Over six decades, Paul Winchell was a master ventriloquist who brought dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff to life on television and a resourcefull inventor who held 30 patents, including one for an early artificial heart he built in 1963, but it would be his work as a voiceover artist for animated projects--specifically as the source of Tigger's lively, lispy tones in Disney's "Winnie the Pooh" film series--that would make him, or at least his voice, eternally beloved by children everywhere. Winchell was born in New York City on Dec. 21, 1922. He contracted polio at age six and
