Gentlepeople, Start Your Weekend! April 19-21, 2013

[Demeter]

9. Jonathan Winters, the Early life and Early career

Winters was born in Dayton, Ohio to Alice Kilgore (née Rodgers), a radio personality, and Jonathan Harshman Winters II, an investment broker. He was a descendant of Valentine Winters, founder of the Winters National Bank in Dayton, Ohio (now part of JPMorgan Chase). Of English and Scots-Irish ancestry, Winters had described his father as an alcoholic who had trouble holding a job. His grandfather, a frustrated comedian, owned the Winters National Bank which failed as the family’s fortunes collapsed during the Great Depression.

When he was seven, his parents separated. Winters' mother (whom he found a comedic mentor in as well as radio personality Alice Bahman) took him to Springfield, Ohio to live with his maternal grandmother. "Mother and dad didn’t understand me; I didn’t understand them", Winters told Jim Lehrer on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer in 1999. "So consequently it was a strange kind of arrangement." Alone in his room, he would create characters and interview himself. A poor student, Winters continued talking to himself and developed a repertoire of strange sound effects. He often entertained his high school friends by imitating a race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

During his senior year at Springfield High School, Winters quit school to join the United States Marine Corps and served two and a half years in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Upon his return, he attended Kenyon College. He later studied cartooning at Dayton Art Institute, where he met Eileen Schauder, whom he married on September 11, 1948. He was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Lambda chapter).

Winters' career started as a result of a lost wristwatch, about six or seven months after his marriage to Eileen in 1948. The newlyweds couldn't afford to buy another one. Then Eileen read about a talent contest in which the first prize was a wristwatch, and encouraged Jonathan to "go down and win it". She was certain he could, and he did. His performance led to a disc jockey job, where he was supposed to introduce songs and announce the temperature. Gradually his ad libs, personas, and antics took over the show.

He began comedy routines and acting while studying at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. He was also a local radio personality on WING (mornings, 6 to 8) in Dayton, Ohio, and at WIZE in Springfield, Ohio. He performed as "Johnny Winters" on WBNS-TV in Columbus, Ohio, for two and a half years, quitting the station in 1953 when they refused to give him a $5.00 raise.

After promising his wife that he would return to Dayton if he did not make it in a year, and with $56.46 in his pocket, he moved to New York City, staying with friends in Greenwich Village. After obtaining Martin Goodman as his agent, he began stand-up routines in various New York nightclubs. His earliest television appearance was in 1954 on Chance of a Lifetime hosted by Dennis James on the DuMont Television Network, where Winters again appeared as "Johnny Winters".

Winters had made television history in 1956, when RCA broadcast the first public demonstration of color videotape on The Jonathan Winters Show. Author David Hajdu wrote in The New York Times (2006), "He soon used video technology 'to appear as two characters', bantering back-and-forth, seemingly in the studio at the same time. You could say he invented the video stunt."

His big break occurred (with the revised name of Jonathan) when he worked for Alistair Cooke on the CBS Television Sunday morning show Omnibus. In 1957, he performed in the first color television show, a 15-minute routine sponsored by Tums.

From 1959 to 1964, Winters' voice could be heard in a series of popular television commercials for Utica Club beer. In the ads, he provided the voices of talking beer steins, named "Shultz and Dooley". Later, he became a spokesman for Hefty brand trash bags, for whom he appeared as a dapper garbageman known for collecting "gahr-bahj", as well as "Maude Frickert" and other characters.

Winters recorded many classic comedy albums for the Verve Records label, starting in 1960. Probably the best-known of his characters from this period is "Maude Frickert", the seemingly sweet old lady with the barbed tongue. He was a favorite of Jack Paar, who hosted The Tonight Show from 1957 to 1962, and appeared frequently on his television programs, even going so far as to impersonate then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy over the telephone as a prank on Paar.

However, Winters had a dramatic role in the The Twilight Zone episode "A Game of Pool" (episode 3.5 on October 13, 1961). He also recorded Ogden Nash's The Carnival of the Animals poems to Camille Saint-Saëns' classical opus.

On The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962-1992), Winters would usually perform in the guise of some character. Johnny Carson often did not know what Winters had planned and usually had to tease out the character's back story during a pretend interview. Carson invented a character called "Aunt Blabby", which was similar to and possibly inspired by "Maude Frickert".

Winters appeared in more than 50 movies and many television shows, including particularly notable roles in the film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and in the dual roles of Henry Glenworthy and his dark, scheming brother, the Rev. Wilbur Glenworthy, in the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One novel. Fellow comedians who starred with him in Mad World, such as Arnold Stang, claimed that in the long periods while they waited between scenes, Winters would entertain them for hours in their trailer by becoming any character that they would suggest to him.

He later participated on ABC's The American Sportsman, hosted by Grits Gresham, who took celebrities on hunting, fishing, and shooting trips to exotic places around the world.

Winters made memorable appearances on both The Dean Martin Show and The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, as well as a regular on The Andy Williams Show. He also performed regularly as a panelist on The Hollywood Squares.

During the late 60s and early 70s, Winters acted in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), had a nightly CBS show called The Jonathan Winters Show from 1967 to 1969, and appeared in Viva Max! (1970).[7] Additionally, he was a regular (along with Woody Allen and Jo Anne Worley) on the Saturday morning children's television program, Hot Dog. in the early 1970s. He also had his own syndicated show called The Wacky World of Jonathan Winters, between 1972 and 1974, which was nominated for a 1973 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement In Music Direction of a Variety (Van Alexander).