Our Own Hall of Fame

 

JONATHAN WINTERS

 OFFBEAT HUMOR, VOICES KEEP WINTERS ON TOP

 

DAYTON DAILY NEWS,  FEBRUARY 16, 1961

 

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

 

Twelfth of a Series

 

     Man to companion in crowded hotel lobby:

     “I tell you, we never should have operated in a hotel room.  Granted he’s still alive, but you shouldn’t have let that brain fall on the rug.”

     This was Jonathan Winters OFF stage.

 

     On stage the elastic-larynxed native Daytonian is just as off beat.  (Pet shop owner to customer who has just had his finger bitten off by a ferocious fish:  “Smarts, don’t it?”)

     Perhaps that’s the reason why he has yet to click with a permanent TV show of his own.

     BUT WINTERS at 35, is still recognized as one of the nation’s top comics and pulls handsome prices for club engagements and TV guest and vacation replacement  (for Jack Paar, George Gobel, etc.) spots.

     Jonathan Harshman Winters III—the first in five generations of his family not in the banking business—started his career as soon as he started to walk and talk.

     As only child, he made up voices and characters to play with because “it was more fun than puppets, anyway.”

     His first grade teacher told him to stop making noises or he’d never amount to anything.  Well (ONE) he didn’t and (TWO) he did.

     The moonfaced monologist’s stock-in-trade is a voice that can pow like a pistol, crack like a rifle, roar like a crowd at Madison Square garden and take a dozen parts in one skit.

     WHEN JOHNNY was seven his parents were divorced and he moved to Springfield where his mother still has her own radio show.  He was graduated from Springfield high school (lamented recently: “I’m always substituting for somebody.  I didn’t get a letter in high school football, either.”)

     Winters served a World War II stint in the Marine corps and briefly attended Kenyon college where he majored in English and art.

     He was studying cartooning at the Dayton Art institute where he entered an amateur show at the Colonial theater, won a watch and a dawn-to 8 a. m. disc jockey job at WING.

     Winters took the latter only to support his wife (Roosevelt high school graduate Eileen Schauder) while he finished his art studies, but when an offer came for a radio-TV job with WBNS in Columbus, he changed careers in mid-semester.

     Winters stayed four years, hit with a show called “Winter’s Wonderland” and then, at 27, made the big try in New York.

     IN HIS TV debut on CBS he accompanied a Mickey Spillane narrative with appropriate pantomine and sound effects (Winters is very large with machine guns.)  Once he played Santa Claus in a Betty Furness commercial.

     Johnny came in second on an Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts program (“I followed a singer who did ‘I Believe.’  He’s the one they believed…”), but it led to a series of guest shots with Garry Moore.

     From then on, he was in demand but has had only one show of his own, a 15-minute-a-night stint on NBC that lasted 39 weeks. (“Then the cowboys came in and held us up.  Off we went.”)

     Winters writes most of his own material, uses nothing off-color, comes up with characters like “Mad Dr. Malone.” And “Zsa Zsa Hathaway” and lines likes the Marine officer briefing the wartime landing group “I had hoped to be able to go with you.”

     THE 200 POUND comic writes fiction in his spare time (example a short story called “Thoughts Of A Turtle While Crossing A Turnpike”) and sends Charles Addams-type cartoons (which are rejected) to the New Yorker.

     He has called professional comedy “the most frustrating, heartbreaking business anyone ever devised.”  He has also said: “By the time I’m 40, I hope to be back on a farm in Ohio, riding a John Deere plow.”

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