday mornings on NBC TV from September, 1972 to September,1973.

Characters voiced
Some of the characters Winchell provided the voice for included:
 * Tigger from Winnie the Pooh
 * Zummi Gummi from Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears
 * Dow's Scrubbing Bubbles
 * Dick Dastardly from Wacky Races
 * Papa Bear from Berenstain Bears

Personal life
Winchell was interested and involved in technology - particularly the Internet - right up to the time of his death. He created and maintained a personal website until 2004. For a short time he operated the now-defunct website ProtectGod.com, which discussed the theology of the latter years of his life.

He had five children: a son Stacy Paul Winchell and a daughter Stephanie from his first marriage to Dorothy (Dottie) Movitz, a daughter April Winchell, a comedian and voice actress, from his second marriage, to actress Nina Russel, and two step-sons Larry and Keith Freeman from his third marriage, to Jean Freeman.

Winchell's autobiography, Winch (2004), exposed many dark areas of Winchell's life, which had hitherto been kept private. The autobiography opened old wounds within the Winchell family, prompting daughter April to publicly defend her mother who was negatively portrayed in the book. Winchell estranged his children, who were not immediately notified of his death, as indicated by a message on April's website: "T.T.F.N. I got a phone call a few minutes ago, telling me that my father passed away yesterday. A source close to my dad, or at least, closer than I was, decided to tell me himself, instead of letting me find out on the news, which I appreciate. Apparently a decision had been made not to tell me, or my father's other children. My father was a very troubled and unhappy man. If there is another place after this one, it is my hope that he now has the peace that eluded him on earth."

Trivia

 * Howard Stern revealed in March 2006 that he carries a picture of Paul Winchell (and Knucklehead Smiff) around with him at all times.
 * Held patents for an artificial heart, a see-through garter belt, a flameless cigarette lighter, and a fountain pen with a retractable tip. Unfortunately for Paul, he never patented his disposable razor, thinking that no one would have a use for it.
 * Created "Oswald": a surreal character by painting eyes and a nose on his chin, covering his face with a small costume, then having the camera inverted. The resulting pinheaded character seemed to have an immensely wide mouth and an amazingly mobile head; Winchell created this illusion by moving his chin back and forth.
 * John Fiedler, who voiced Piglet in the Winnie the Pooh films, died on June 25th - the day after Winchell's death.

Artificial Heart

Paul Winchell said that he invented the first artificial heart, and publicized his claim in television appearances, newspapers, and on his website. A search of “Paul Winchell” and “artificial heart” on Google gives almost 2,000 articles, many of which erroneously repeat Paul Winchell’s false claims as if they were fact.

Specifically, on his website he said that he was “the first inventor to ever receive a U.S. patent for an artificial heart”. He said he “filed in the summer of 1956”.

Paul Winchell’s webpage entitled “The Artificial Heart” includes the following: ''“I applied for a patent and then I awaited the examiner's report. The initial search revealed that the device was cleared for patent and no prior art had been found. I filed in the summer of 1956.''

''It took me almost eight years to convince the examiner of the device's possibilities. He too thought I was wacky but he finally acceded, making me the first inventor to ever receive a U.S. patent for an artificial heart.”''

These claims are untrue:

His only artificial heart patent (US patent No. 3,097,366), was filed Feb. 6, 1961 (not in the summer of 1956) and issued 2½ years later on July 16, 1963. Certainly, he did not invent the first artificial heart. Patents that preceded his include artificial hearts by Fry (US Patent No. 2,917,751, filed April 10, 1956 and issued December 22, 1959), and by Norton (US Patent No. 3,048,165 , filed April 17, 1959 and issued August 7, 1962). During the 1950’s, well prior to Winchell’s filing, heart lung machines were invented and many patents were issued for external mechanical hearts. There were many publications concerning the subject such as “Some Physiologic Aspects of the Artificial Heart Problem” (Dodrill et al.: Journal of Thoracic Surgery, Volume 24, No. 2 August 1952, pages 134-153). Internal artificial hearts were developed and implanted into experimental animals by Akutsu and Kolff at the Cleveland Clinic, beginning in 1957, although their early work was published and not patented, which was customary for inventors from academia.

Paul Winchell donated rights to his patent to the University of Utah in 1972. His claim that his invention was modified and used in the first human recipient of an artificial heart is false.

On his webpage he wrote:

''“I returned again to Utah when I heard rumblings that the FDA was considering trying the technology on a human being. I met a young man there who had been hired to adapt the invention for human physiology. His name was Robert Jarvik, a brilliant biomedical engineer who had begun to modify the heart for a human being. Until then my patent had been used primarily for animal studies and was much too large for the human chest. By the time Jarvik had reduced the unit, a brave dentist named Barney Clark volunteered to be the first recipient of an artificial heart.”''

Dr. Jarvik was hired to work on artificial hearts in 1971, before Paul Winchell had any involvement with the University of Utah. Dr. Jarvik’s artificial heart designs did not utilize any aspect of the invention patented by Mr. Winchell, which was not used in any way in the development of the Jarvik 7. The scope of Winchell’s patent (3,097,366) is limited to devices that use pivotally mounted plates or cam driven roller mechanisms to compress flexible plastic bags containing blood. The mechanisms described in his patent are crude and impractical, were never used to construct a working model suitable for long term animal use, and were never utilized in any total artificial heart implanted into a human patient.

Paul Winchell’s claims have been erroneously repeated by respected publications such as the Washington Post that failed to fact-check the information. The Post included the following in Paul Winchell’s obituary on June 27, 2005.

''“In 1963, he [Paul Winchell] patented an artificial heart that he said was a collaboration with Henry J. Heimlich, inventor of the maneuver for choking victims. Mr. Winchell's device was considered the prototype for the one designed by Robert K. Jarvik that was successfully implanted in a human in 1982”.''

The Winchell device was not the prototype for the first permanent total artificial heart -the Jarvik-7 heart- which was an improvement upon earlier pneumatically powered heart designs by doctors Akutsu, Kolff, Liotta, Kwan-Gett and others. The Jarvik-7 did not use any of the mechanisms patented by Paul Winchell, and was an entirely separate development. US patent No. 4,863,461, patented by Dr. Jarvik, illustrates the principal of operation of many pneumatic hearts. The closest functional predecessor of the Jarvik-7 heart was the Kwan-Gett heart, which had sustained an animal for a world record of 10.8 days (260 hours) at the time Robert Jarvik joined Dr. Kolff’s program at the University of Utah in 1971. Dr. Kolff assigned Dr. Jarvik (then a young inventor and recent graduate in Biomechanics who had not yet completed his MD degree) the task of developing a new model heart to overcome the two limiting problems with the Kwan-Gett heart: 1) obstruction to venous return; and 2) poor reliability when fabricated from blood compatible polyurethane material. Dr. Jarvik invented the multi-layer blood pump diaphragm, which achieved durability of years compared to the durability of only a few weeks obtained with single layer polyurethane diaphragms used in the Kwan-Gett device. Dr. Jarvik also overcame the problem of obstruction of venous return by better matching the anatomic configuration of the artificial heart to the natural anatomic shape, and he designed the human configuration of the Jarvik-7 heart used to treat Dr. Barney Clark.

The small size Jarvik-7 heart has since been renamed the CardioWest heart and is the only total artificial heart granted full PMA approval by the United States Food and Drug Administration.