The first newspaper obit I've seen for Paul Winchell. [Los Angeles Times, registration perhaps necessary]

An amazing man died yesterday at the age of 82. Paul Winchell was a pioneer of early television, appearing on hundreds of shows with his wooden-headed friends, Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff. He was a great ventriloquist — maybe the best ever — but he was also a great all-around entertainer and inventor.

Paul was born Paul Wilchin, and an early hero in his life was radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. (Years later, a whole generation of voice-throwers would cite Paul Winchell as their early hero.) Paul got his start on the popular radio program, Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour and he later toured with stage presentations featuring talent discovered for that show. He debuted on television in 1948, at a time when few American homes even had sets, and was a mainstay of network programming for years with several different shows of his own and frequent guest appearances on others. Adults and kids alike loved the irreverent Jerry Mahoney who flirted with ladies and sassed the man who operated his head. They also loved the shy, silly Knucklehead, as well as other characters that Winchell devised. Paul was an extremely clever man and his shows were marked with inventive uses of the new medium.

Beginning in the mid-fifties, Paul turned that inventiveness into non-entertainment directions, especially medicine. His most famous achievement was in the invention of an artificial heart. Others advanced Paul's basic design to the point of making it practical but all acknowledged that the breaktrough, the underlying design, was the work of Paul Winchell. He invented numerous other things as well, including battery-heated gloves and a flameless cigarette lighter, and was as proud of his many patents as he was of all his awards as a performer.

During the sixties, Winch — as many of his friends called him — cut back on his ventriloquism and focused on his inventing. Most of his performing was limited to cartoon voice work — a field in which he quickly became one of the top practitioners. He was Dick Dastardly on Wacky Races and Dastardly and Muttley, Gargamel on The Smurfs, Fleagle on The Banana Splits, and many more…but his most enduring characterization would surely be Tigger in the Disney cartoons of Winnie the Pooh. Paul played Tigger for various projects until a few years ago when a rasp in his voice finally (and controversially in some circles) caused Disney to replace him. He also did occasional on-camera acting jobs, many of them sans dummies, and was very good in them.

I was privileged to know Paul and to work with him on several occasions. He was a brilliant man who made no secret that he was also a troubled man, uncertain of his own accomplishments and torn between performing and doing something "more serious." At times, he seemed genuinely stunned that he had been a personal hero to so many of us.

He had an amazing thirst for what some would call "dirty jokes." One of my oddest memories is of sitting with a group of friends in the living room of a small condo he had in Encino. Completely impromptu, Paul picked up a Jerry Mahoney dummy and launched into what had to have been the filthiest and funniest routine ever performed by a beloved children's entertainer. I enjoyed the performance but couldn't help but "flash back" to being five years old and watching Paul and Jerry hosting Super Circus on ABC. It was one of those moments when you're acutely aware of how far you've come since childhood.

Last year, Paul published a dark, candid autobiography called Winch, detailing some of the demons that had plagued him over the years. The book troubled many of Paul's friends, and some of his fans regretted reading it. Here's the review I posted at the time. As noted, it's not one of those "here's a list of my successes" memoirs. It was more like, "Here's how I went crazy." The last few times we spoke, I got the feeling that he was more at peace with himself than he'd been in decades, and I hope that was not just wishful thinking on my part.

I do not believe word of Paul's death has hit the wire services yet, but it's been floating around the Internet since last night. Sadly, I was finally able to confirm it via a friend of the family so I decided to go ahead and post this here. I'm sure there will be news stories soon and tributes. In the meantime, you can learn more about this extraordinary man — and even hear his theme song — over at his website. Even that exhaustive collection of articles and clippings will only give you some inkling of the brilliance of Winch.

The overnight Saturday Night Live rerun that airs tomorrow morning is the one from 2/10/79 hosted by Cicely Tyson with musical guests Talking Heads. It's not, as I recall, a very memorable episode.

This coming week on GSN's What's My Line? reruns: Tomorrow morning's Mystery Guest is Gene Kelly. Monday morning, it's Sal Mineo. Tuesday morn, catch Buddy Hackett. Wednesday, we get Tony Franciosa and Shelley Winters, plus one of the non-celeb guests is the great glamour photographer, Bunny Yeager. Thursday AM, you have your Julius LaRosa and then on Friday, it's Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys. These episodes are from June and July of '57.

Here's a recent interview with Peter Palmer, who had the title role in both the Li'l Abner Broadway show and the movie of it.

