Sometimes All of the People Just Fool Themselves

Paul Winchell died today, Sunday. He was 82. In recent years he was most famous as the voice of Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh movies. Just like Edgar Bergen and his sidekick Charlie McCarthy, however, Winchell and his sidekick Jerry Mahoney rose to fame in the 1930's doing ventriloquism on the radio. Give that a thought for a second. They did ventriloquism on the radio. People sat in their home and listened to someone doing ventriloquism on the radio and, apparently, did not think that was really, really odd. This is where the expression "simpler times" comes from.