1922: Paul Wilchinsky was born in New York, NY, a second generation American whose grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe.
The Great Depression was a financially hard time for his father’s tailoring business, and that dashed young Paul’s vision of medical school.
At age 13, bedridden with polio, Paul learned a talent that would set the course for his life.
He taught himself ventriloquism and created a dummy.
One year later at age 14, Paul developed a ventriloquist act and performed on a radio program - Major Bowes Amateur Hour. He won first prize.
Big band leader Ted Weems then offered young Paul a job as his opening act. With no formal training and not much education, teenage Paul was thrust into showbiz.
He changed his name to Paul Winchell and traveled the vaudeville circuit with his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff.
1943: Winchell got his own syndicated radio show. Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charley McCarthy proved more popular, so Paul’s show didn’t last long. But he kept performing live for years.
His big break finally came with the advent of television. In the 1950s, NBC gave him his own Saturday morning kids show - Winchell Mahoney Time. As the years rolled on, he and his dummies also made guest appearances on The Lucy Show, The Dean Martin Show, and Ed Sullivan. He published a book teaching ventriloquism.
But Paul never gave up on his childhood dream of becoming a doctor. So in 1959, while continuing his showbiz career, he entered Columbia University to study medicine.
He moved to Los Angeles where he found a new career as a voice actor for cartoon shows. Among his many credits, Winchell provided the voices of Dick Dastardly and Tigger from Winnie the Pooh.
All the while he took courses in LA and attained a degree in acupuncture. He also studied medical hypnosis.
Winchell developed a lifelong friendship with Dr. Henry Heimlich, a surgeon who created a chest drainage valve, aka the Heimlich valve, which became a life-saving medical invention. In the 1970s, however, he became world famous for conceiving the Heimlich maneuver.
After watching many of Heimlich’s surgical operations, Winchell came up with an idea for a device to keep blood flowing throughout the body during heart surgery. He received the patent for an artificial heart in 1963, and he even created a working model.
Winchell held dozens of patents for all sorts of devices including a lighter that had no flame, winter gloves heated with batteries, a disposable razor, and other creations.
When Dr. Robert Jarvik conducted experiments into an artificial heart at the University of Utah, Winchell permitted free use of his patents. That led to some controversy. Jarvik claimed he didn’t use any of Winchell’s ideas in the unit he created. Others claimed the designs were very similar.
Even so, when Dr. Jarvik implanted the first artificial heart into his patient Barney Clark in 1982, Paul Winchell took no credit for it.
Winchell continued to voice cartoon characters for the rest of his career and died at age 82. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Jerry Mahoney & Knucklehead Smiff are in the Smithsonian Institution.
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