If you couldn't get through to those links to the Al Franken Show interview of Ed Klein, here's a better link. And if you don't want to listen, here's a transcript. I found it fascinating, and not because I'm that wild about Hillary Clinton — I'm still hoping she isn't the candidate — but because I think most political/polemic books are full of sloppy, blind research and it's so rare that the authors get nailed. The interview shows are either too nice to them or, more often, the interviewers lack sufficient knowledge to call people on their fibs and distortions. Nice to see an exception that reminds us what a news-oriented interview should be like.

(And yes, I know that an hour long version of The Al Franken Show airs the following weekday on the Sundance Channel. I'm guessing Monday's show will have the Klein interview but since Klein wasn't in the studio with Franken and Conason, the audio version is probably just as good.)

[UPDATE, a little later: I'm told the Klein interview made it into last night's Sundance Channel edition. The next airing of that one will be early Monday morning.]

June Foray was honored this evening with a celebration at the Motion Picture Academy,  from whence I have just returned.  It was to honor June's many years of service to the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch. The Academy is, as you may know, a somewhat political entity with various folks lobbying for more attention and money to be directed towards their area of specialty. The lighting people are always pushing for more Oscars to be presented (and more prominently) for lighting, and for more film retrospectives and exhibitions to focus on lighting, etc. June's efforts on her committee are high among the reasons that there are still Oscars for short subjects, and now one for feature animation, and that all are presented in the on-air telecast and treated as major areas. So a load of her friends and cohorts convened to salute her, and there was food and drink and speechifying and applause and a very good time was had by all.

This is as good a place as any to mention that I am assisting Ms. Foray with her long-awaited biography. Soon, I will be advertising here for someone who wants to earn rotten money for transcribing interviews I'll be conducting with her. Right now, I'm asking if anyone out there can help me jog her memory with some of the more obscure things she's done. Her powers of recall are very good but no one could have worked as much as that woman has worked and remember more than about a third of it. The other day, she received a residual check for her work on the Frank Sinatra movie, Dirty Dingus Magee and she called me up and said, "Was I in that? What did I do?" I've never seen the film so she called Frank Sinatra Jr and he didn't know, either. But June's in a lot of movies dubbing other actresses and sometimes children, and I'd like to try and identify as many of them as I can.

In the speeches this evening, director Arthur Hiller mentioned one such role. When he did the 1971 movie, The Hospital, there was a line spoken by Diana Rigg that he thought was not perfect. This was decided during the editing process and as Ms. Rigg was back in England, he brought June in and she redubbed it with a slightly different inflection. She did it so well, he said, that Diana Rigg did not even notice the substitution and had to be told that it had been done and which line it was. That's the kind of thing I'd like to itemize…as many of those as possible. If you know of any, let me know. June is a remarkable woman and I have a feeling this is going to be a remarkable book.

Item before last, I mentioned the evisceration of author Ed Klein on today's Al Franken Show. Here's a link to a site where you can download a couple of WMA files with the audio.

Who created the 1975 Marvel comic book, Omega the Unknown?

Here's a nice list of Free Software Utilities one can download on the Internet. I have a few other recommendations in a couple of categories and I'll try and post them here soon. But over all, this is a pretty good source of good freeware.

I'm listening to a little of The Al Franken Show at the moment. He has on Ed Klein, the author of that new book on Hillary Clinton, and Klein was either very, very brave to come on the show or very, very dumb. Reporter Joe Conason is ripping the man and his book into teensy shreds, citing errors and forcing Klein to either admit he got something wrong or to defend it by saying, "Well, I heard that from someone," and of course, he can't say who that someone was. I missed the first part but I haven't yet heard Klein able to defend the accuracy of anything being discussed. No wonder Conservative pundits are distancing themselves from this guy.

It's interesting to me that some of Klein's critics have brought up what I always felt was an underrated aspect of all the Clinton-bashing that goes on…and it's true of a lot of Bush-bashing and other political extremism that infests our national dialogue, though the anti-Clinton folks brought it to a high art. It's the sheer profit motive. There's money in writing books and giving lectures that demonize polarizing public figures. A certain amount of America — surely not the majority but more than enough to make a book into a best-seller — wants to hear that the people they despise are even worse than anyone could imagine. And here's the key thing: It doesn't even matter that much if the "information" may be incorrect, just as it doesn't matter to most fans of Pro Wrestling that the outcome of the match is predetermined. They want to hate someone and to see that person get beaten up.

No one of any substance is willing to stand behind Ed Klein's book but according to some reports, he's going to clear something like $10 million from it, plus whatever advances he receives for his next few projects. He's not making that money because he's a good reporter. He's making it because he's giving a certain group of people what they want to hear.

My pal Peter David saves me the trouble of writing an even longer post about how brain-fogged ridiculous the anti-flag burning amendment is. Read him, then come back here and read the rest of me.

Given the low incidence of the supposed crime, we have here a cure for which there is no known disease…but there probably will be. No one's really burning American flags, at least not in this country. But with a law in place that dares people to do so, can anyone believe that some folks won't be more inclined to fire up Old Glory?

One point I haven't seen much of is that the proposed amendment would give Congress the power to write laws to stop flag-burning…but no one has seen these laws. Maybe no one has offered up a draft of what one might look like because they know any such example will be impractical and impossible to fairly enforce.

How do you write a statute that would effectively and efficiently empower authorities to prosecute flag-burning? Merely saying one cannot burn a flag won't do it since the established, proper way to dispose of a tattered or unwanted flag is to burn it. Someone will have to define what it means to "desecrate" a flag, and that discussion always reminds me of the time that infamous rebel Abbie Hoffman appeared on The Merv Griffin Show wearing an American flag shirt and CBS covered up that part of the screen. They decided that was a desecration despite the fact that during the Griffin broadcast, there was a commercial in which Roy Rogers wore the exact same shirt, and that was deemed acceptable. CBS was then in the impossible position of trying to explain why it was "desecration" for Abbie Hoffman to wear the flag while arguing against the war in Vietnam, whereas it was fine for Roy Rogers to wear it while selling fast food. How will any law against flag desecration not run into that kind of highly-arguable conundrum?

For that matter, how are they even going to define the American flag? Those shirts were probably not made out of actual flags but if they were, would it alter their legal propriety? If I take a length of red and white striped cloth and burn it, am I burning an American flag? What if the pattern has white stars on a blue background but isn't, in its whole form, a flag? Are they going to arrest me for burning something that kind of looks like an American flag? What if I burn a 13-star flag? What if I design a 56-star flag with fifteen stripes and burn it? What if instead of burning a flag, I rip it apart? What if I rip it apart and re-sew it into an American flag jacket or cummerbund? I'll bet I could think of a hundred things to do with a flag that some would think was desecration and others would think was honoring it. Suppose I shredded and charred one? Would that be desecration? What if I shredded and charred one in order to re-create a famous battle scene from American history in which soldiers hoisted a damaged flag? Supposing I write a movie in which someone incinerates Captain America…

This can go on forever and it's something the courts don't need. I think it speaks well of America if we believe it's so strong and enduring that it can't be harmed in the slightest by some punk somewhere trampling on one example of Betsy Ross's handiwork. Of all the insulting things I've seen said of this country, I don't think any have been as contemptuous as the suggestion that we are actually harmed by flag-burning.

Here's a joke that's making the rounds via e-mail…

Q: How many Bush Administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are delusional spin from the liberal media. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate illumination?

I'm as surprised as you may be, but on the issue of the Supreme Court decision on eminent domain, I agree with The Washington Times.

Veteran comic book artist Sam Kweskin passed away this morning at the age of 81. His career in comics was brief and almost wholly spent at Marvel. He began drawing (and occasionally writing) for the company in 1952, back when it was called Atlas, and appeared in books like Adventures Into Terror and Wild Western until the amount of available work declined around 1957. The cover pictured above is reportedly the only published cover he ever drew for comics.

Thereafter, Kweskin built a solid career in advertising art and storyboarding for commercials, returning to comics only for one short story — a war back-up for the 1967 Tod Holton, Super Green Beret. Around 1972, he did a small amount of work for Marvel — some of it under the pen-name, "Irv Wesley" — on Daredevil, Dr. Strange and Sub-Mariner. On Sub-Mariner, he worked with the strip's creator, Bill Everett, who was then having health problems. Kweskin was being groomed to take over the book but it was cancelled, and Marvel's editors were not impressed enough with the work he was then doing to offer him more. Kweskin returned full-time to advertising work and also dabbled in illustration work, most of it involving old airplanes and war scenes.

Some historical articles refer to Kweskin as having been a ghost artist for Bill Everett, even before their 1972 collaborations. This is apparently not true, even though Everett told it to interviewers. Years later, when comic historians tracked down and interviewed Kweskin, he said he had never ghosted for Everett or anyone, and couldn't understand how that rumor got started. Well, it got started because Everett apparently had some names confused. In any case, Kweskin was a good artist even if he wasn't Everett's assistant, and it's a shame there wasn't more room for him in comics.

I hear Don Rickles was in fine form on this evening's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which was just taped. There's a story about Sinatra in Vegas and a bit of Carson remembrance that are supposed to be wonderful. He does not, however, call anyone a hockey puck.